Wearable Computer

Problem definition:

In order for George to be able to navigate his way once on street, a navigation system is required to help George get from his starting point to his final destination. Once George has his route planned on the navigation application on the smart phone, he can now step into the street and start his journey.

Unfortunately for George, from time to time there will be obstacles in his way to the final destination. Since obstacles such as potholes, steps and trees amongst others cannot be seen, George needs a way of being able to tell where these objects are and therefore avoid them as best as possible.

It is also imperative that George is able to determine where certain landmarks are located, as well as be able to find pedestrian crossings and cross the road in a safe manner. Even if George takes the same route every day and gets used to the obstacles of that path, one day or another he is bound to encounter a change in the environment that he uses for his route. This can be caused by a number of elements such as road works and detours.

Solution:

Moore (2001) et al designed a system called Drishti, a wireless pedestrian navigation system that uses a number of integrated technologies together in order to effectively route a blind professor through a university campus. This system uses a wearable computer, voice recognition and synthesis, GPS and GIS combined with wireless networks to augment information relevant to the blind user depending on his or her geographical position.

Certain elements of this system can be adopted for our proposed solution. A wearable computer equipped with a microphone for voice recognition as used by Moore et al (2001), can be used in order for George to be able to communicate with the system and thus make routing requests on the go. Although George’s route is preplanned through the navigation application, George may need to make additional requests for routing. Such requests can include “pedestrians crossing” to which the system may reply with the distance to the pedestrian crossing as well as the instructions to reach it.

Graphical Positions System (GPS) will be used to transmit information about George’s location and therefore access information about traffic, road works, landmarks and traffic lights in his immediate area through Geographic Information System (GIS). The latter being a system which captures and stores geographic data.

How it works:

The system will work in the following manner; George will plan his route using his navigation application on his smart phone and once on the road, the GPS tracker placed in a backpack sends tracking information regarding George’s position. This will communicate with the GIS , checking what information is available about that particular location. The information will be given to George through voice synthesis through the speakers in his headset.

Whilst on the way to his destination, the GIS is checked constantly for known obstacles; such as road congestions, traffic and special events, as well as information about pedestrian crossings and landmarks. These are placed in the spatial database and are then given to George through the headset.

If George needs on the spot information at a particular place, he can speak into the microphone and through voice recognition computed within the wearable computer, a signal is sent to the GIS and a reply is given to back to George.

The wearable computer communicates with with the spatial database held on the server, through a 3G Internet connection, whilst a constant connection is maintained with the navigation application’s map server to ensure routes are computed in terms of the least obstacles rather than the shortest route. This can be seen in figure x.

System Design:

Figure x: System Design showing the client and server side of the system.

As can be seen from figure x, the system is also spit into client and server side. The client side contains the wearable computer, GPS and headset that will be in George’s backpack, while the server contacts the database and connection to the GIS and map server through the smart phone.

In order to implement such a system, the following hardware and software is needed:

Hardware:

Similar to Moore et al (2001) off-the-shelf hardware will be used for this prototype to ensure that it is as cost effective as possible. The main hardware components needed are:

• Wearable computer

• GPS receivers

• Headset

These components weight approximately less than 2lbs according to Moore et al (2001).

Software Components:

• Spatial database to manage geographic information system data.

• Speech Recognition software

Moore et al (2001) state that although their system has been tested, GPS is not foolproof and has been proven to lose signal near trees and tall buildings. For this reason, an improvement for this can be to use the user’s average speed and compass to compensate for the last data through signal loss.