Swiss Town Rolls Out RFID System for Blind Bus Riders

When a bus approaches a stop, the vehicle's active UHF RFID transceiver alerts the Milestone, which informs the user that a bus is approaching, provides the bus' line number and destination and asks if the user would like to board. At the press of a button, the Milestone transmits a signal to the bus driver that the visually disabled passenger would like to board. PAVIP is also able to tell users when the next bus is scheduled to arrive, but since St. Gallen's transit system does not include real-time arrival information at its bus stops, that capability has not been enabled for this particular trial.

St. Gallen's entire fleet of 70 public buses are equipped with active UHF RFID modules that communicate with a blind person’s Milestone device.

According to Knecht, Bones chose RFID for the technology's versatility. "It was the easiest thing to put on a bus stop," he says, "because it [an RFID tag] is cheap, it works, it is safe against vandalism and it's very suited to the needs we have, which is to store information."

PAVIP's active RFID transceivers employ a proprietary protocol transmitting at 868 MHz. The original plans for the system involved the 2.4 GHz spectrum, but Knecht says signal interference from power lines and mirrored bus windows required a shift to lower frequencies. Once those problems were resolved, he states, the frequency-hopping RFID "worked brilliantly."

"We are convinced that this new technology will be very helpful for blind people," says Ralf Eigenmann, managing director of VBSG. "I don't expect any maintenance costs. For us, we just have to place the RFID chips and the technology in the buses. If we build new stops, we'll integrate these chips into the new stops." VBSG, he says, might also consider utilizing RFID as a form of ticketless travel on its bus system if the transit authority continues to have a positive experience with the technology.

According to Knecht, the pilot project will cost a total of 774,000 Swiss francs ($740,226). The program is funded jointly by VBSG, the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs, the Swiss Federation of the Blind and Visually Impaired and Bones, which donated its engineering time and interrogators for users in St. Gallen.

In addition to public transit applications, Bones' Milestone device also utilizes RFID for a variety of other purposes. Users can purchase passive HF RFID tags and affix them to medicine bottles and other objects. They can also record voice memos associated with particular tags, such as a pharmacist giving directions for taking medicine, then replay the memos when the Milestone reader scans the tag. Additionally, the device contains a slot for SD memory cards, commonly found in cameras, that can store recorded books for the user to listen to.

The Milestone device with RFID readers was released last year, Knecht says, and currently has 3,000 to 4,000 users worldwide. Bones sells boxes containing an assortment of 10 passive HF tags for approximately $10 apiece.