Search Results (39)

Accurate and reliable pedestrian positioning service is essential for providing Indoor Location-Based Services (ILBSs). Zero-Velocity Update (ZUPT)-aided Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS) based on foot-mounted wearable Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) has shown great performance in pedestrian navigation systems. Though the velocity errors will be corrected once zero-velocity measurement is available, the navigation system errors accumulated during measurement outages are yet to be further optimized by utilizing historical data during both stance and swing phases of pedestrian gait. Thus, in this paper, a novel Forward–Backward navigation and Rauch–Tung–Striebel smoothing (FB-RTS) navigation scheme is proposed. First, to efficiently re-estimate past system state and reduce accumulated navigation error once zero-velocity measurement is available, both the forward and backward integration method and the corresponding error equations are constructed. Second, to further improve navigation accuracy and reliability by exploiting historical observation information, both backward and forward RTS algorithms are established, where the system model and observation model are built under the output correction mode. Finally, both navigation results are combined to achieve the final estimation of attitude and velocity, where the position is recalculated by the optimized data. Through simulation experiments and two sets of field tests, the FB-RTS algorithm demonstrated superior performance in reducing navigation errors and smoothing pedestrian trajectories compared to traditional ZUPT method and both the FB and the RTS method, whose advantage becomes more pronounced over longer navigation periods than the traditional methods, offering a robust solution for positioning applications in smart buildings, indoor wayfinding, and emergency response operations. Full article

The complexity of subway station space can impact the efficiency of passenger navigation. The subway spatial environment is a key factor affecting indoor wayfinding for pedestrians; however, the research framework that examines how various environment factors influence pedestrians during different stages of wayfinding remains ambiguous. This study examines how environmental elements may affect users to varying degrees at different stages of wayfinding, which in turn affects their wayfinding efficiency, recording and analyzing the wayfinding performance and eye-tracking data of 32 participants. The findings reveal that different environment factors exert varying degrees of influence on pedestrians at different stages of wayfinding. Significantly, signage (p = 0.000) proves to have the most substantial impact on wayfinding, followed by stairs/escalators (p < 0.05), but the participants walked to the wrong platform in the TD2 scenario because they were guided by the Line 2 signs in front of the stairs/escalators. Thus, the influence of signage is not entirely positive. This study contributes to an understanding of the differences in the influence of environmental elements on wayfinding during different wayfinding stages, and provides suggestions for the spatial environmental design of subway stations and the improvement of wayfinding efficiency. Full article

Airports are complex environments where efficient localization and intelligent traffic management are essential for ensuring smooth navigation and operational efficiency for both pedestrians and Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs). This study presents an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven airport traffic management system that integrates Visible Light Communication (VLC), rerouting techniques, and adaptive reward mechanisms to optimize traffic flow, reduce congestion, and enhance safety. VLC-enabled luminaires serve as transmission points for location-specific guidance, forming a hybrid mesh network based on tetrachromatic LEDs with On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation and SiC optical receivers. AI agents, driven by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), continuously analyze traffic conditions, apply adaptive rewards to improve decision-making, and dynamically reroute agents to balance traffic loads and avoid bottlenecks. Traffic states are encoded and processed through Q-learning algorithms, enabling intelligent phase activation and responsive control strategies. Simulation results confirm that the proposed system enables more balanced green time allocation, with reductions of up to 43% in vehicle-prioritized phases (e.g., Phase 1 at C1) to accommodate pedestrian flows. These adjustments lead to improved route planning, reduced halting times, and enhanced coordination between AGVs and pedestrian traffic across multiple intersections. Additionally, traffic flow responsiveness is preserved, with critical clearance phases maintaining stability or showing slight increases despite pedestrian prioritization. Simulation results confirm improved route planning, reduced halting times, and enhanced coordination between AGVs and pedestrian flows. The system also enables accurate indoor localization without relying on a Global Positioning System (GPS), supporting seamless movement and operational optimization. By combining VLC, adaptive AI models, and rerouting strategies, the proposed approach contributes to safer, more efficient, and human-centered airport mobility. Full article

