Towards Building iBeacon-based Smart Indoor Environments for Visually Impaired Users

Improving accessibility to public buildings by people with special needs has been an important societal commitment that is mandated by federal laws. In the information age, accessibility can mean more than simply providing physical accommodations like ramps for wheel-chairs. Better yet, accessibility will be fundamentally improved, if a user can be made aware of important location-specific information like functions of offices near the user within a building. A smart environment may help a new person quickly get acquainted about the environment. Such features can be more critical for cases of making an indoor environment more accessible to people with visual impairment. With the intention to promote the integration of visually impaired people in society, this thesis efforts on methodologies for building smart and accessible indoor office environments with the help of Apple's Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology called iBeacon to provide location awareness and enable easy access to information about the environment to people with visual impairment. This thesis presents work done on developing an iterative based approach in improving the configuration of given number of iBeacons to gain optimal signal coverage in a given office space environment and enabling smart features such as tagging points of interest and push notifications. This work aims to exploit the idea to look at visual impairment beyond the level of disability and cash it at as an opportunity to bring about a change of style of living. This work develops a methodology by introducing an end-to-end systems that uses intelligent server side and visually-impaired-friendly client side interfaces to give a prototype of an assistive technology to help them do basic activities like getting familiarized about an office environment without the need for asking for assistance.