Abstract
The research project “The Walls for All” (in Italian “Le Mura per Tutti”) aims at the realization of an aid system for visually impaired people, promoting autonomous mobility in a free time/cultural outdoor scenario. The selected installation site is a 4 km pedestrian and bike wide lane on top of the historical walls of Lucca city, Tuscany, Italy. The proposed system guides the user on predefined tracks (virtual path), realized by means of buried cables, that can be detected with the help of the Smart Cane, a traditional white cane equipped with custom electronics; and a mobile device featuring an ad-hoc developed Android application that provides geo-referenced guidance and context information. The system has been conceived, designed and successfully tested by visually impaired people of the Italian Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired—Section of Lucca.
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Acknowledgments
The project “Le Mura per Tutti” has been partially supported by Fondazione Banca Del Monte di Lucca and Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca for the design and development of the hardware/software systems and the installation of the infrastructure on the historical walls.
The authors would like to thank Massimo Diodati (President) and all the friends of the Lucca section of the Italian Association of the Blind and the Visually Impaired for their valuable support in many phases of the project. Thanks also to the Municipality of Lucca and Opera delle Mura of Lucca for the support provided, especially during the installation phase. A special thanks to Barbara Leporini, Carmen Santoro and Antonello Calabrò of the Italian National Research Council, who developed the very first version of the application on a Symbian-based mobile terminal (Fanucci et al., 2011).
Thanks to Luigi Rosi, CEO of the company Veret srl, Capannori (LU), who designed and implemented the fiberglass mechanical structure of the smart cane.
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Donati, M., Iacopetti, F., Celli, A., Roncella, R., Fanucci, L. (2020). An Aid System for Autonomous Mobility of Visually Impaired People on the Historical City Walls in Lucca, Italy. In: Paiva, S. (eds) Technological Trends in Improved Mobility of the Visually Impaired. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16450-8_16
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