A Low-cost IoT Architecture to support Urban Mobility for Visually Impaired People
Nádia Aparecida de Oliveira Silva, Rodrigo Moreira, Larissa Ferreira Rodrigues, Rafael Marinho e Silva
TL;DR
The paper tackles accessibility challenges in urban mobility for visually impaired people by proposing a low-cost, edge-enabled IoT architecture that uses GPS-enabled on-bus sensors, LoRa communication, and a Raspberry Pi gateway to deliver real-time bus-location and route-context to users. The architecture enables audible and tactile notifications and map-based guidance while keeping costs low for broader deployment. An experimental evaluation using MQTT benchmarks shows that latency grows with message size and that QoS increases gateway CPU load, particularly at higher bus counts, demonstrating the system's scalability and the need to balance reliability with performance. The work offers a practical, scalable path toward smarter, more inclusive Smart City mobility solutions, with future directions including alternative long-range channels and AI-assisted traffic prediction.
Abstract
People with visual impairments struggle with urban mobility and independent travel, opening up opportunities for technological advances to improve their quality of life. The Internet of Things (IoT) plays an essential role in bringing improvements and accessibility for visually impaired people. Although alternatives aimed to use IoT in urban mobility, those solutions are still in the initial stages and do not supports urban mobility for people with visual impairment. This paper proposed and evaluated a low-cost IoT architecture that uses Single-Border Computers (SBCs) to support urban mobility. A performance evaluation showcased that our low-cost architecture handles bus trace workload and is suitable for supporting impaired people to get information concerning bus location on Smart Cities scenarios.