Modelling the Suitability of Urban Networks for Pedestrians: An Affordance-Based Framework

Automated Generation of Indoor Accessibility Information for Mobility-Impaired Individuals

“…We start with a widespread and readily available information source on indoor spaces -architectural floor plans in CAD format -as a sufficient record of environmental properties for accessibility computation. Integrating the insights presented in [12,13], [5] and [1], we propose to derive mobility affordances for a wheelchair user by simulating movement in space. This is done by matching the geometrical constraints of actions involved in moving in a wheelchair with the geometry of obstacles in the environment.…”

“…The idea of automating the task of deriving information meaningful for navigation appears in [13]; it is further elaborated in [12]. The authors propose a computer-based "translation of selected environmental attributes [of public park paths] into a scaled suitability value for individual mobility" as an alternative to subjective or rule-of-thumb affordance assessment.…”

“…[12,13] use a network model -paths as edges and intersections as nodes -with relevant environmental properties (such as length or slope) as well as the resulting suitability values aggregated on path level.…”

“…As we have seen, body scales are just a stand-in for what one can effectively do, and not always a good one at that; is there another way to encode ability? The procedure presented in [12,13] builds on the idea of affordances as ratio values as outlined in section 2.2: different levels of various factors of motor ability are expressed as scaled values to be compared to the corresponding physical properties of the environment.…”

“…Automatisation of accessibility assessment has been suggested in research on public transportation planning [12,13] and ergonomics in the workplace [6]; how to go about this task in the context of assistive indoor navigation systems is the focus of this paper. We propose a method to compute a user-relative selection of accessible space as well as a set of accessible paths between indoor places.…”