Design and implementation of a multimodal personal indoor navigation assistant

There are several situations in which individuals require indoor navigation services such as way finding inside museum, malls or emergency evacuation of a building for people with disabilities. Although, currently the most demanding types of navigation services are those that focus on the outdoor GPS-based navigation, having an indoor navigation service would help lots of people especially elderly people or people with cognitive or physical restrictions in routing inside a complex building. The issue of indoor navigation still raises challenging research questions such as indoor localization methods, path planning and navigation presentation. Localization data combining with planing an adaptable path according to user's preferences and needs can be presented in the proper form of easy-to-follow instructions to guide the user to easily reach a destination. This thesis addresses issues of path representation and guidance through providing a multimodal navigation assistant within which navigation guidance is provided by depicting a path inside a 2D map along with presenting different forms of verbal, textual and graphical instructions. The thesis also discusses the issue of deviation detection in indoor navigation. Moreover, an Android prototype has been implemented to test the proposed multimodal navigation assistant.