The feasibility study carried out showed that there is a clear need for the PAL system and the proposed use case. The PAL end-users are not served by any application yet that can fulfil their requirements in indoor navigation.
Our study revealed that infrastructure providers, namely airports, PAL’s primary target group, have considerable yearly costs for providing special assistance services that PAL can help to reduce. Moreover airports need to comply with existing regulations that support accessibility of buildings for mobility impaired persons.
The integration and participation of end-users plays a key role in the development of indoor navigation systems. Therefore, PAL has aimed to integrate, motivate and activate different relevant stakeholder end-user groups (e.g. organisations of blind and visually impaired people, departments that care for fully accessibility, research partners, end-users) to establish a strong, continuous and extensive user-centred design approach in PAL. We determined the following key aspects that are perceived by end-users as particularly important for an indoor navigation system:
* Smooth crossing between outdoor / indoor intersections
* High availability and accuracy of position
* Mobile application as a useful extension of their own navigational training and awareness
Furthermore, the following three levels of service requirements have been identified:
* Level 1: PAL should build on existing regulations that affect accessibility of buildings and other constructions. These regulations are valid for new buildings and in the general sense also when rebuilding or renovating. There are many national and special cases that need to be considered.
* Level 2: Support of special assistance services e.g. calling help, information about state of escalators should form part of the system.
* Level 3: On-demand navigation for adjusting plans and routes, but also a module to prepare from home should be made available.
There is competition around specific areas of the PAL use case, which however builds on deploying a completely new technology (iBeacons) which from our experience is very difficult to motivate. The competition analysis showed a lot of opportunities that we can realise with PAL and has not identified any substantial threat from the current players.
The identified opportunities for PAL include:
* Wide acceptance and demand for wayfinding applications
* Evidence of willingness of users to explore environments despite disabilities, provided that the underlying infrastructure supports this.
* Increasing number of people using special assistance at travel hubs.
* The uptake in the construction industry of digital technologies and tools, e.g. BIM (which results in readily available and machine readable digital artefacts to be used by indoor apps) and the emergence of Smart buildings
* Improvement of image-based technique algorithms for localisation.
* Considerable growth expected for the indoor location market.
The PAL feasibility study allowed us to understand better the needs of stakeholders (e.g. airports, end-users, end-user organisations), gain knowledge about competitors, define the technological challenges and how we are going to solve them, identify risks and elaborate a strategic approach in business development as well to increase the visibility of the companies involved.