The global increase in the population of Visually Impaired People (VIPs) underscores the rapidly growing demand for a robust navigation system to provide safe navigation in diverse environments. State-of-the-art VIP navigation systems cannot achieve the required performance (accuracy, integrity, availability, and integrity) because of insufficient positioning capabilities and unreliable investigations of transition areas and complex environments (indoor, outdoor, and urban). The primary reason for these challenges lies in the segregation of Visual Impairment (VI) research within medical and engineering disciplines, impeding technology developers’ access to comprehensive user requirements. To bridge this gap, this paper conducts a comprehensive review covering global classifications of VI, international and regional standards for VIP navigation, fundamental VIP requirements, experimentation on VIP behavior, an evaluation of state-of-the-art positioning systems for VIP navigation and wayfinding, and ways to overcome difficulties during exceptional times such as COVID-19. This review identifies current research gaps, offering insights into areas requiring advancements. Future work and recommendations are presented to enhance VIP mobility, enable daily activities, and promote societal integration. This paper addresses the urgent need for high-performance navigation systems for the growing population of VIPs, highlighting the limitations of current technologies in complex environments. Through a comprehensive review of VI classifications, VIPs’ navigation standards, user requirements, and positioning systems, this paper identifies research gaps and offers recommendations to improve VIP mobility and societal integration. Full article

This study presents a novel approach to enhancing indoor navigation in crowded multi-terminal airports using visible light communication (VLC) technology. By leveraging existing luminaires as transmission points, encoded messages are conveyed through modulated light signals to provide location-specific guidance. The objectives are to facilitate navigation, optimize routes, and improve system performance through Edge/Fog integration. The methodology includes the use of tetrachromatic LED-equipped luminaires with On–Off Keying (OOK) modulation and a mesh cellular hybrid structure. Detailed airport modeling and user analysis (pedestrians and luggage/passenger carriers) equipped with PINPIN optical sensors are conducted. A VLC-specific communication protocol with coding and decoding techniques ensures reliable data transmission, while wayfinding algorithms offer real-time guidance. The results show effective data transmission and localization, enabling self-localization, travel direction inference, and route optimization. Agent-based simulations demonstrate improved traffic control, with analyses of user halting and average speed. This approach provides reliable indoor navigation independent of GPS signals, enhancing accessibility and convenience for airport users. The integration of VLC with Edge/Fog architecture ensures efficient movement through complex airport layouts. Full article

The built environment continues to become increasingly accessible to people with disabilities, yet there remains a lack of focus on how these individuals are evacuated in emergencies. The objective of this scoping review was to survey the academic literature to identify solutions for safely evacuating individuals with functional limitations from the indoor built environment (i.e., buildings). Journal articles and conference proceedings published in the year 2002 onwards were included. Two pairs of reviewers independently evaluated 3562 articles from ten databases and identified 99 articles. The results were categorized into six main evacuation solution types: notification, wayfinding, egress, building design, strategy, and training programs. Our findings highlight the importance of tailoring solutions to the needs of individuals with different functional limitations. Future work should focus on expanding the number of solutions available for (1) emergencies beyond fires (e.g., natural disasters); (2) unique building types that may require specialized engineering considerations; and (3) a greater variety of impairments (e.g., seeing, hearing, cognitive). We also emphasize the need for more interdisciplinary work and the importance of including rescuers and rescuees in emergency preparedness discussions. These collaborations will ensure that building designs, organizational procedures, and evacuation aids complement each other to maximize safety. To our knowledge, this is the first scoping review to identify solutions for evacuating individuals with functional limitations from buildings. These findings may help inform future recommendations for new evacuation guidelines around the world. Full article

Wayfinding signage is an intermediary public facility that coordinates the relationship between space and people, and it is crucial to help people find their way in complex indoor environments. In people’s cognitive behaviour towards wayfinding signs, the visual salience of the signs is the prerequisite and key to ensuring their effective operation. This paper aims to review published research articles on the effect of indoor environments on the saliency of wayfinding signs. The literature review was conducted by PICO methodology to formulate the research question and develop search strategies. Relevant research articles were identified by systematically searching electronic databases, including Web of Science, ScienceDirect, ProQuest, and EBSCO. This paper summarises two categories of factors influencing signage salience: (1) floor plan factors and (2) environmental factors. This study examined and condensed the attributes of wayfinding signage and their impact on how pedestrians perceive visuals while navigating. Exploring the elements that influence the visual prominence of indoor signs enhances our comprehension of how pedestrians engage with visually guided information indoors. Furthermore, this offers a theoretical foundation for the realm of indoor wayfinding. Full article

