Routes to a building or a room suited to the specific needs of users

TL;DR

This paper introduces OPALE, a mobile app designed to help university campus users navigate from outdoor locations to specific rooms inside buildings, addressing last-meter orientation challenges especially for users with disabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach for indoor orientation within a campus app, considering user-specific needs and disabilities, enhancing accessibility and wayfinding.

Findings

Effective indoor navigation features implemented in OPALE.

Improved accessibility for users with disabilities.

Enhanced user experience in campus navigation.

Abstract

OPALE is a multi-service mobile app for users of the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University campuses, combining the discovery of practical, cultural and scientific resources with useful everyday functions. Points of interest are geolocated on a map of the campus and can be reached via an itinerary. But an itinerary to a building is not always enough to find your way around. The orientation problem often lies in the last few metres: between the entrance to the building and the room you are looking for. In this article we present OPALE, and the approach we have adopted to solve this problem of orienting users in a building. We will also show how we take into account the specific characteristics of users, particularly those with physical or cognitive disabilities.