Walking aids based on wearable/ubiquitous computing – aiming at pedestrian’s intelligent transport systems

As contemporary transport system including developing Intelligent Transport System (ITS) is vehicle centered, pedestrians especially elders and disabilities are always threatened. This paper proposes a new pedestrian-centered traffic system concept named “Pedestrian’s ITS” (PITS) based on ubiquitous and wearable computing techniques. P-ITS consists of various components including wearable computers for people in special needs and distributed computers to sense and control environments. This paper presents two example components, that is, Intelligent Cane, a wearable computer for the Blind, and a ubiquitous computing system to obtain and visualize traffic flow of Pedestrians.