Personalized accessible wayfinding for people with disabilities through standards and open geospatial platforms in smart cities

Abstract

Of the many features that smart cities offer, safe and comfortable mobility of pedestrians within the built environment is of particular importance. Safe and comfortable mobility requires that the built environments of smart cities be accessible to all pedestrians, mobility abled and mobility impaired, given their various mobility needs and preferences. This, coupled with advanced technologies such as wayfinding applications, pedestrians can get assistance in finding the best pathways at different locations and times. Wayfinding applications comprise two components, a database component containing accessibility data, and appropriate algorithms that can utilize accessibility data to meet the mobility needs and preferences of all individuals. While wayfinding applications that provide accessibility on both permanent (e.g., steps) and temporary (e.g., snow) pathways are becoming available, there is a gap in current solutions. There are two elements in the gap, one is that the accessibility data used for finding accessible pathways for people with disabilities are not compliant to the widely agreed upon and available standards, another is that the accessibility data are not available in free and open platforms so that they can be used by developers to develop personalized wayfinding applications and services. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a new extension in CityGML with accessibility data. We demonstrate the benefits of the new extension by testing various route options within a city. These route options clearly show the differences between commonly (shortest and fastest) requested and produced pathways and accessible pathways that are feasible and preferred by people who are mobility impaired, such as wheelchair users.

Urban Parks as Perceived by City Residents with Mobility Difficulties: A Qualitative Study with In-Depth Interviews

“…Too slippery, uneven or sand and gravel paths were indicated as one of the main barriers in parks. This finding is quite surprising for the authors who, while actively working in the design field, preferred stabilized sand and gravel surfaces in green areas as nature-friendly and water-permeable [ 24 , 76 , 77 , 78 ]. This pavement surface characteristic is not covered in the guidelines of universal design though this should serve as a direction in reconciling the needs of all users [ 74 ].…”

Research on barrier-free wayfinding and navigation

“…Research also indicates that different types of disabilities require different support for wayfinding [1]. For the analysis of the selected research papers, please refer to Table.1, every article will be analyzed, and the focus point of each paper will be listed [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

A Systematic Review of Urban Navigation Systems for Visually Impaired People

“…We also reviewed orientation systems for other disabilities. For wheelchair users, Wheeler et al [ 126 ] presented a sidewalk network that has accessibility information (width, length, slope, surface type, surface condition, and steps of each sidewalk segment), and a Dijkstra algorithm calculated the best road depending on that information. Bravo1 and Giret [ 122 ] constructed a wayfinding system that depends on the user profile (the type of disabilities) to find the best route according to each disability.…”