Wayfinding is important for everyone on a university campus to understand where they are and get to where they want to go to attend a meeting or a class. This study explores the dynamics of mobile navigation apps and the spatial ability skills of individuals on a wayfinding performance and perceived workload on a university campus wayfinding, including indoor-outdoor navigation, by focusing on three research objectives. (1) Compare the effectiveness of Google Maps (outdoor navigation app) and MazeMap (indoor-outdoor navigation app) on wayfinding performance and perceived workload in university campus wayfinding. (2) Investigate the impact of participants’ spatial ability skills on their wayfinding performance and perceived workload regardless of the used navigation app. (3) Highlight the challenges in indoor-outdoor university campus wayfinding using mobile navigation apps. To achieve this, a controlled experiment was conducted with 22 participants divided into a control (using Google Maps) and an experiment group (using MazeMap). Participants were required to complete a time-bound wayfinding task of navigating to meeting rooms in different buildings within the Gløshaugen campus of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Participants were assessed on spatial ability tests, mental workload, and wayfinding performance using a questionnaire, observation notes and a short follow-up interview about the challenges they faced in the task. The findings reveal a negative correlation between overall spatial ability score (spatial reasoning, spatial orientation, and sense of direction) and perceived workload (NASA TLX score and Subjective Workload Rating) and a negative correlation between sense of direction score and total hesitation during wayfinding task. However, no significant difference was found between the Google Maps and the MazeMap group for wayfinding performance and perceived workload. The qualitative analysis resulted in five key challenge categories in university campus wayfinding, providing implications for designing navigation systems that better facilitate indoor-outdoor campus navigation. Full article

Navigation networks are a common form of indoor map that provide the basis for a wide range of indoor location-based services, intelligent tasks for indoor robots, and three-dimensional (3D) geographic information systems. The majority of current indoor navigation networks are manually modeled, resulting in a laborious and fallible process. Building Information Modeling (BIM) captures design information, allowing for the automated generation of indoor maps. Most existing BIM-based navigation systems for floor-level wayfinding rely on well-defined spatial semantics, and do not adapt well to buildings with irregular 3D shapes, which can make cross-floor path generation difficult. This research introduces an innovative approach to generating 3D indoor navigation networks automatically from BIM data using image thinning, which is referred to as GINIT. Firstly, GINIT extracts grid-based maps for floors from BIM data using only two types of semantics, i.e., slabs and doors. Secondly, GINIT captures cross-floor paths from building components by projecting 3D forms onto a 2D image, thinning the 2D image to capture the 2D projection path, and crossing over the 2D routes with 3D routes to restore the 3D path. Finally, to demonstrate the effectiveness of GINIT, experiments were conducted on three real-world multi-floor buildings, evaluating its performance across eight types of cross-layer architectural component. GINIT overcomes the dependency of space definitions in current BIM-based navigation network generation schemes by introducing image thinning. Due to the adaptability of navigation image thinning to any binary image, GINIT is capable of generating navigation networks from building components with diverse 3D shapes. Moreover, the current studies on indoor navigation network extraction mainly use geometry theory, while this study is the first to generate 3D indoor navigation networks automatically using image thinning theory. The results of this study will offer a unique perspective and foster the exploration of imaging theory applications of BIM. Full article

The National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) is a significant institution in modern medicine in Taiwan. Its West Campus, the oldest medical center in the country, has been recognized as a municipal historic site due to its architectural and historical importance. However, visitors have faced navigation difficulties for a long time. To address this issue, a study was conducted to find navigation solutions within the constraints of architectural structure, hardware, and busy crowds. Blender and Unity were used to recreate the environment, and interactive virtual wayfinding experiments were conducted with 64 participants divided into two groups. Each group completed 12 tasks in two scenarios, and their task performance, wayfinding behavior, and questionnaire responses were collected to evaluate the overall environment. The pretest helped identify problems in the existing signage system and weak areas, leading to redesigning of a new signage system. The main objective of the posttest was to evaluate the new design’s effectiveness. Our research contributes to future signage system layout design references, enhancing readability and information coherence while recommending locations within medical facilities. We set specific design standards to facilitate wayfinding signage systems in complex environments. Full article

Due to the inherent limitations of underground spaces, such as the lack of natural ventilation and sunlight, underground space users tend to face more health risks compared with their aboveground counterparts. However, little is known about how the underground environment, users’ health, and their associations were impacted by the outbreak of the pandemic. In this study, we investigated and compared the impacts of the general underground environment on regular users’ physical and psychological health before and after the pandemic. To achieve this aim, the data from 525 surveys were collected from eleven underground sites, followed by an objective field measurement study conducted at five underground sites in Hong Kong pre- and post-outbreak of the pandemic. The multigroup structural equation modelling results indicated that: (i) surprisingly, the users’ satisfaction towards almost all underground environment factors, including greenery, connectivity with the aboveground environment, thermal comfort, ventilation, indoor air quality, acoustic comfort, and lighting, excluding wayfinding, were significantly higher in the post-outbreak period; (ii) the users’ health, both physical and psychological, was significantly better in the post-outbreak period; (iii) the impacts of visual comfort on the users’ physical and psychological health were significantly greater in the post-outbreak period (critical difference ratio (|CDR|) > 1.96); (iv) the impacts of wayfinding, greenery, and acoustic and thermal comfort on the users’ physical or psychological health were significant only in the pre-outbreak period (|CDR| > 1.96); (v) the impacts of connectivity on the users’ physical and psychological health were significant in both the pre- and post-outbreak periods (|CDR| < 1.96). The findings were further cross-validated using the objective measurement results. With an increasing need to develop healthy underground spaces, the study contributes to the development, design, and management of the underground environment to enhance the users’ health in the post-outbreak era. Full article

