Whilst a person’s environment can pose obstacles, the key insight from the profession of Orientation and Mobility is that a person’s perception and mobility are intertwined.

Psychosocial factors, such as one’s sense of self and self-efficacy, one’s motivation, one’s fear and anxiety, attitudes towards disability, and family dynamics, affect behaviour as one learns to travel through the environment.

An important barrier to independent travel for vision-impaired people and people with cognitive disabilities is the psychological one that comes through a loss of confidence in a person’s ability to achieve their goal – to get where they want to go reliably and to do so without having to rely on chance and strangers. This barrier is often a manifestation of other people’s concerns.

The Power of Technology

Assistive technology may help people overcome these psychosocial barriers. A wayfinding technology should be able to:

• reliably and accurately locate and orientate a person as they move
• give a person more confidence, so they know that they won’t get lost
• give a person the ability to find their way home, every time.

Waymap's approach, therefore, is designed with this in mind. The quality of instructions, their relevance and their timeliness – and most importantly their accuracy & accessibility – are the keys to confidence. The confidence provided by highly reliable, accurate and timely navigation instructions can build a person’s sense of self-efficacy, help overcome anxiety, and importantly improve carers, parents and adult children’s disposition toward independent mobility.

Accessibility & Navigation

To achieve this, an infrastructure-free approach is necessary for the system to be scalable. Maintenance costs for a beacon or QR code-based approach can be overwhelming along with having poor reliability. In order to provide the quality, reliable instructions necessary, the location system needs to deliver:

• Accurate location to around 1 metre
• Accurate heading to around 10 degrees
• Complete support for the entire journey.

We believe that Waymap is the only company able to provide this.

With this user-first approach, we can provide a fully accessible and inclusive experience for your venue, no matter its complexity or size. With dynamic multi-ability routing and automated, multi-lingual, context-aware instructions, Waymap can provide truly independent access for anyone, anywhere.