By providing a tool with audio description capabilities to citizens with visual, cognitive and physical disabilities, their mobility around the city is facilitated. Users can easily understand their geoposition and points of interest around them. As a matter of fact, visually impaired people tend to develop other senses to make up for the lack of visual information. This is usually achieved by creating mental maps of the city and memorizing hazards and points of interest. While this technique is very efficient for familiar areas, it becomes completely ineffective for areas in which the person is unfamiliar with. With the use of the proposed tool, this will completely change and improve the way that people with visual, cognitive and physical disabilities move around the city of Lisbon allowing them to safely travel around unfamiliar areas of the city. At the same time, this tool does not only limits itself to citizens, but it will also help all those visitors to the city who suffer from the same type of disability to improve their tourist experience.
This solution will use the publicly available datasets in Lisbon containing geographic coordinates to inform audio-described content in the city. Further, it will have the capability to embed user added data referring to points of interest identified and added by the local community.
Voice guided information is transmitted using stereo output with the intent to create a 3D stereo sound sensation to facilitate understanding of directions based on the origin position of the sound. The system is compatible with the device embedded audio output speaker and external audio wireless peripherals.
This tool aids addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) issued by the United Nations by tackling:
Solution released under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) .
This project is part of VoxPop , an innovative project that aims to foster the digital transition of the mobility sector in Lisbon, Portugal, through a process of change based on the 3 main vectors of digital transformation: People, Processes and Technology. The project is led by the Lisbon City Council (CML) and mobilises municipal entities, private companies and the civil society.
This project is co-financed by the Municipality of Lisbon and the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative .
Dr. Llogari Casas and Professor Kenny Mitchell co-founded 3FINERY LTD with a host of top notch advisors and partners. We are an independent spinout of Edinburgh Napier University in the context of more than 7 years of research on advanced audio and visual immersive avatar communication technologies. If you would like to find out more about how we can help you and your business, please get in touch with us.
