Wheelchair users are confronted with many outdoor obstacles in everyday travel that can make the task arduous and unsafe, especially in unfamiliar environments. However, if wheelchair users are provided with routes that can safely, accurately and efficiently guide them to their destinations, then the difficulty and danger associated with traveling might be significantly reduced. In this article, we present a routing method suitable for wheelchair users by taking into account sidewalk obstacles such as slope, steps, sidewalk condition and sidewalk traffic as are preferred by users. Our method calculates impedance scores for each sidewalk segment, which are then used to determine an optimal route between any given pair of origin-destination addresses in a sidewalk network. We first discuss sidewalk network parameters and a spatial database suitable for wheelchair navigation. Then we discuss our personalised routing approach. We also describe three methods to weight the impedance level of each sidewalk segment and compare the effectiveness of each method through experimentation using the sidewalk network for the University of Pittsburgh campus area.
Wheelchair users indicate the importance of personalized routes for individuals with mobility impairments. In regard to evaluation results, although subjects travelled 14.64% more distances in average along the personalized routes than the shortest feasible routes, they rated the personalized routes better path quality and less effort to travel.
Individuals with mobility impairments such as wheelchair users are often at a disadvantage when traveling to a new place, as their mobility can be easily affected by environmental barriers, and as such, even short trips can be difficult and perhaps impossible. We envision a personalized wheelchair navigation system based on a PDA equipped with wireless Internet access and GPS that can provide adaptive navigation support to wheelchair users in any geographic environment. Requirements, architectures and components of such a system are described in this paper.
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