An ageing population facing age related vision problems will have a significant impact on health and social care services of the future. Visual impairments can lead to a serious decrease in the quality of life, reducing the activities of daily living and physical mobility, ending up in possible social exclusion and depression.Travelling outside of the individually limited comfort zone is for visual impaired people a huge challenge and requires help from others.Providing means  for achieving independence and social equity   of blind and visually impaired is of essential importance; therefore, novel ICT-based navigation and mobility assistance solutions have to be developed and introduced.It becomes immediately obvious that there is a huge gap between the essential  functionalities required for the urban mobility of visually impaired people and the service types/quality currently supported by mobility assistance solutions.In fact the involvement of the crowd, besides the above benefits (personal assistance, providing information/help), will be also useful in building and maintaining the “Infostructure” (i.e., information about the infrastructure) required for indoor navigation and mobility assistance. Besides the physical characteristics of indoor environments (maps of buildings, subway stations) this Infostructure will also comprise information for the localization service (special reference points improving the positioning methods). The idea is to rebuild "virtually" the indoor of the buildings and create improved indoor maps with accurate information to facilitate the guidance and mobility of blind and visually impaired people.The main question, we have to focus, are :

1. How ICT-based solutions reconcile increased demand with limited resources
2. How ICT-based solutions increase and facilitate the supply of formal and informal care for older adults
3. How ICT-based solutions reduce the demand for care through prevention and self-management
4. How ICT-based solutions can support the shift towards better care at home and in the community

In this special thematic session we want to focus especially on the indoor navigation and the way of user interaction. Hence we especially invite the scientific, but also commercial community to hand in papers covering at least some of the following topics:

• Indoor navigation for visually impaired and blind users
• Means of interaction with older visually impaired and blind people
• Special routing adaptations for visually impaired and blind users
• Lessons learned during this process
• User Involvement within different development phases
• Multi modal user interfaces for the navigation

Chairs

• 
  Miroslav Sili, Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT)
• 
  Klaus Höckner, Hilfsgemeinschaft der Blinden und Sehschwachen Österreichs