Bidirectional BLE enabled Audible Pedestrian Signal for Visual Impaired Pedestrian

Audible Pedestrian Signal(APS) is an additional equipment to provide information about pedestrian signals in non-visual formats such as audible tones and verbal messages. It can provide information to pedestrians about the location and directions of a crosswalk, and the traffic signal status. In general, a pedestrian who is visually impaired uses a 358.5MHz wireless remote controller to activate the APS and crosses at the crosswalk with the help of the APS. The existing APS can only receive an activation message from the remote controller. Therefore, the APS has an issue, especially at intersections, that all APSs within the communication range of the remote controller are activated simultaneously. It makes to confuse the visual impaired pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a BLE-enabled APS that can enable two-way communication via Bluetooth with a smartphone. The proposed system solves the problem and provides them with additional information, so that visually impaired pedestrians can cross at the crosswalk more conveniently.