A Confidence-Based Approach for the Assessment of Accessibility of Pedestrian Network for Manual Wheelchair Users

An obvious way to assist people with disabilities in their efforts to move around in urban areas is to offer information regarding accessible path segments that take into account their specific needs. Providing safe navigation in urban areas for people with disabilities can substantially enhance their opportunities for full social participation and the exercise of their basic rights. In order to offer these people information on accessible paths, we need to assess the accessibility of pedestrian networks . Accessibility is the result of interactions between the individual and the environment. These interactions need to be more carefully considered when we evaluate accessibility for persons with disabilities. This paper proposes a new approach for assessing accessibility, based on user confidence while moving around in urban space. For validation purposes, the proposed approach is applied in the Saint-Roch area of Quebec City using confidence information from 127 manual wheelchair users. The results are presented and discussed and further research perspectives are proposed.

[1]  J. J. Gibson.  The theory of affordances , 1977 .

[2]  J. M. Morris,et al.  Accessibility indicators for transport planning , 1979 .

[3]  W H Warren,et al.  Perceiving affordances: visual guidance of stair climbing. , 1984, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[4]  E. H. Mamdani,et al.  An Experiment in Linguistic Synthesis with a Fuzzy Logic Controller , 1999, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[5]  Shane Ward,et al.  Designation of timber extraction routes in a gis using road maintenance cost data , 2001 .

[6]  Robin Haynes,et al.  Car travel time and accessibility by bus to general practitioner services: a study using patient registers and GIS. , 2002, Social science & medicine.

[7]  R. L. Kirby,et al.  The Wheelchair Skills Test: a pilot study of a new outcome measure. , 2002, Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation.

[8]  Richard L James R Church,et al.  Measuring Accessibility for People with a Disability , 2002 .

[9]  James R. Marston,et al.  The Hidden Demand for Participation in Activities and Travel by Persons who are Visually Impaired , 2003 .

[10]  David Briggs,et al.  Modelling Access with GIS in Urban Systems (MAGUS): capturing the experiences of wheelchair users , 2003 .

[11]  Luc P De Witte,et al.  The Wheelchair Circuit: Construct validity and responsiveness of a test to assess manual wheelchair mobility in persons with spinal cord injury. , 2004, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

[12]  J. Wernstedt,et al.  Application of machine learning methods to route planning and navigation for disabled people , 2006 .

[13]  H. Matthews,et al.  Mapping for Wheelchair Users: Route Navigation in Urban Spaces , 2006 .

[14]  William C Miller,et al.  Measuring wheelchair intervention outcomes: Development of the Wheelchair Outcome Measure , 2007, Disability and rehabilitation. Assistive technology.

[15]  Jiang Guiyan,et al.  A New Extended Arc-Node Data Model of Dynamic Segmentation Technology in Urban GIS-T , 2009, 2009 WRI World Congress on Software Engineering.

[16]  Hassan A. Karimi,et al.  Personalised routing for wheelchair navigation , 2009, J. Locat. Based Serv..

[17]  Joanne Yip,et al.  Development and content validation of the Wheelchair Use Confidence Scale: a mixed-methods study , 2011, Disability and rehabilitation. Assistive technology.

[18]  Sabine Timpf,et al.  Modelling the Suitability of Urban Networks for Pedestrians: An Affordance-Based Framework , 2013, AGILE Conf..

[19]  Hassan A. Karimi,et al.  Pedestrian network map generation approaches and recommendation , 2013, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[20]  Sabine Timpf,et al.  An Affordance-Based Simulation Framework for Assessing Spatial Suitability , 2013, COSIT.

[21]  Hassan A. Karimi,et al.  Simulating and visualizing sidewalk accessibility for wayfinding of people with disabilities , 2015 .

[22]  Mir Abolfazl Mostafavi,et al.  A NEW ONTOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE FOR INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL AND PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENTS: DISABILITY AND REHABILITATION CONTEXT , 2016 .