Independent wayfinding is a major challenge for blind and visually impaired (BVI) travelers. Although GPS-based localization approaches enable the use of navigation smartphone apps that provide accessible turn-by-turn directions in outdoor settings, such approaches are ineffective in indoor and other GPS-deprived settings. We build on our previous work on a localization algorithm based on computer vision and inertial sensing; the algorithm is lightweight in that it requires only a 2D floor plan of the environment, annotated with the locations of visual landmarks and points of interest, instead of a detailed 3D model (used in many computer vision localization algorithms), and requires no new physical infrastructure (such as Bluetooth beacons). The algorithm can serve as the foundation for a wayfinding app that runs on a smartphone; crucially, the approach is fully accessible because it does not require the user to aim the camera at specific visual targets, which would be problematic for BVI users who may not be able to see these targets. In this work, we improve upon the existing algorithm so as to incorporate recognition of multiple classes of visual landmarks to facilitate effective localization, and demonstrate empirically how localization performance improves as the number of these classes increases, showing the time to correct localization can be decreased by 51–59%. The source code for our algorithm and associated data used for our analyses have been made available in a free repository. Full article

Wayfinding is considered to be one of the most demanding challenges to be performed by hospitals’ users. Wayfinding has been an interest among researchers from different fields, such as architecture, interior design, cognitive psychology, and facilities management, to name a few. Previous scholars have highlighted the need for a holistic framework taking into consideration both user and environmental factors. A narrative review of the literature was carried out to understand the full extent of the issue and address the ever-increasing demand for a holistic assessment framework. This article attempts to address the underlying gap by proposing a comprehensive framework that takes into account both facets of the issue through a narrative review of the literature to some of the most prominent research attempts to address the problem of wayfinding in complex healthcare settings. Furthermore, the proposed framework can assist both researchers and practicing professionals by providing a comprehensive understanding of the issue of complex wayfinding as well as of the variables to be investigated in the assessment process. Full article

Signage plays a crucial part in passengers’ wayfinding process. This research proposes a general method to optimize and evaluate different signage alternatives based on building information modeling (BIM), virtual reality (VR) technologies, and passengers’ wayfinding behaviors. A wayfinding experiment with 46 participants was conducted in a virtual environment. In this experiment, relevant measurements, including wayfinding time, wrong turns, and stopping and looking, were selected to describe wayfinding behaviors. The results showed that the evaluation outcome of the new integration information signage was better than that of the old one, with its wayfinding measurements decreasing to varying degrees. Overall, the new integration information-signage solution is more efficient in guiding passengers. Moreover, this general method of optimizing and evaluating signage alternatives with BIM and VR technologies is also suitable for other indoor spaces. Practitioner Summary: To evaluate the old and new integration information signage in transport hubs, a virtual reality experiment was conducted in this study based on the wayfinding theory and the TOPSIS comprehensive evaluation approach. The results showed that the new integration information signage solution was more efficient than the old one in guiding passengers. Full article

The COVID-19 spread abruptly changed the fruition of indoor environments, where necessary adaptive measures have since been implemented. Buildings open to the public were suddenly equipped with physical devices aiming to encourage users’ appropriate behaviors, such as hand sanitizing, social distancing, and temperature monitoring. Through a twofold architectural-psychological perspective, the paper presents a research aiming to understand how users perceive these devices in the Italian context and to identify the design features that could improve their effectiveness in enhancing individuals’ awareness. With an interdisciplinary approach, four methods were adopted: observational field surveys, background and normative framework analysis, survey research through an online questionnaire, and case studies survey research. The results confirm the overall effectiveness of the implemented anti-COVID strategies, their suitability in encouraging individuals’ appropriate behaviors, and the importance of regulating the users’ flow indoors. The research allowed defining the devices (hand-sanitizing devices and temperature-measurement instruments) and wayfinding systems more suited to be included in the prevention strategy and identified their more appropriate design features in relation to the users’ feedback. Operational suggestions are presented as well. The adopted experimental approach can be useful in supporting decision making in managing of the built environment in both the current and future contexts. Full article