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Lessons Learned from Designing, Deploying and Testing an Accessible BLE Beacon-based Wayfinding System in a Multi-Floor Indoor Environment

Published: 22 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Indoor wayfinding poses unique challenges for people with disabilities. Large, unfamiliar indoor environments can be difficult to navigate even for people with no disabilities. This paper presents a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon-based indoor wayfinding system that factor in the unique needs of people with diverse abilities. The system was designed using the methods previously developed for an indoor wayfinding system called GuideBeacon. Mobile applications for both android and iOS devices were developed for operating the wayfinding system. This work documents the guidelines that were formulated and the design decisions that were made when setting up this system in a multi-floor indoor environment. The results obtained from preliminary usability testing suggests that the indoor wayfinding system can be used effectively by people with diverse abilities.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '22: Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
October 2022
902 pages
ISBN:9781450392587
DOI:10.1145/3517428
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 22 October 2022

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Author Tags

  1. BLE Beacon
  2. indoor navigation
  3. localization

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  • Short-paper
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ASSETS '22
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ASSETS '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 35 of 132 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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ASSETS '25

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