Hello to the VICS list. I am enclosing our report on the use of Loadstone below. We look forward to the comments of VICS members. Ronan Report Begins: Well positioned in Dublin and Cork - GPS and a mobile phone as a mobility aid for people with a vision impairment - authors: Aedan O'Meara, Cearbhall O'Meadhra, Ronan McGuirk Date January 2007 Overview Over the past few months we have been experimenting with mobile phones interacting with the Global Positioning System to assess the usefulness of this technology as a mobility aid to people with a vision impairment. We have been carrying out a trial of the Loadstone-GPS system at two locations in Ireland, (Dublin and Cork). In this short paper we summarise our experiences and are pleased to report that the experiment was successful. What is the Global Positioning System? The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite navigation system. A set of satellites is in orbit around the Earth. These satellites transmit radio signals and a person with a GPS receiver can determine his/her location based on these satellite signals. There is a very good article explaining the Global Positioning System in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System What is Loadstone? Loadstone-GPS is a free program designed for Series 60 Symbian mobile phones. This software has been designed to work well with screen readers such as Talks or Mobile Speak on the mobile phones. In order for Loadstone-GPS to work, it requires a separate GPS receiver that is connected to the mobile phone using Bluetooth. It is worth noting that the hardware is standard off-the-shelf equipment. It is not specially designed for visually impaired people. Furthermore, the Loadstone-GPS program itself is free. For more information on Loadstone-GPS check out the Loadstone website at www.loadstone-gps.com What equipment did we use? Ronan used a Nokia 6600 with Talks 2.5 premium edition together with a Holux Slim 236 GPS receiver. Aedan used a Nokia 6680 with Talks 3.0 premium edition with dictionary and a Holux slim 236 GPS receiver. Cearbhall used a Nokia 6680 with Talks 3.0 premium edition with dictionary, ThinkOutside Bluetooth keyboard, Motorola Bluetooth earphone And a Holux slim 236 GPS receiver. How we used Loadstone The Global Positioning system works by receiving radio signals from Satellites and calculating the location of the receiver as a point of Latitude and longitude on the Earth. When you install Loadstone on your mobile phone and get it working with your GPS receiver, it can tell you your latitude and longitude, altitude and speed and direction of movement. However, to make full use of it, it is Necessary to have a way of converting latitude and longitude to place names or as they are called "points of interest, or P.O.I.s". Loadstone, which is being written by a blind programmer, is specially designed to make the recording of any point of interest to you absolutely simple. Pressing the hash key in the Loadstone program on your mobile phone puts you into an edit box and it is similar to entering a text message. After using Loadstone for a few months we collected hundreds of point names. The types of point names we collected included train stations, Luas stations, shops, pubs and many road junctions. Ronan found that he could use loadstone to tell which train station the Dublin Dart had stopped at. Using Loadstone on the Dart train gives a great deal of information. Not only can you tell which station you are at, but also when the train is moving you can tell the speed and direction. You can follow the curve of Dublin Bay as the train leaves Dun Laoghaire heading due west and gradually curves through the compass till it is heading north. Ronan found that he needed to learn the meaning of compass points such as West By North, and East by North East. Using Loadstone gives a very rich understanding of your location, speed, direction and altitude especially if you are travelling in a bus or a car. Cearbhall collected points along the seafront in Bray. This is a half kilometre of straight esplanade with no distinguishing features. He was able to use Loadstone to mark the point of entry to the esplanade (a particular set of steps and buildings alongside the walk that identified different parts of the route. When you have collected a set of points yourself or downloaded them from the point share exchange, Loadstone is a good help when trying to understand your current location or find a point of interest. It is simple to ask Loadstone what the nearest point is or to get the direction and distance to a point you wish to reach. Loadstone is not a substitute for a long cane or a guide dog, but it is a useful addition to your existing method of mobility. How to look up an Internet map to get latitude and longitude There is a web site at http://stevemorse.org/jcal/latlon.php with a search facility that is very simple and will give you the latitude and Longitude of any town or large village in Ireland, or anywhere else in the world. It will also do the reverse. If you capture a point with loadstone you can look it up on this website to get the street address. Ronan found that it usually gives the correct street name in Dublin but the address number of the house is only an approximation. Comparison of Loadstone with other location systems Unlike mapping systems which some of us have over a year's experience of, Loadstone stands out as the only viable and cost effective option for the visually impaired who wish to be told at any time exactly where they are on the surface of the earth. (yes, you can use it anywhere on the surface of the earth, even at the poles though we haven't tried this yet!). At the moment the list of already labelled points of interest is only being built by the voluntary efforts of current users. It is therefore a very rewarding project to be involved in as the information you gather will be there for