A positioning system with RFID tags and QZSS for navigating the visually impaired

Pedestrian navigation systems such as google route map have become popular in recent years. However, visually impaired people is difficult to use the general navigation system due to the low positioning accuracy and the non-user-friendly interfaces for them. Therefore, the goal of this study was to develop a navigation system for visually impaired people. Currently, GPS is a prevailing technology as a way of outdoor positioning. Among them, the quasi-zenith satellite system (QZSS) “MICHIBIKI” has been attracting attention in Japan because it can get extremely higher accurate position than conventional GPS. Meanwhile, indoor positioning technology using various methods such as Wi-Fi, RFID, and iBeacon has been rapidly developed. In this paper, we apply the QZSS and RFID in the UHF band to the location positioning in the indoor and outdoor for navigating visually impaired people. For this purpose, we measured the radio field intensity of RFID tags in a various situation. As a result, we verified that position estimation based on RFID can be utilized for navigation. Furthermore, we also propose an algorithm for estimating the self-position by combining the position data of MICHIBIKI and RFID.