Beacon for Safety | Beacons lend a helping hand to visually impaired bus passengers in Bucharest

Source    : Venture Beat
By        : Barry Levine
Category  : Beacon For Safety

Beacons have become known among marketers as store location-pingers for mobile device users who might welcome aisle-appropriate coupons.

But a startup’s new project in Bucharest, Romania highlights their potential as a vital service in environments that themselves are mobile — public transportation.


 This is the first project of its kind.Mounted on the outside of each bus, a beacon emits via Bluetooth Low Energy its unique location identifier when it is within about 180 feet of a bus stop.

The project’s app, installed on the iOS or Android smartphone of a visually impaired person waiting at the bus stop, responds by pushing a notification to the passenger’s home screen that “bus number 24 has arrived,” even if the app is not open. There is also a unique audio signal emitted by the phone.
Passengers employ text-to-speech readers on their phones, so the notification can be spoken to them. As is normally the case with beacons, updated communications to the passengers — such as current bus schedules or the number of the approaching bus — require a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection.

The challenges of bus beacons

The beacon is specially designed for outdoor use, remote monitoring, and connection to a buzzer on the outside of the bus, which helps the passenger find the arriving bus. There are sixteen different buzzer sounds, so the passenger can choose one. If several buses for waiting visually impaired passengers arrive at once, the bus plays all of the selected buzzer sounds in a sequence. When the passenger boards the bus, the notification and buzzer(s) stop.

A test version of the program, which is funded by the Vodafone Foundation, began in June with the installation of 40 beacons and the participation of about two dozen passengers. It was initiated when an organization serving visually impaired people approached last winter. Seven thousand passengers in Bucharest are registered as visually impaired, and another 5,000 are estimated to have some sight problems.

Bus-based beacons, the Canadian company noted, fall off or are stolen, have short-lived battery lives, and have very limited ranges — plus only a few passengers will have the required app. iSign’s own browser-based solution has a greater range of up to 300 feet, and is thus expected to reach 90 percent of passengers.

But the Bucharest project’s needs match beacons’ limitations. Those adapted beacons only need to function as the buses are coming to a stop, they have been adapted for remote monitoring of battery life and other functions, they can run off the buses’ electrical systems, and the visually impaired passengers have an incentive to download the app.

This is the first wide-scale implementation of a number of public transportation projects. One, a trial project in Abu Dhabi, puts beacons literally in the role of lifesavers.

In that effort,  beacons are provided on keychains for a classroom of students, so teachers and school personnel can test whether this solution can help keep track of the group. Each keychain-with-beacon runs about $20.


(Read More: venturebeat.com/2015/09/14/beacons-lend-a-helping-hand-to-visually-impaired-bus-passengers-in-bucharest/)