A protocol proposal to improve visual disabled individuals access to transport system.
Population growth in the major cities of the world has been very rapid over the years, and according to United Nations reports it is forecast to continue rising. In order to meet the growing needs of this population, the concept of Smart Cities emerges, which is defined as the use of technology to improve urban infrastructure and provide a better quality of life for the population. In this scenario, urban mobility will be the theme addressed in this paper, specifically the mobility of visually impaired people. The present Master Qualification work aims to propose a protocol to aid the mobility of visually impaired people in public transport environments, such as subway stations, train stations, bus terminals, etc., through the use of smartphone technology. The proposal will be to provide location information through an application installed on a smartphone so that employees of subway stations can locate visually impaired users even if they are outside the station and assist them with their transportation using public transport. The methodology used in this work will be experimental research and the proposed protocol will be based on dynamic calculation of physical distances between visually impaired users and access points to stations through geolocation coordinates provided by the GPS of users' smartphones. A central server, connected to the Internet, will be in charge of managing the communication between the applications installed on the smartphones, as well as sending to the operating sector of each subway station the requests for assistance to visually impaired users. With the results of this work it is expected to generate improvements in the autonomy of the visually impaired in terms of mobility in public transport through the use of technology and consequently contribute to the expansion and development of Smart Cities concepts.