Cyber Crumbs for Successful Aging With Vision Loss
From: IEEE Pervasive Computing - 06/2004 - Vol. 3, No. 2, P. 30
By: David A. Ross

Researchers at the Atlanta VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center
have collaborated with Charmed Technology to develop Cyber Crumbs, an
electronic system that functions like a trail of bread crumbs to help
visually impaired people efficiently navigate through unfamiliar
environments. Several location awareness technologies were tested as
candidates for Cyber Crumbs' tech infrastructure, and the MIT Media Lab's
Locust IR system emerged as the best technology because it enabled users to
follow the route without breaking stride and did not require any additional
effort on their part to obtain navigational data. The Atlanta team approached
Charmed Technology to supply the hardware component of Cyber Crumbs by
modifying interactive conference badges based on the Locust System to
function as cyber crumbs and reader badges, and both organizations worked
together to create software that would direct people to one of two specific
sites in the VA hospital. In the Cyber Crumbs system's current form, the user
wears a reader badge and walks along a route peppered with cyber crumbs that
are asleep most of the time to conserve battery power; the badge sends out a
wake-up signal in one-second intervals, and a crumb activates and transmits
its ID code and text message once every second when a person comes within 22
feet of the device. The prototype system was tested on 10 visually
handicapped people between 37 and 85 years old, and results indicated that
Cyber Crumbs reduced average performance times by 50 percent and average
distance traveled by 25 percent when compared to baseline figures.
Participants generally praised the system as a tool for giving them support
for independent travel and awareness of their surroundings, and appreciated
Cyber Crumbs' ability to identify important objects or locations en route.
Aspects of Cyber Crumbs they did not like included a lack of reliability due
to signal reflections, the time it took for the system to locate crumbs, and
a lack of crumb personalization. The VA hospital and Charmed Technology are
working to address these issues. 

http://www.computer.org/pervasive/pc2004/b2030.pdf