Personalised routing for wheelchair navigation

Abstract

Wheelchair users are confronted with many outdoor obstacles in everyday travel that can make the task arduous and unsafe, especially in unfamiliar environments. However, if wheelchair users are provided with routes that can safely, accurately and efficiently guide them to their destinations, then the difficulty and danger associated with traveling might be significantly reduced. In this article, we present a routing method suitable for wheelchair users by taking into account sidewalk obstacles such as slope, steps, sidewalk condition and sidewalk traffic as are preferred by users. Our method calculates impedance scores for each sidewalk segment, which are then used to determine an optimal route between any given pair of origin-destination addresses in a sidewalk network. We first discuss sidewalk network parameters and a spatial database suitable for wheelchair navigation. Then we discuss our personalised routing approach. We also describe three methods to weight the impedance level of each sidewalk segment and compare the effectiveness of each method through experimentation using the sidewalk network for the University of Pittsburgh campus area.