Smart traffic lights for people with visual impairments: A literature overview and a proposed implementation

Attempting to establish aids for individuals who are visually impaired has urged many cities to seek solutions for improving their quality of life. Namely, cities have installed sound-emitting devices into traffic lights as well as sidewalks that assist their navigation. Moreover, as cities are always striving to move forward and achieve innovations concerning navigation for disabled individuals, smart traffic lights, capable of synchronizing in real-time according to traffic and individual mobility conditions, are already being installed around the world. This is in line with the adoption of the smart city concept, which involves a set of methodologies and indicators that regulate how cities perform regarding the promotion of citizens’ quality of life. Another important principle is the techno-economic aspect indicating the need for low-cost careful planning to produce cost-efficient solutions, while additional important issues are maintenance, power efficiency, and the means to coordinate numerous devices to facilitate operation in a timely and reliable manner. In this article, we present an overview of the existing solutions for the navigation of people who are blind and visually impaired along with a requirement analysis performed on the feedback received from interviews with members of the Lighthouse for the Blind of Greece both of which lead to the proposal of a new implementation that pushes the state of the art.