Web Services for Guiding Persons with Locomotor Impairments in Public Spaces

The navigation of pedestrians to a certain destination poses a challenge for large or unknown public spaces, even for those with very good wayfinding designs. This is amplified when people having locomotory impairments try to orientate themselves while being limited by accessibility restrictions. The approach presented here is based on modeling public spaces as graphs and adding weights corresponding to the potential difficulty to cross their edges. The typical path generation algorithm is extended to deliver the right guidance to pedestrians with mobility problems. By selecting a policy specific to their needs in the routing application, the users can have details on how hard it is to access a certain location of the public space. The paper presents an implementation using RESTful web services and an example of routing directions inside a building from our faculty.

I. Introduction

Public spaces are usually vast areas with many architectural topological features, where people need support to orientate themselves, or they can get lost, have bad experiences, and lose time. To offer a path generation solution one generally employs graph model approaches with algorithms for finding the most suitable path between two nodes. With the advance in mobile technologies and mobile phones in general, most pedestrians in the public space can gain this benefit in an instant [3].