# Indoor-Guided Navigation for People Who Are Blind: Crowdsourcing for Route Mapping and Assistance
## 3 Indoor Navigation: Towards a Crowdsourced Approach
### Indoor Navigation Approach  
Admittedly, regarding real-time assistance and guidance for routes, the primary objective of the specialized mobile apps with wearable services is to assist visually impaired or blind users to navigate indoors with online or offline help obtained from an online community. In the client-server model, a wearable client smartphone or another specialized sensory device (i) streams live video to a crowd server (working as a social navigation networking service) for sighted volunteers using the internet/WiFi and (ii) receives near-real-time feedback with assistance and guiding instructions from the crowd server. Below, we provide a few examples of such social collaboration. For instance, SoNavNet allows connected users in the social network to share navigation information with the intention being to provide more personalized navigation methods and routes based on member experience rather than on the shortest distance. SoNavNet is based on an experience-based approach--through communication (using online social media) and collaboration (sharing and exchanging experiences), people who are BSVI can find suitable routes, both outdoors and indoors, that meet their specific needs and preferences. SoNavNet, as an online social navigation network system, facilitates the sharing and exchange of experiences with points of interest (POIs), routes of interest (ROIs), and areas of interest (AOIs) [24]. The authors [25] designed the Tales4 Us platform to promote creativity, collaboration, and a learning process in which BSVI and other communities can share their shopping stories through a specialized social network. The application has the following major functionalities: (i) the user can play other users' shopping stories and (ii) users can record new stories and share them with the community. In the case of the \"Seeing-eye person\" proposed in [26], a crowdsourcing approach enables multimedia data sharing and services for BSVI navigation. The goal of this work is to provide user-accessible crowd services (uniquely tailored for people who are visually impaired) that are flexible (with a friendly HCI and APIs that make it easy to plug in new apps to motivate online volunteers to provide their services) and efficient (near real-time response and a balanced workload between the mobile phone, the back end system, and the different types of users). The authors [27] designed their general-purpose social navigation approach to be available for any user, including people who are BSVI with impaired mobility. The system allows knowledge to be shared between users, and existing places can be reviewed freely and new ones can be uploaded to the global database, improving the application content. The ParticipAct infrastructure implements calls to different external API services, such as geocoding, localization, routing calculation, and the download of POI entities, enabling a new set of functionalities. However, the system does not include data quality support in the sense of automatic filtering-out of erroneous inputs as (possibly) fake entities. In sum, after a semi-structured survey of people who are BSVI, an interview with BSVI experts (see section above), and a brief overview of the recent developments in the field (see above), we came up with some meaningful empirically based insights concerning the context of experience-driven indoor navigation and related R&D solutions. Consequently, based on this knowledge, we identified some R&D niches for the further enhancement of composite ETA solutions for people who are BSVI. Below, we describe our insights and the proof of concept, i.e., a proposed novel ETA prototype for indoor navigation using offline and online crowdsourced assistance from volunteers. The novel ETA system presented below is a compound technology of innovatively adapted hardware devices, such as the 3D ToF IR camera, the RGB camera, a specially designed tactile display with EMG sensors, bone-conducting earphones, a controller, an IMU, GPS, a light detector, and compass sensors.