Personal Mobile Assistant for Air Passengers with Disabilities (PMA)

This paper describes the PMA research project in progress, whose aim is to develop a concept for personalized mobile route guidance and information for air passengers with disabilities (PWDs), and to implement this concept step by step. The PMA guides PWDs along their route from home to the desired departure gate (or vice-versa: from landing to destination), and provides them with information as and when they need it on their current position and remaining travel route, together with the latest flight information (e.g. delays or gate changes). This project mainly focuses on in-house guidance within the airport for passengers with visual disabilities. The concept is based on normal commercial mobile devices (cell phones or PDAs) with cameras. Within this project, the implementation of the concept is also restricted to the airport area, but is easily extendable to other public transport facilities.