Point to Point Navigation for People with Mobility Impairments

The wide availability of high resolution city maps has radically changed our life during the last years. In particular, the routing services offer the capability to plan a travel by taking into account different transportation modalities, e.g., by car, train, public transport, bike, foot. Actually these routing services are mainly oriented to the majority of end-users and does not take into account particular constraints. This paper introduces a novel framework to assist people with mobility impairments in point to point navigation. The proposed framework is based on the creation of a road graph with different levels of detail (LoD) that can be modified at run-time by users if an obstacle obstructs the pre-planned path. Sidewalks, crosswalks and dynamic obstacles are also considered during the planning due to their importance for the navigation of mobility-impaired users. The proposed framework is based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) to manage and model the road graph, OpenTripPlanner (OTP) to plan a dedicated path considering different constraints, and mobile platforms for real time navigation and obstacle detection.