A Smart Walking Assistant for Safe Navigation in Complex Indoor Environments

Large and crowded public places can easily disorientate elderly people. The EU FP7 project Devices for Assisted Living (DALi) aims at developing a robotic wheeled walker able to assist people with moderate cognitive problems to navigate in complex indoor environments where other people, obstacles and multiple points of interest may confuse or intimidate the users. The walking assistant, called c-Walker, is designed to monitor the space around the user, to detect possible hazards and to plan the best route towards a given point of interest. In this chapter, an overview of the system and some of its most important functions are described.