Interactive guidance system for railway passengers

This paper presents a new interactive guidance system for passengers. The system developed for the visually disabled consists of a cane, a portable information terminal and radio tag-installed Braille blocks. The tag reader at the tip of the cane reads the location data in the tag and transmits it to the portable information terminal by radio waves. The information terminal generates appropriate guide and navigation messages by utilizing geographical information and personal data of the user. The user c an interactively acquire the messages by communicating with the system. We carried out a field test to evaluate the system at a station in Tokyo. In this test,. a number of visually disabled persons used the system in the actual conditions. The results of the test-have shown good availability of the system.