Fostering accessible urban mobility through smart mobile applications

Abstract

Cities have evolved as a natural environment for cars rather than people. This has limited people's ability to move around, living and interacting with the urban space affecting the experienced quality of life. Clearly, this regards all of us and, in particular, people affected by impairments. One of the main barriers in building services to fill the gap between the urban environment and people living in it is surprisingly represented by the lack of information. Think for instance to Google maps; you can ask for a path between any two destinations and you will receive a response with the shortest path whether you are travelling by car, public transportation or just walking. Yet, there is no path or information available regarding people on a wheelchair or blind. Instead, we discuss in this paper how the vast popularity of sensor-endowed smartphones can be exploited to create unprecedented services able to improve the interaction with the environment, the social inclusion and the quality of life.

On exploiting Data Visualization and IoT for Increasing Sustainability and Safety in a Smart Campus

“…The client-side was implemented with the Angular framework 1 and with the standard web-based languages, like HTML5, CSS3, and TypeScript. 2 Concerning the data visualization elements, we used some Javascript libraries like Google Charts, 3 Chart.js, 4 and D3.js 5 to make the charts interactive. Using these technologies, we were able to develop a responsive web-based application, enjoyable both from smartphones and tablets and larger screens (i.e., laptop).…”

“…In a world that is getting increasingly digital and interconnected, and where also the physical objects are integrated into the information network to collect data about the environment (Internet of Things, IoT), Data Visualization can facilitate the understanding of huge volumes of data. This is particularly true if related to smart environment, both outdoor (e.g., visualizing urban accessibility data [2][3][4]) and indoor (e.g., designing infographics to stimulate environmental awareness [5]). Focusing on the indoor, Data Visualization can be useful to display information tied to the IoT infrastructure and sensors deployed inside smart buildings, to make people aware of the specific conditions (e.g., air Chiara Ceccarini chiara.ceccarini6@unibo.it 1 Dipartimento di Informatica -Scienza e Ingegneria, Università di Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, Bologna, 40126, Italy quality and energy consumption [6]) and dynamics (e.g., people flow, [7]) of the environment they are experiencing.…”

The Use of Mobile Wallet Services Apps in Urban Living

“…Urban living has been found to trigger changes in a community's living and cultural attitudes, particularly in terms of residential design and layout, and there is often a significant urban divide based on class, status, and financial status (Mohamad and Ayob, 2013). The growth in urban environments has also been found to significantly affect quality of life and had also widened the gap between people who can freely move about and people who have limited movement due to mobility impairments (Palazzi and Bujari, 2016).…”

“…Mobile technology has ubiquitous sensing and communication capabilities and enables the gathering of data about a person's surrounding environment (Palazzi and Bujari, 2016). In other words, because urban dwellers tend to have highly scheduled lives, mobile technologies are able to provide them with updated information to make their lives more practical.…”

Inclusive smart cities: theory and tools to improve the experience of people with disabilities in urban spaces.

“…• Navigation and wayfinding Alghamdi, van Schyndel, & Hamilton, 2014;Palazzi & Bujari, 2016;Rituerto, Fusco, & Coughlan, 2016;Wang et al, 2017);…”