Accessible Urban Routes Reconstruction by Fusing Mobile Sensors Data

Despite the recent attitude toward making modern urban cities accessible, many barriers and obstacles still challenge impaired people mobility every day. Having a complete and accurate map of both accessible paths and barriers could support people mobility and could drive urban planning renewing efforts. However, mapping accessible paths and barriers timely, and in an accurate way, requires a significant effort and it is often left to volunteers and no-profit associations. The Maps for Easy Paths (MEP) project represents an attempt to build accessibility maps (i.e., maps with accessible routes) fusing, in an automatic fashion, data implicitly collected through mobile devices carried by interested people when they move around the city. In particular, the paper focuses on the design of the MEP-Traces app used for the collection of relevant data and the MEP-Fusion engine for the reconstruction of accessible routes out of inertial readings and GPS measurements. Experimental results in reconstructing accessible routes in urban scenarios show the effectiveness of the approach in dealing with typical problems related to poor inertial sensors quality.