Indoor mapping: the project taking shape Down Under

Transcript

14 April 2013

Roberta: A project is currently underway to create a piece of technology that maps the indoors for people who are blind or vision impaired. We’re joined today by Euan Ramsey-Stewart, principal designer for the project. And this one’s called SIMO. Welcome Euan.

Euan: Hi Roberta, how are you?

Roberta: I’m well thank you. Now what is the SIMO project?

Euan: A lot of things really, but in essence the project is just about providing real time and accurate location information to help any person, but in particular the blind and vision impaired, to navigate and travel safety, confidently and with ease through any unfamiliar environment. This is without the use of an O&M trainer or a guide or a carer or something along those lines, by putting it on a smartphone-based technology.

Roberta: So what will it do for people who are blind or vision impaired?

Euan: It’s going to create independence and mobility. That’s our biggest aim, because it’s going to allow people to go out there freely and confidently and move around society and be integrated, more than anything else.

Roberta: And how will people use this technology Euan?

Euan: It’s a smartphone, as I mentioned before. Now the smartphone technology is, it’s on the smartphone platform, it’s the easiest one because it’s free, it’s useable. Now the thing is, what we’ve done is we haven’t just gone ahead and developed this, we’ve actually asked the community, the blind and vision impaired community, what they actually want. We’ve interviewed, we’ve surveyed, we’ve trialled, we’ve tested. And what we’re about is providing that information in a useable format.

So what we’ve done is with the smartphone, we’ve allowed individual preferences to be catered for in the best way possible. We can’t cater for everything, but we’ve catered for 95% we believe. We have large colour contrast display, we have a range of large text sizes and large arrows. We use auditory cues, we use speech recognition. We have vibrate tactile interfaces. And large, easy to use menu items. So basically in essence, this product has been designed by the blind and vision impaired, not us. They’ve told us what they want, we’ve just put it on the phone.

Roberta: So what stage of research are you at and is this something that will be available for people soon?

Euan: Yeah, well we’re at our final stages of the research. It’s involved the testing of interface technology at the moment, refining the systems and putting it all together in to one product and then we can commercialise that. I certainly hope we can bring it forward very, very soon. It’s been a project with a long history; it started in 2001 with my initial research.

We’re looking at wanting to bring this out in the very near future, at least in the Beta test phase. Many of our test subjects actually want it right now, the people who’ve tested it, they’re saying we want it now, we want it in our phones. And we’re going, hang on, we can’t give it to you just yet, we need to finalise it.

We’re the tortoise compared to the hare. A lot of other companies out there are producing these indoor navigation technologies, but they’re not actually listening to the end user. They’re saying here you are, this is what we’ve got, use it. You get used to it. We’re coming from a different perspective, we’re asking the end user what they want, and then we design it and make it all work.

And that’s the biggest thing here. There’s no point in releasing something until we’re absolutely sure it works.

Roberta: Well there’s a lot of people out there more clever than I am Euan. And what sort of training would people get to use this? Is it simple?

Euan: Well initially it would have to be, to start with we would, we’re actually looking at introducing it through blindness organisations such as Vision Australia and Guide Dogs. So O&M experts would be there to help train people. The whole point is though, we want to have it so that any person can help set the system up for someone who’s blind or vision impaired, to be able to do it themselves. We want it to be as easy and as foolproof as possible.

Roberta: Well that sounds fantastic. So where can people find out more?

Euan: It’s fairly low key at the moment but they can Google us if they really want to. Or they can simply visit our, pretty modest website. Here we have a links section as well which has few of our papers that we’ve written for journals and conferences we’ve attended. I have an ad coming out in the International Journal of Orientation Mobility, coming out this year, volume five. Our contact details are available on the website and there are little videos to look at. We’ve had a bit of press coverage over recent times as well.

Roberta: Well congratulations on that Euan and I know it’s been a long time coming, but I’m sure that by the time it is released it will be very, very user friendly.

Euan: Oh, thank you. We intend it to be absolutely 100% user friendly.

Roberta: I’ve been speaking with Euan Ramsey-Stewart, Principal Designer for the project called SIMO.  And this program has been brought to you by Media Access Australia and Media Access Australia are supporters of this program.

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