Context-based Barrier Notification Service Toward Outdoor Support for the Elderly

TL;DR

This paper presents a mobile service that provides real-time, personalized barrier notifications to elderly users outdoors, aiming to encourage social participation and address dynamic environmental obstacles.

Contribution

It introduces a user-participatory barrier information collection method and a filtering system for personalized, timely notifications to elderly users.

Findings

Confirmed usability through public experiment in Tokyo.

Achieved accurate filtering of relevant barrier information.

Demonstrated potential to promote elderly social activities.

Abstract

Aging society has been becoming a global problem not only in advanced countries. Under such circumstances, it is said that participation of elderly people in social activities is highly desirable from various perspectives including decrease of social welfare costs. Thus, we propose a mobile service that notifies barrier information nearby users outside to lowers the anxiety of elderly people and promote their social activities. There are barrier free maps in some areas, but those are static and updated annually at the earliest. However, there exist temporary barriers like road repairing and parked bicycles, and also every barrier is not for every elder person. That is, the elder people are under several conditions and wills to go out, so that a barrier for an elder person is not necessarily the one for the other. Therefore, we first collect the barrier information in the user participatory manner and select the ones the user need to know, then timely provide them via a mobile phone equipped with GPS. This paper shows the public experiment that we conducted in Tokyo, and confirms the usability and the accuracy of the information filtering.