Experiments with RouteNav, A Wayfinding App for Blind Travelers in a Transit Hub

RouteNav is an iOS app designed to support wayfinding for blind travelers in an indoor/outdoor transit hub. It doesn't rely on external infrastructure (such as BLE beacons); instead, localization is obtained by fusing spatial information from inertial dead reckoning and GPS (when available) via particle filtering. Routes are expressed as sequences of "tiles", where each tile may contain relevant points of interest. Redundant modalities are used to guide users to switching goalposts within tiles. In this paper, we describe the different components of RouteNav, and report on a user study with seven blind participants, who traversed three challenging routes in a transit hub while receiving input from the app.