The University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) has finished the development of the Elcano project, an indoor guide solution for people with disabilities, implemented under the auspices of the Indra-Fundación Adecco Professorship in Accessible Technologies.
The objective of the Elcano project, set up in 2010, is to facilitate and optimize the mobility of people with disabilities in large public environments such as airports, train stations, libraries and other large administrative buildings.
To do so it has developed a navigation infrastructure made up of an intelligent environment information service; a multi-modal positioning system that includes different technologies (RFID, Wi-Fi cells, cameras) and a personal navigation device which the person with the disability can access through their mobile phone or tablet.
The modular design of the personal device allows the application to adapt to different kinds of disability, interpreting information collected from the environment in an appropriate manner in each case. For example, in the case of a person with impaired vision, it will provide audio information; for the hearing impaired it would provide visual information and for people with physical disabilities it would provide maps that take into account architectural barriers. In recent developments, Augmented Reality technology makes it possible to superimpose relevant information (destination, route, etc.) onto a camera image.
Furthermore, the Rector of UCLM, Miguel Ángel Collado, the director-general of Indra, Santiago Roura and the President of the Fundación Adecco, José María Echevarría y Arteche, have signed an agreement to set up a new research project for Accessible Technologies called Argos, which will consist of the development of technical support for people with disabilities to help them carry out administrative documentation tasks.
