User-Specific Route Planning for People with Motor Disabilities: A Fuzzy Approach

Abstract

Mobility is fundamental for social participation. Everyone benefits from pedestrian networks for their mobility and daily activities. People without disabilities may have little difficulty walking on narrow sidewalks, over potholes, and so on. However, people with motor disabilities (PWMD) may find it more difficult to deal with such conditions. For PWMD, even routine trips are often fraught with problems, with many different obstacles restricting their mobility and consequently rendering their participation in social and recreational activities difficult. The potential problems and risks associated with mobility for PWMD could be significantly reduced if navigation systems provided them with appropriate accessible routes. These routes should consider PWMD’s personal capabilities as well as sidewalk-network conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for computing a user-specific route for PWMD. Such a route is personalized based on the user’s confidence to deal with obstacles such as slopes, uneven pavement, etc. We show how user reported confidence levels could be used to aggregate sidewalk conditions in a routing model to offer user-specific routes. The proposed methodology was developed using a fuzzy approach and is evaluated by manual wheelchair users in Quebec City.

Community mobility and participation assessment of manual wheelchair users: a review of current techniques and challenges

“…The type of neighborhood called for would provide shortened routes for MWU and programs incentivizing participation. This is further supported in a 2021 10.3389/fnhum.2023.1331395 study by Gharebaghi et al (2021) who used trip data to show how poor sidewalk conditions could significantly impact the CMP of individuals with motor disabilities. This highlights the importance of ensuring that new developments and existing neighborhoods are up to code regarding accessibility.…”

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].…”

Safe Walking Route Recommender Based on Fall Risk Calculation Using a Digital Human Model on a 3D Map

“…The Land Use Regression (LUR) model was used to model the concentration of black carbon to be calculated in the route candidates for home-to-school commuting [11]. Other researches have aimed at designing route recommendation algorithms for the specific benefit of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients [15], visually impaired users [16], and Patients with Motor Disabilities (PWMD) [17]. Such researches have given more importance to the customization of the algorithm using user-specific necessities.…”

“…Such researches have given more importance to the customization of the algorithm using user-specific necessities. Gharebaghi et al have proposed a Fuzzy Approach for PWMD user (on manual wheelchair)-specific route recommendation in which the user's confidence while dealing with obstacles such as uneven pavement and slopes is used to personalize the route [17].…”