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the helen hamlyn research centre: design for our future selves the royal college of art: postgraduate art and design

24 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge 2005

Babelfish: a word in your ear

Applied Information Group (AIG)

The Issue

Finding your way in busy and complicated stations can be a real challenge if you are visually impaired or have mobility or cognitive difficulties.

What is it?

Babelfish is a portable navigation device worn as a necklace that gives sonic clues and feedback in large transport hubs. It forms part of a wider service accessed via the Internet and mobile phone.

How Does it Work?

In its audio form, Babelfish provides a 3D soundscape of the station, using sound to signpost key locations - platforms, exits, amenities, even staff. For a blind person, miniature speakers in a necklace device relay locations to help navigate and allow them to make informed requests of the public.

Babelfish works by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, commonly found in the Oyster smartcards used on London Transport. Babelfish reverses the equation. Usually, RFID tags are mobile and readers are stationary. The AIG team have turned that idea around and made the tags stationary and the readers mobile. They envisage setting RFID tags at all the key locations around a transport terminal ticket barriers, cash dispensers, information booths and so on. The reader would be sited in the traveller’s mobile phone.

In this way the user has control of the technology through their Babelfish enabled phone that will deliver information in an audio or visual format. In this way they will be able to plan the navigation of a journey in advance. Babelfish will then act as a virtual escort to give confidence once they start their journey, with real-time location information and guidance delivered through their mobile phone screen or via the necklace device.