South Western Railway (SWR) has fitted out two London railway stations with a technology that could make it easier for people with sight loss to find their way around the station to the platform.
Dave Williams, Customer Experience Manager, Consumer and Business Services, RNIB, trials the myEyes app at Vauxhall station (c) SWR
Two stations, Putney and Vauxhall have been fitted with small Bluetooth beacons around the stations, and when coupled with a smartphone app, they can provide audio instructions that guide users from the entrance to the Assisted Boarding Points on platforms.
Assisted Boarding Points are a dedicated meeting point at all SWR managed stations where customers who may need assistance can just turn up and go with 10 minutes notice – whether it’s a mobility or visual impairment, luggage or a hidden disability.
The MP for Battersea, Marsha de Cordova, who is herself visually impaired, had brought the technology to the attention of SWR’s Accessibility Team.
Once a customer activates the myEyes app, Bluetooth beacons installed across the station will ‘track’ the device in question. By identifying exactly where the customer is in the station, the app passes them from beacon to beacon, telling them which direction stairs or lifts are and other useful information such as where the ticket office is in.
The three-month trial started at the beginning of this month, before potentially being rolled out at other stations across the SWR network. The myEyes technology has been installed by Self Energy.
This service is currently only available for customers with iPhones, but an Android version is coming soon. The SWR Accessibility Team are actively encouraging customers to try the app and is asking for feedback to be submitted by completing a short survey here.
TFL had these at a couple of big Tube stations as a trial too, it was ages ago, like actual years ago. Same old bluetooth beacon + app combo. Was incredibly cheap, the tiny lightweight beacons easily attached to walls or ceilings and were battery powered so not even any cabling was required. Could just go around once a year replacing batteries with charged ones. Dunno why they didn’t go ahead with them, upfront cost and ongoing maintenance was tiny. Could probably have 2 people maintaining the entire network.
The problem here is that the risk-of-failure (of a device) isn’t “someone missed a £1 of a burger offer” but “a blind person is left stranded with no one to help”.
What happens is that a “cheap, throwaway” Bluetooth beacon device becomes someone’s “critical infrastructure”.
Without having a combination of device status monitoring and hot-standby versions of the devices, there is considerable genuine risk to vulnerable people who would come to rely on the devices.
@Brian Bluetooth beacons are very reliable, they very basic and don’t even really transmit any data. But sure a backup would be worth it of course since they literally cost a few quid. The backup doesn’t even need to be on standby or even know the other one exists, it can be completely dumb and just be running normally. As long as the app detects either of them it’ll be able to give the next direction, it wont care which one it sees first. It’ll easily be reliable enough.
If one of them failing happens 1 in 1,000 days(only a 3 year lifespan), then the 2 of them failing on the same day would happen once in every 2,700 years(1,000 days x 1,000 days), or the same week would be every 390 years(if it’s just 2,700/7 but im not sure about that). Either way that should placate your reliability concerns. Have someone go around once a week to check the app picks them all up if we have to. Or just simply have the app itself send a report if it picks up 1 beacon but not the one thats supposed to be next to it. The whole bluetooth beacon system design is incredibly straight forward since there’s no authentication, no data transfer, nothing, it’s totally passive. It should be super low on your list of concerns.
We’ve tried the same technology at work to help visitors find their way around the building. With the solution we tried, the batteries last five years and the beacons formed a mesh network integrating with the WiFi access points (Which also had an embedded bluetooth beacon) so you could check up on the entire system from a single console.
The downside with our solution was that location accuracy was terrible. (Plus the manufacturer wanted enourmous monthly fees to allow us to run the apps the users used) We ended up abandonding it.