Catia Prandi

mPASS: Integrating people sensing and crowdsourcing to map urban accessibility

This paper presents mPASS (mobile Pervasive Accessibility Social Sensing), a system designed to collect data about urban and architectural accessibility and to provide users with personalized paths, computed on the basis of their preferences and needs. The system combines data obtained by sensing, crowdsourcing and mashing-up with main geo-referenced social systems, with the aim of offering services based on a detailed and valid data set.

On Combining Crowdsourcing, Sensing and Open Data for an Accessible Smart City

This work presents a novel geospatial mapping service, based on OpenStreetMap, which has been designed and developed in order to provide personalized path to users with special needs. This system gathers data related to barriers and facilities of the urban environment via crowd sourcing and sensing done by users. It also considers open data provided by bus operating companies to identify the actual accessibility feature and the real time of arrival at the stops of the buses. The resulting service supports citizens with reduced mobility (users with disabilities and/or elderly people) suggesting urban paths accessible to them and providing information related to travelling time, which are tailored to their abilities to move and to the bus arrival time. The manuscript demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach by means of a case study focusing on the differences between the solutions provided by our system and the ones computed by main stream geospatial mapping services.

A context-aware system for personalized and accessible pedestrian paths

This work presents mPASS (mobile Pervasive Accessibility Social Sensing), a social and ubiquitous context aware system to provide users with personalized and accessible pedestrian paths and maps. In order to collect a complete data set, our system gathers information from different sources: sensing, crowdsourcing and data produced by local authors and disability organizations. Gathered information are tailored to users needs and preferences on the basis of his/her context, defined by his/her location, his/her profile and quality of data about the personalized path. To support the effectiveness of our approach, we have developed a prototype, which is described in this paper, together with some results of the context-based adaptation.

Trustworthiness in crowd- sensed and sourced georeferenced data

This paper focuses on the trustworthiness of data gathered from different sources, including crowdsensing and crowdsourcing, in pervasive systems. The specific focus is on mPASS (mobile Pervasive Accessibility Social Sensing), a system devoted to support mobile users with accessibility needs in a smart city context. mPASS is in charge of collecting data about urban and architectural barriers and facilities, with the aim of providing mobile users with personalized paths, during their movement, computed on the basis of their preferences and accessibility needs. A trustworthiness model is presented that combines three sources of information, i.e., crowdsensed data, crowdsourced data and authoritative data. Simulations results witness the feasibility of our approach.

From gamification to pervasive game in mapping urban accessibility

In this paper we present the design and implementation of two different game applications, designed and developed in order to extend and motivate the community of mPASS, an urban accessibility mapping system. On the one hand, mPASS relays to collect a sufficiently dense, detailed and trustworthy amount of data. On the other hand, its niche goal somehow limits its natural audience, which is not enough to reach the critical mass of information needed by the system in order to provide effective accessibility maps for its users. To overcome this problem, we resorted to the use of a gamification strategy to develop both a traditional prizing add-on and a novel mobile game targeting young and adults players, aiming to include them into the data contributors community. Design process and development description of both games are presented, highlighting the design iterations of the concepts, motivated by contribution gathered from feedback sessions, focus group and experience prototyping.

Crowdsourcing Urban Accessibility:: Some Preliminary Experiences with Results

This short paper presents some preliminary results (both quantitative and qualitative) gathered from field trials with three different mobile apps that allow walkers to map urban accessibility barriers/facilities, while wandering around. The three apps were designed based on different gamification mechanisms, respectively exploiting: i) intrinsic (i.e., altruistic) motivations, ii) extrinsic motivations expressed in terms of a concrete reward, and iii) extrinsic motivations expressed in terms of fun/entertainment. These preliminary results reveal that the apps designed on the basis of extrinsic motivations are able to drive users to provide a larger amount of contributions. Interesting differences between concrete rewards and fun used as effective means to motivate contributors are discussed.

Augment browsing and standard profiling for enhancing web accessibility

The opportunity of effectively tailoring Web resources presentation - depending on each single user needs and preferences - represents a challenge and a necessity for accessibility and inclusion. On the Web, customizing means transcoding content according to some user and/or device (contextual) settings. Such a profiling refers to devices constraints, user habits, skills, different needs (or tastes) about interaction, in order to drive all the necessary procedures for content (re)shaping. The usual set up that users provide for assistive tools such as screen readers or speech-to-text applications, is a common practice (and a typical example) for a subjective, better enjoyment of resources. This work describes an augment browsing system, which allows users to set up their needs and preferences about Web pages presentation from the browser interface and is capable to automatically modify (transcode) content, according to such settings at client-side. The system is based on a widespread Web browser extension (GreaseMonkey) and well-known standards have been utilized to represent users settings. Finally a case-study of the system has been assessed on a widespread social network, also taking into account some evaluations about accessibility by a group of blind persons.

Fighting exclusion: a multimedia mobile app with zombies and maps as a medium for civic engagement and design

This paper presents a study on urban data crowdsourcing driven by Geo-Zombie, a multimedia mobile application we designed and developed to engage pedestrians in taking note of urban architectural impediments and facilities by documenting them through pictures and multimedia data. Geo-Zombie aims at transforming the civic activity of contributing into a virtual gamified experience where players attempt to escape from horrific situations in which zombies are ready to cannibalize unsuspecting walkers. In some sense, walkers that kill zombies deeply reconnect with the concept of imminent danger which can be fought resorting to appropriate civic actions. To challenge our initial hypotheses we conducted a design process, starting with a concept generation where three different concepts were discussed which gave rise to five different multimedia mobile apps including the one with zombies. Then, focus group, experience prototyping, application design and implementation, and finally field trials were exploited to refine the design and to select the best apps out of the five that better responded to the need of involving common people in collecting urban accessibility data. It is worth noting that the experiences of use with 50 avid walkers have demonstrated that a multimedia mobile app with maps and zombies can be a concrete step towards a social inclusion strategy while inviting new reflections and discussions on the issue of urban data crowdsourcing.

CrowdSensing for smart mobility through a service-oriented architecture

Crowdsensing is a powerful approach to build representations of specific aspects of reality which are of interest for citizens in smart cities, and in particular for people with special needs. In this work, we present an application of the microservice paradigm to create a mobility services platform. By exposing each part of the process as a microservice, we achieve the ability of developing applications as orchestration of available components. Moreover, we leverage the possibility of sharing data between different applications in a controlled environment.

A Service-Oriented Approach to Crowdsensing for Accessible Smart Mobility Scenarios

This work presents an architecture to help designing and deploying smart mobility applications. The proposed solution builds on the experience already matured by the authors in different fields: crowdsourcing and sensing done by users to gather data related to urban barriers and facilities, computation of personalized paths for users with special needs, and integration of open data provided by bus companies to identify the actual accessibility features and estimate the real arrival time of vehicles at stops. In terms of functionality, the first “monolithic” prototype fulfilled the goal of composing the aforementioned pieces of information to support citizens with reduced mobility (users with disabilities and/or elderly people) in their urban movements. In this paper, we describe a service-oriented architecture that exploits the microservices orchestration paradigm to enable the creation of new services and to make the management of the various data sources easier and more effective. The proposed platform exposes standardized interfaces to access data, implements common services to manage metadata associated with them, such as trustworthiness and provenance, and provides an orchestration language to create complex services, naturally mapping their internal workflow to code. The manuscript demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach by means of some case studies.