What is it about?
Mobility impaired pedestrians including wheelchair users encounter crucial accessibility barriers in their daily lives that can lead to serious accidents. Existing navigation systems (e.g., Google Maps) are presently incapable of identifying these accessibility barriers to offer appropriate routes for mobility impaired pedestrians, mainly due to the unavailability of adequate geographical map data containing up-to-date wheelchair accessibility information. This paper investigates the impact of visualizing the risk of facing certain potential accessibility barriers in advance on the route planning behaviour of the mobility impaired pedestrians using a prototype system for the first time. Our interactive map prototype is designed to display accessibility information including the risk of facing potential barriers when planning a journey from 'A' to ‘B’, so that mobility impaired users can make informed decisions before starting their pedestrian trips based on their mobility preferences.
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Photo by Yomex Owo on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our investigation underscores the importance of presenting risk information, which is currently overlooked in accessible navigation systems. Addressing the accessibility challenges is important to notify people with mobility impairments in advance about the risk of experiencing unwanted accessibility barriers in order facilitate route planning for mobility impaired pedestrians in the built environment as well as minimize their likelihood of serious accidents. Two significant findings are that: i) mobility impaired users have a very strong inclination towards longer but accessible barrier-free routes, instead of shorter potentially inaccessible routes; thereby indicating a high degree of risk aversion; and ii) users’ have varying risk attitudes towards specific types of accessibility barriers based on the type of impairments, mobility aids, and individual perceptions and mobility preferences. Therefore, our analysis indicate a prominent impact of visualizing the risk of accessibility barriers within given arbitrary routes on the routing behaviour of the mobility impaired people, justifying the significance of our risk-based approach. Hence, a navigation system displaying the potential risk of barriers in advance can be useful for providing mobility impaired users an informed choice during route planning, that can help them to reach their destination points safely and smoothly within their expected duration.
Perspectives
This research work was part of my Master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. Reuben Kirkham (the co-author of this publication), starting from March 2021 to February 2022. The main motivation to conduct this research was to improve route planning and navigation experience of the mobility impaired pedestrians in the built environment, using our proposed risk-based interactive prototype system. Based on the overall positive feedback from our relevant survey participants, existing navigation systems are encouraged to consider incorporating potential risk features to improve their accessibility accuracy required for better route planning and user experience for the mobility impaired community.
Miss Sadia Azmin Anisha
Monash University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Investigating User Risk Attitudes in Navigation Systems to Support People with Mobility Impairments, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3572921.3572953.
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