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Utilisation of Location Based Services for the benefit of Visually Handicapped People
Way 6: The existing Mobile phone can be used in this approach. Here using the mobile
network area, the user position has to be identified and using Location Management
utilities along with background GIS interoperable server many information can be passed
on the ears of ViHP. It is a mandate of Federal Communications Commission (FCC),
USA that, all wireless carriers in the United States must provide a certain degree of
accuracy in pinpointing the location of mobile users who dial 9-1-1, which is a location
based emergency service application that pinpoints your location and relays it the
appropriate authorities. This mandate can be used with a special permission for a ViHP
that he/she is licensed to get his positional information to some degree of accuracy, which
will not be displayed in numbers but will be processed in the background and only
locality details will be told in words. In this way the existing mobile can be used for LBS.
Again the cost of the equipment and operational cost are two major factor to be
subsidized by the Government for ViHP.
It takes around 7 to 8 months to convert normal book to Braille text book (Lison Joseph,
2003) and also only 20% of the demand is fulfilled by dedicated Government Braille
printing press. If this is a case for a simple book, then it would certainly will be a little
time consuming process for implementing a full fledged LBS. But once it is established
only thing which has to be taken care of is the temporal changes in the spatial database
elements.
Conclusion:
It is found that the developmental need is becoming so high in the developing countries.
So at this juncture, it is very important for the developing countries to look for such
hurdles and applicability of such technologies from the common man point of view,
otherwise unplanned developments would make void in some social development later.
Leaving aside the cost and accuracy issue, still lot of work is to be done for preparing
high resolution geospatial database and customized GIS software in making automated
location management utilities with an intelligent Semantically interoperable text to voice
converter. Since dependency on mobile phones is becoming more visible and soon LBS
will become all-time activity for a common man, hence putting/creating a little extra
infrastructural and spatial information base would provide an extended economical
benefit in the long run and also help a social cause.
References:
- Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 2000. Statistics on Visually Impaired and Blind. World
Health Organisation (WHO).
-
Hindu, 2000. A boon to visually handicapped people using computers. November.
-
Lison Joseph, 2003. Demand for Braille textbooks proving difficult. Times News
Network, November.
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