Researchers at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and Grossman School of Medicine have created an app to help people with visual impairments navigate New York City’s subway system. Commute Booster uses a smartphone camera to recognize relevant signs along a transit route, guiding the user to their destination while ignoring nonessential signs and posters.Commute Booster is designed for the “middle mile,” where passengers trawl through turnstiles, busy passageways and terminals to stay on the correct route. The app combines general transit feed specification (GTFS), a standardized and publicly available database about public transportation routes, with optical character recognition (OCR) to interpret signs and guide the user accordingly. “By integrating these two components, Commute Booster provides real-time feedback to users regarding the presence or absence of relevant navigation signs within the field of view of their phone camera during their journey,” an NYU press rele
