Development of a dialogue-based guidance system for narrow area navigation
Introduction
Students, especially freshmen (first-year students) going missing on large university campuses has been a common problem, to the extent that in many countries universities actively engage in developing missing student protocols and policies at a large scale1,2,3,4,5. In some countries, federal laws and nation-wide policies have even been introduced to handle students going missing and losing their way on campuses [US Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education 2016]. To solve the problem, many students search for help on the Internet6, and websites specializing in developing online guides, have already proposed some simple initial solutions in the form of easily understandable general Internet guides on how to prepare for the first year of studying at the university and navigate one's way on the campus7. Moreover, to improve freshmen's quality of life, there have also been proposed specialized solutions such as smartphone applications for supporting students’ on-campus navigation, like MapsPeople's “MapsIndoors” 8 or StudentVIP's “Lost On Campus” 9. Unfortunately, these solutions are usually not released on a global scale and have limited applicability. For example, MapsIndoors is a very useful application, but is limited only to university facilities, and thus cannot be applied as, e.g., indoor navigation application for museums of theme parks. Moreover, Lost On Campus, despite its wide applicability, is an application released only in Australia, thus is limited in its applicability range to one country.
In this paper, we propose a user-friendly application with wide applicability for both on-campus navigation, as well as for indoor narrow area navigation (NAN) in a wide variety of facilities, including tourist sites and entertainment venues. Moreover, the proposed application applies the user's point of view in presenting supporting navigation information and allows the user to communicate with the navigator with both a simple graphical interface as well as free speech, additionally relieving potential stress of the user by performing a non-task-oriented chat.
As the first step in the development and a proof of concept for the application, we chose Kitami Institute of Technology (in Kitami, Japan) as the experimental site, and developed it as the Campus Navigation Partner System (CNPS) (Masui et al., 2018, Yoshida et al., 2018, Yoshida et al., 2019).
Kitami Institute of Technology is a university located on a single campus. It has a complicated internal pathway, and the names of departments and other areas in the facility have been changed due to the reorganization of departments in 2017. Therefore, there is a difference in the names used by the students of the old and new curriculum and the faculty and other staff, which causes a vital need for additional support in navigating freshmen through the facility.
In a survey conducted on 24 freshmen, 21 out of 24 students answered that they had been lost on the campus at least once, thus it is expected that this is a common problem of high prevalence. Therefore, it is necessary to provide navigation to freshmen who are new to the university and are not yet familiar with the layout of the campus.
In order to provide sufficient navigating function for indoor areas and facilities, we propose a facility navigation system for freshmen. The system has a navigation function and an indoor information presentation function inside the facility and runs on a standard smartphone.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes previous research on narrow area navigation systems. In Section 3, we describe the basic idea and technical details of the proposed navigation system. In Section 4, we describe the experiments evaluating the system's performance and discuss their results. Finally, Section 5 presents the conclusions.
Section snippets
Related work
In this section, we overview the previous studies on information presentation and acquisition of location information in narrow areas.
Lyardet et al. [Lyardet et al., 2006] discussed different techniques of presenting the path and supporting user orientation to reach a certain destination in indoor premises.
Simões et al. [Simões, 2013] developed a navigation system for visually impaired pedestrians. They also pointed out that because the accuracy of the GNSS signal is not stable, Pedestrian Dead
Basic idea
The system proposed in this paper was implemented as a smartphone application. Initially, we considered both iOS and Android versions. However, an iOS application needs to be reviewed and accepted by Apple's AppStore before it can be officially distributed, which is costly and makes modifications of the application time consuming (it requires passing the review in AppStore). Moreover, the development of an iOS application imposes additional constraints and problems forced by Apple, such as
Preliminary experiment
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed system, we asked a group of participants to use the interactive navigation to get to locations of their choice.
Moreover, a preliminary experiment was conducted to evaluate the input analysis process, which is the main processing part of the interactive navigation method.
In the experiment, we investigated the accuracy of extracting the information about the current location and destination from user's input.
Conclusion
In this study, we have developed a facility navigation system, CNPS, intended for use by freshmen at the Kitami Institute of Technology. To develop the system, we first conducted a preliminary experiment, in which we verified the effectiveness of the destination/current location input process. We also improved the system by adding undetected input patterns to the database.
Based on the results of the preliminary experiment, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the functions of the system and
Authorship contributions
Y. Yoshida: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing - Original Draft, Visualization
F. Masui: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition
M. Ptaszynski: Conceptualization, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition
Acknowledgments
This research was carried out with the help of Zooops Japan Co., Ltd., as well as the Academic Affairs Division of the Kitami Institute of Technology, and more than five hundred students of our university who volunteered to take part in the experiments. We also thank the anonymous Reviewers of this paper who provided many thorough corrections and comments which allowed us to greatly improve the paper's readability and quality in general.
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