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The world now has 6 billion mobile phone users. Latest figures indicate that mobile phone penetration rates stand at almost 45 percent in low-income countries and 76 percent in lower-middle-income countries (Debashis & Mukherjee, 2003).
Consequently, a lot of people in the world, especially the people living in developed countries use mobile technology and its supportive application in performing their daily routine task (Aharon, 2010). Mobile technology has improved people’s lives with its vast range of applications which makes people become much closer to each other through texting, social networking applications, video or voice phone calling and other social activities. The mobile technology and its applications provide an easy way to satisfy the needs and demand of the people. This technology also helps professional and business related person to continuously remain in contact with their colleagues and officials.
There are several other benefits of Mobile technology as people can get real time weather updates, can be used for purchasing, money transfer, e-banking, access data banks. The improvements in technology also bring changes in the tourism. It can be observed that the most of the tourists hold a map on the street, while a Mobile technology tourist uses GPS and tour guide applications (Abowd, et al., 1997). Generally speaking, people have benefited a lot from with the advanced mobile technology.
The Mobile Technology and its application provide remote monitoring of the patients physiological changes and access to the health care facility in the remote areas such as village in central Africa (Mahad., 2009). The Mobile technology also helps tourist to find out enormous services like accommodation, emergency or safety, gastronomy, navigation and orientation, news, transport, cultural and heritage sights, weather forecast, shopping places and language translator etc. (Jaraba, et al., 2011; Sebastia, et al., 2009).
Significance of Mobile Technology
The significance of Mobile technology and its applications can be analyzed by the fact that several mobile applications have been developed and in use from the personal to commercial capacity. There are several other benefits of Mobile technology and its applications involved in our daily life like real time weather updates, online purchasing, funds transfer, and e-banking ((Yeonjeong, 2011; Louise & Valerie E., 2011) and tourism. This technology also helps in medical science as there are several health applications proposed and developed in which wearable sensors are used to obtain data of the human body. The combination of Mobile technology and tiny bio-sensors enable the real time self monitoring of disease and also extend this feature to the clinical staff for observation, diagnosis and real time feedback according to the current situation of the patient (Jones, 2010).
We have not seen so far any technological assistance provided to night blind person. Presently, we have observed that the things available to supportnight blind person is to take white cane or Night mobility devices. There are several mobile applications developed for assisting tourist (Zhou, et al., 2010; Guo, et al., 2009)and patients suffering from different diseases (Chang, et al., 2011; Li, et al., 2011) but unfortunately no supportive application for tourists or people which deals with night blindness. In this paper we develop a mobile application model for a night blind tourist to help the tourist to reach its destination before dusk. The proposedapplication model also provides tourist safety in terms of providing various alternatives to reach its destination.
In next section, we describe aboutnight blindness disease and presently available assistive methods or devices for night blind people. The following section speaks about the overall structure of the proposed model followed by technical section having some application screen shots. The following sections present the survey results, the discussion about various aspects of the proposed application and the last section present some concluding remarks.
The tourist faced several issues during travelling in different countries like facing different cultures, knowing the rights, finding places of interest, hotel reservation etc. The researchers have already addressed several issues related to health care and tourism.