An approach for developing indoor navigation systems for visually impaired people using Building Information Modeling

This article presents a Building Information Model (BIM), which describes the topology, geometry, and semantics of buildings; user preferences; and status of sensors deployed in the building. The aim is to propose an approach for developing a context-aware indoor navigation system, which assists blind and visually impaired people in unfamiliar large public buildings with complex horizontal and vertical connectivity. The proposed building data model aims to overcome the drawbacks of existing BIM-based Indoor Navigation Systems (INS). The innovation aspects of the proposed data model can be summarized as follows: 1) Abstract description of the hierarchy of building elements; 2) BIM is focused on indoor navigation. It allows one to extract information about the topology of a specified part of the building, which is used by an algorithm for coarse-to-fine path finding; 3) Provides rich semantic information on all building elements, objects and users located in the building; and 4) Provides all necessary information for obstacle (fixed and movable) avoidance.