Interactive cloud system for the analysis of accessibility in smart cities

Abstract

Recent technological progress has enabled the spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to new applications possible with the aim to improve citizens' quality of life. This idea has been significantly increasing in political agendas as well as in the public services. The concepts of Smart-city or Sustainable-city are possible thanks to the application of technology. The focus of this work is on people with movement disabilities and the goal of the whole system is to meet their real needs and requirements. As a result, this article presents the possibilities offered by new ICTs to design a method for generating knowledge about accessibility issues in urban environments. In this sense, a comprehensive system aided by technology is proposed to analyse the transportation accessibility in a city. The research tries to make visible the most vulnerable groups of citizens, involving them as active participants and to serve as a way of social awareness. It aims to improve the knowledge of the current accessibility level and to improve the interaction and learning of all actors and groups involved -government, institutions, researchers, professionals, people with disabilities and other individuals of society in general. To perform and implement the system, the latest advances in technologies such as GPS positioning, geographic information systems, smart sensing and cloud computing have been used. The combination of all these technologies allows an interactive, dynamic and constantly updated approach.

The Role of Social Factors in the Accessibility of Urban Areas for People with Motor Disabilities

“…Over the past two decades, a great deal of research ( [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]) has focused on the mobility of people with special needs. Matthews et al (2003) and Beale et al (2006) [12,13] developed a model for navigation of wheelchair users in urban spaces, called MAGUS.…”

“…They developed this approach to simulate and visualize the accessibility for two groups of PWMD as well as for blind users. [18][19][20][21] proposed systems for the analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of urban accessibility, specifically for people with disabilities, using the latest advances in the information and communication technologies, global positioning systems(GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), smart sensing, and cloud computing. The proposed models provide automatic monitoring tools to dynamically discover, assess, and classify the accessibility of urban environments.…”

A Comprehensive System for Monitoring Urban Accessibility in Smart Cities

“…The proposed architecture is based on the experience and recent previous research works regarding distributed IoT architectures [ 55 ] and citizens’ traceability systems performed by this research group [ 26 , 27 , 56 , 57 ], which improve the current track-and-trace system proposals for the acquisition of locations of citizens in heterogeneous and uncontrolled environments.…”

Improving Urban Accessibility: A Methodology for Urban Dynamics Analysis in Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Cities

“…Finally, through the 'Time synchronization module'the synchronization problem of the system components is solved. In addition, an application for mobile devices has been designed to let users report in real time about their own experience [35]. It is possible to send comments, photos and reports anonymously through it.…”