A New Approach for Accessibility Assessment of Sidewalks for Wheelchair Users Considering the Sidewalk Traffic

Abstract

Independent mobility of people with motor disabilities is fundamental for their daily activities. However, the mobility of these people is often restricted by diverse environmental and social factors. In addition to static factors, temporal factors such as the presence of the crowd could reduce the accessibility on the sidewalk. Hence, in this paper, we focus on the accessibility of sidewalks for people with mobility impairment, specifically for manual wheelchair users, in the presence of crowd. The paper aims at understanding how environmental factors, including temporal factors such as crowd density, affect the independent mobility of individuals with mobility impairments. The proposed method evaluates each user's confidence level in navigating different sidewalk components in the presence of different population densities and uses a fuzzy-based model for accessibility assessment. Besides the accessible maps for different population densities, a similarity index has been applied to compare the impact of crowd on the accessibility of sidewalk components. The findings suggest that, the direction of the movement of people have a significant effect on the level of accessibility of each segment. Moreover, while the presence of crowds is discouraging in some situations, it improves accessibility in others.