Treffer: From Research to App: Personalized Inertial Navigation for the Visually Impaired

The transition from research to real-world application is full of challenges. In this work, we present our efforts to integrate a personalized Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) framework, called MAPIN, into a real-time mobile application that displays the user's trajectory on a map using only inertial signals and map data. We have overcome the challenges of translating a Python implementation into a C++ implementation, assembling different modules from different research works and made compromises to fit the available hardware and computational resources in the mobile devices. Experimental results show that both the real-time and Python implementations produce very similar results, with execution times that are reasonable for a real-time application. Furthermore, the real-time MAPIN has been integrated with the guidance interface developed by Okeenea Digital, our industrial partner in the project, to create a proof-of-concept (POC) navigation application for demonstration purposes. Through this integration process, we have learned valuable lessons that will guide our future integration efforts.