An Accessible Autonomous Vehicle Ridesharing Ecosystem

Abstract

Autonomous ridesharing vehicles provide a potential alternative and affordable mode of transportation for older adults and users with disabilities or special needs, but relatively few studies have investigated the accessibility of autonomous ridesharing applications and vehicles for them. Therefore, a participatory design approach was used to investigate the needs and challenges of this population. This investigation involved interviews, review of past focus group transcripts, literature reviews, and surveys. The findings resulted in a list of user needs to design and build prototypes of accessible technologies as part of an ecosystem for booking and riding in autonomous ridesharing vehicles. The ecosystem of technologies consisted of prototypes of a mobile application, a web application, an in-vehicle human-machine interface, an external human-machine interface, and the vehicle interior design.

Speculative Exploration on Future Sustainable Human-Machine Interface Design in Automated Shuttle Buses

“…The individual phases are executed in an iterative pattern to incrementally improve the design and develop a solution that meets the user requirements [58]. Many scholars and practitioners also used participatory design [59] to investigate the needs and challenges of a specific category of users (e.g., the elderly, visually impaired users, pedestrians, etc.) and co-creation.…”