Another interesting paper and brand new journal out of left-field this month. Blind mobility in the real-world has long been considered both complex and difficult, and so the accessibility community has come-up with many systems to help users navigate. But now its time to take our work into the mainstream, and take mainstream work for our own.

The new journal I mention is the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), which:

"Publishes papers reporting significant results in the research and applications of distributed, wireless or wireline sensor and actuator networks. As an interdisciplinary field, sensor networks draw upon many disciplines including signal processing, networking and protocols, embedded systems, information management, and distributed algorithms. Potential synergies among these fields are expected to open up new research directions."

Thumbing through the first Issue I came across a paper on navigation using sensor networks to direct user flow. Could we repurpose this to assist mobility?

"We develop distributed algorithms for adaptive sensor networks that respond to directing a target through a region of space. We model this problem as an online distributed motion planning problem. Each sensor node senses values in its perception space and has the ability to trigger exceptions events we call “danger” and model as “obstacles”. The danger/obstacle landscape changes over time. We present algorithms for computing distributed maps in perception space and for using these maps to compute adaptive paths for a mobile node that can interact with the sensor network. We give the analysis to the protocol and report on hardware experiments using a physical sensor network consisting of Mote sensors. We also show how to reduce searching space and communication cost using Voronoi diagram."