Accessible Routes from Crowdsourced Cloud Services (ARCCS)

There are, at present, of the order of 1 million people in wheelchairs in the UK and the number is growing as the population ages. Whilst access to buildings has been improved in the past 20 years, people in wheelchairs experience considerable difficulty in the process of travel - whether that is in using public transport or in getting from A to B by wheeling themselves. The overuse of the arms and shoulders that results from the need to travel in non-ideal environments results in injuries and long-term loss of function, exacerbating the difficulties of travel.

Technology has evolved to the point where it is possible to combine sensor systems, with communications, data storage and machine learning algorithms in an IoT deployment to allow us automatically to characterise the environment and to measure the process of moving through it. As a consequence, it is now possible to envision a system in which information from automated data capture, coupled with subjective input and data feeds of travel advice, can be combined to provide navigation information to wheelchair users in a way that respects their specific disability.

The aim of the ARCSS project is to devise a system capable of capturing data of known quality from a large a group of people, by adopting an approach that moves from gold standard measurement through to the collection of data from mobile phone sensors of variable quality and means of attachment, all of it in the wild. By itself, this data will be a unique resource for the scientific community, to the potential benefit of wheelchair users. Using this data, we propose to develop techniques (i) for analysing and presenting information to end users to help them navigate in a way that is personalised and respects their particular disability; (ii) for providing feedback to urban planners about problems in the environment and potential causes or commonalities between them, with the aim of improving design practice in an evidence-based manner.

ARCCS is a fusion of challenging engineering and the use of the engineered systems to conduct scientific studies of acceptability and influence, and so to motivate change. ARCCS involves the design of IoT technologies - primarily focussed on high-quality sensing, data storage and communications rather than actuation. In place of automatic control, the system is designed to provide information to users to allow them to make better choices or, indeed, to contribute to the collection of further information for the general benefit of society. All of the work will be conducted in the wild and all will involve user groups whose role will range from participatory design and system bootstrapping to use and evaluation. This proposal has been developed in the light of problems that have been identified by the wheelchair-using community themselves, as communicated to us through our existing activities in this area.

Given the social and economic importance of allowing wheelchair users better access to places and services that able-bodied people take for granted, it is our intention to make this a profoundly open project. We will publish both the IoT hardware and software as open-source materials, and, subject to ethical approval, appropriately de-identified data will be made available for further research within the community.

Depending on the source, it is estimated that there are between 750,000 and 1.2 million wheelchair users in England, roughly 1% - 2% of the UK population. Estimates in other developed nations range from about 0.6% to around 1% of the population, with further significant numbers experiencing other mobility problems. The ARCCS project is focussed on this group of individuals, who are triply disadvantaged: by the difficulty in moving about as a result of their disabilities, by poor urban design that results from a lack of evidence about how individual disabled people actually travel, and by a lack of navigational aids tailored for the specific requirements of disabled people. The aim of ARCCS is to provide an evidential base for change using IoT technology to supply the data, and careful scientific validation to ensure that the automated processing of that raw data results in information that is of value in addressing some of the above issues.

The proposed outcomes of the project are, in brief: a variety of technologies for measurement; systems to provide assistance to the disabled; and data - with the power to extend both the collection and the processing of that data over time. The nature of the project is that we expect to put in place mechanisms that will continue to contribute value well beyond the lifetime of direct funding. Consequently, we will make all our systems open (subject to the protection of individual privacy), so that other researchers can contribute to the analysis of data, provision of new services, and the enhancement and maintenance of existing services. Whilst we will test and deploy the technology initially in London (since that is where we are based), no part of the project is intended to be geographically limiting. Consequently, we would expect that, following a successful deployment in London, the service would roll out to other places in the UK and more widely.

ARCCS is planned to be a progressive project, moving from relatively small numbers of carefully validated sensor systems and ground truth based on visual inspection to automated processing of data obtained from the wide variety of current and future mobile phone sensors that are sufficiently ubiquitous that they have the power to deliver impact in scale. The population of people in wheelchairs is large, and so the population who can expect to receive direct benefit in time is correspondingly large. Other beneficiaries include those the wider population with mobility problems, urban planners, and society as a whole - if disabled people are able more easily to travel, then society benefits from their fuller engagement.

ARCCS is a step-change in thinking in that it provides a bottom-up approach to accessibility engineering. ARCCS will build a wheelchair accessibility map for wheelchair users with data from wheelchair users. The resultant data set has the capacity to offer a number of new insights into the way in which wheelchair users interact with the environment and provide an evidence base for practice both in the transport world which is not currently available.