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

Amin Gharebaghi,Geoffrey Edwards,Mir-Abolfazl Mostafavi,Patrick Fougeyrollas

doi:10.3390/ijgi10020065

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.

Highlights

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities [1], there is a consensus about the need for equal access to the physical environment regardless of people’s capabilities [2]
Three steps are usually followed: (1) build the ruleset and define the membership functions, (2) develop a fuzzy inference system (FIS) using if- rules and (3) merge the outputs of the rules and ensure defuzzification of the results using a different set of membership functions to derive output variables [39]
In order to cover all possible combinations of the fuzzy sets associated with the variables, we needed to define mn rules where m is the number of fuzzy set values and n is the number of variables

Summary

Introduction

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities [1], there is a consensus about the need for equal access to the physical environment regardless of people’s capabilities [2]. For PWMD, routine trips are often fraught with problems, with many different obstacles restricting their mobility. They may experience diverse obstacles on sidewalks, such as high curbs, steps, uneven surfaces, and long inclines. These obstacles may be especially challenging in an unfamiliar environment. A one-size-fits-all solution is not sufficient, and diversities in capabilities and preferences of PWMD must be considered in routing tools development

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion