Route Planning and Scheduling for Wheelchair Users

As human beings age, their physical abilities degrade. The proportion of population using wheelchairs increases sharply with age [1]. As the number of the elderly increases, the population of wheelchair users is very significant and increasing dramatically. Thus, finding accessible wheelchair routes is an important problem. Wheelchair users would like to find a path quickly and know the estimated travel time, but there is no existing system that shows up-to-date and detailed information about route accessibility. Thus, we were motivated to create route planning software installed on a small device to give wheelchair users route accessibility information while they are travelling. Our software also contains a simple scheduler which synchronizes with a route planner to provide more detailed transportation information. If the user needs to head to a different destination because of a change to his/her schedule, the scheduler can transfer this information to the route planner. Then it will re-compute a path to the new destination. Furthermore, the route planner can announce the minimum required transportation time to the scheduler, which then provides an early reminder to the user. We conducted user studies with potential users, both wheelchair and non-wheelchair individuals. Instead of being presented with a cumbersome and lengthy low-level path people, especially the elderly, would prefer a more cognitively relevant high-level path. Therefore, our system shows both high-level and low-level paths, which are available because our novel path planner finds paths hierarchically from coarse detail to fine.