Abstract
Accidents related to electric kick scooters, which are widespread globally, are increasing rapidly. However, most of the research on them concentrates on reporting accident status and injury patterns. Therefore, while it is necessary to analyze safety issues from the user’s perspective, interviewing or conducting a survey with those involved in an accident may not return enough data due to respondents’ memory loss. Therefore, this study aims to identify the risk factors in the context-of-use for electric kick scooters based on a topic modeling method. We collected data on risk episodes involving electric kick scooters experienced by users in their daily lives and applied text mining to analyze text responses describing the risk episodes systematically. A total of 423 risk episodes are collected from 21 electric kick scooter users in South Korea over two months from an online survey. The text responses describing risk episodes were classified into nine topics based on a latent Dirichlet allocation. From the result, four risk factors can be identified by analyzing the derived topics and the cause of the risk according to the context. Moreover, we suggested design improvement directions. This study can be helpful for designing safer electric kick scooters considering safety.
Highlights
Electrification has replaced the internal combustion engine, given power to non-powered products, introduced personal means of transportation, and is bringing about a variety of changes in our lives
To improve the safety of the electric kickboards, this study explored the context-of-use surrounding the use of electric kickboards based on user-centered design methodology
To confirm the safety of electric kick scooters, we focused on the effects of contextual factors in Figure 1, identifying the risks experienced by various users in terms of product factors and environmental factors
Summary
Electrification has replaced the internal combustion engine, given power to non-powered products, introduced personal means of transportation, and is bringing about a variety of changes in our lives. In various forms, personal mobility devices (PMDs) are being developed for conventional vehicles (e.g., cars, bikes, or kick scooters) or novel vehicles (e.g., self-balancing boards, one-wheels, or hoverboards) [1,2,3]. Among these, products such as electric kick scooters enmeshed in the Internet of things (IoT) are rapidly distributed as shared services [4]. PMDs have been increasingly distributed due to their advantages of reducing transportation costs and providing convenient means to use information and communication technology (ICT), PMD-related traffic accidents and those caused by product failures are rapidly on the rise [3,5,6,7]. At a hospital in South Korea, which had more than 100,000 patients annually, the number of PMD-related accidents tripled from 14 in 2016 to 51 in 2017 [6]
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