Five blind or partially blind hikers, with the help of an innovative GPS-enabled smartphone app, completed a 6-day, 80 kilometre hike in the Vosges mountain range last week—unaccompanied by sighted guides.
The developers, a team at France’s Strasbourg University, hope to develop the experimental system into one that may be useful by many more visually-impaired people. It’s called NaviRando, from French words for navigate and hike, and it uses the smartphone and a strap-on unit that has gyroscope, barometer and accelerometer functions that are used to help refine the GPS data and make it more useful to the user.
The device part is important, because the developers intend to use it to make the system usable even where there’s no GPS signal, even, say, a subway station.
The test hike was laid out in advance, with volunteers from the French Hiking Federation going out to note any obstacles and deviations, which were incorporated into the device. For city streets, which are much better-mapped, that would not be needed.
MORE details at TheLocal.fr Photo: TheLocal.fr