generations to come who might need it! This is the only program that allows you to build entirely your own route to suit bus, train, or any other off the road route. It is totally portable and once one is used to it you will never leave it at home! Aedan has gone back to using Wayfinder for comparison purposes as he used it for a year before getting Loadstone. He reports that his installation of Wayfinder, in his circumstances, was totally sterile in that it gave no information like individual bus stops, etc that he had built up with Loadstone. Wayfinder only announced the turns and was awkward in use to find even the name of the road you have turned onto. It appears to be purely a mapping program designed for car users, or sighted pedestrians. Ronan had previously used Mini GPs which is a program that came with the Talks premium edition and allowed the labelling of mobile phone cells. Mini GPS can tell you the name of the mobile phone cell in which you are located. However, in Dublin the cells can be quite large (3 or four kilometres across in places). Obviously this only gives you a very approximate location. On the Dublin Dart train system the mobile phone cells often include more than one station so it is not a foolproof method of identifying location. Loadstone by contrast gives you a location that can be accurate to about 5 metres. Saving points to the Point share website Each of us collected many points. The Loadstone-gps website provides a database for sharing points. Over the past few months we have added several hundreds of Irish places to the point share exchange. Coverage of points in Ireland today Before we started using Loadstone, a number of Irish points had been added to the exchange. We are pleased to report that we have jointly added several hundred more. We have captured all Dart stations from Bray to Tara Street and all Green line Luas stations from Sandyford to Stephens green. We have saved a lot of points in the Dun Laoghaire Dalkey area and also in Dublin 4. Ronan went hill walking on the Wicklow Way and has saved several points along the route and elsewhere in County Wicklow. In Cork Aedan has added many points for Cork city centre, West cork as far as Clonakilty, and in East Cork from Fermoy to Dungarvan and in Waterford as far as Lismore, Waterford City, and Dunmore East. Cearbhall has collected most of the stations from Heuston station, Dublin to Waterford together with many points along the M50 from Bray to Sandyford. Problems we encountered with Loadstone Ronan had problems with the Holux GPS unit not getting a signal but has now resolved this problem. Cearbhall found that the interest points marked on the Bray seafront change each time he goes out. The change is small and not important when noting buildings alongside the route. However, a series of four rubbish bins that create a hazard for a blind pedestrian and are spaced about ten metres apart, are reported by loadstone as being in significantly different locations every time one passes. The accuracy of current technology can vary a bit from day to day and we are experiencing typical accuracies of about 5 to 10 metres. The Wikipedia article we mentioned above gives a very good explanation of the factors that affect location accuracy. We have got to grips with the peculiar way Holux works. You need to switch it on in an area with a guaranteed signal and wait about 30 seconds before starting loadstone on the mobile phone. If you do this it works fine afterwards. If you start it in an area with a bad signal (for example on a crowded train) then it often goes into a strange mode and won't see a satellite signal until re-booted. We find that switching Holux off and on again with the switch on the Holux box works fine to get it back working again, provided you wait about 60 seconds, and we found that we rarely needed to re-boot the phone. Aedan found that in order to get an accurate direction of travel it was necessary to walk fairly quickly. There is a feature built into the GPS units called Static Navigation that is the cause of this. We recommend that the Static Navigation feature be turned off. If you get a unit with Static Navigation turned on, you will either have to walk quickly to get a direction or go through a somewhat complex process to turn this feature off. The Loadstone program itself can be a little confusing in its layout and we have contributed through the email discussion list to a more logical layout in certain parts of the newer versions. Next steps We have no hesitation in recommending this product or, more correctly, project as a fine example of the blind helping themselves to create a fantastically useful tool to assist orientation. We would encourage other visually impaired people in Ireland to try it out. If we work together we can build up a rich store of points on the point share exchange. Looking to the future we expect technology to change fairly rapidly. Loadstone-GPS currently works on the second edition Symbian phones. As of now it doesn't work on the 3rdrd edition. Hopefully this will change over time. We expect that over time GPS technology will rapidly improve and GPS chipsets will be built into mobile phones. Further, it is assumed that the new European GPS system Galileo, currently being built, with several satellites already put into orbit, will have an accuracy level of centimetres. This would mean that in a few years, if we still have an accessible system like Loadstone-GPS, we will be able to find the door, not just the building as at the moment! We are in touch with the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (OSI) to see if their maps can be imported into Loadstone. We will also examine the OSI'S OWN GPS programs to see if they can be used by a blind person in a laptop or mobile phone. --- Report ends. -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.410 / Virus Database: 268.16.10/624 - Release Date: 12/01/2007