# Indoor-Guided Navigation for People Who Are Blind: Crowdsourcing for Route Mapping and Assistance
## 6 Conclusions and Discussion
It is important to note that even indoor situations that change daily, such as renovations, furniture movements, closed doors, etc., can be recorded and updated continuously by sighted volunteers using social networking and the web cloud DB. In unrecognized environments, a trained ETA guiding system can either guide the user around the obstacle or suggest another route to continue on next. Thus, the presented innovative web-crowd-assisted method enables BSVI users to obtain the latest information about the suitability of indoor routes. After experiencing a route, BSVI users (and correspondingly ETA system) can rate the route's validity and make personal averaged ratings ascribed to the route (that are ascribed to the volunteer who recorded it). This allows other BSVI users to choose the best-rated routes and obtain offline guidance from the best-rated volunteers (sighted users). In short, from the point of view of the end-user, the presented wearable prototype is distinguished from other related wearable indoor navigational ETA approaches in the sense that (a) it has an intuitive hands-free control interface that uses EMG (or mobile app and panel) and forehead tactile display; (b) it has a comfortable, user-orientated headband design; (c) it provides machine-learning-based real-time guided navigation and recognizes objects, scenes, and faces as well as providing OCR (optical character recognition); and (d) it provides web-crowd assistance while mapping indoor navigational routes and solving complex situations on the way using volunteers' help. It is important to note that each modality is composed of the same set of eight modes (object detector, specific object detector, scene description, face recognition, OCR, obstacle recognition, navigation, social networking) that are active or work in the background. The inclusion of all of these modes in three functional modalities is a unique feature of the proposed guided ETA system. Thus, the specific advantages of the proposed experience-centric indoor guided navigation in the sense of user interface and social networking are as follows:  
1. People who are BSVI acquire more confidence through human-based wayfinding experiences (through interactions with trusted volunteers or other people who are BSVI with similar needs and preferences) than by using computer-generated models and algorithms. 2. Floor plans or evacuation schemes provided by third parties or volunteers are digitalized, scaled, and matched with the computational vision (SLAM)-generated routes. This helps people who are BSVI when they become involved in complex situations (such as being lost, encountering unexpected obstacles, etc.) and need real-time assistance from volunteers. 3. Indoor situations that change daily can be recorded and uploaded continuously by volunteers through social networking in the web cloud DB. 4. Wayfinding experiences can be effectively rated and shared using social networking. In time, a participatory web 2.0 social networking platform could emerge for people who are BSVI--something similar to a worldwide \"Visipedia\" with a rated, crowdsourced, and publicly available indoor guided navigational web cloud database that is updated in almost real-time. This would expand the set of available indoor routes considerably and enable a much more efficient and reliable rating. In summary, this paper presented a unique approach to the provision of technological and operational know-how on real-time guided indoor navigation improvements for people who are BSVI that does not require prior expensive investment in Wi-Fi, RFID, beamers, or other indoor infrastructure. The provided insights could help researchers and developers to exploit social Web2.0 and crowdsourcing opportunities for computer vision-based ETA navigation developments for people who are BSVI.