RESIMA: An Assistive Paradigm to Support Weak People in Indoor Environments

Abstract

This paper deals with the RESIMA architecture developed to assist people with sensory disability in indoor environments, with particular regard to the visually impaired. With respect to solutions presented in the state-of-the-art, RESIMA is a smart multisensor assistive system which, exploiting a high resolution monitoring of the user position in the spatial-temporal domain as well as a deep inertial monitoring of the user status, assures a reliable and continuous form of assistance. The system is based on a wireless sensor network and smart paradigms, which extract relevant information from data collected through the multisensor architecture to manage interactions between the user and the environment itself. This paper mainly focuses on the multisensor system architecture and smart paradigms for the user localization and the user-environment interaction (UEI). Real experiments, performed by good health users, demonstrate an accuracy of the positioning system of about 3.9 cm and a suitable rate of success probability associated to the UEI functionality embedded in the RESIMA architecture.