Research Information System
Universal Access in the Information Society, vol.23, no.2, pp.901-911, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)
We observe that the majority of the studies regarding the walking impaired concentrate on wheelchair users. However, there are many people who are capable of walking in a limited way and not using wheelchairs. Our overall target working in this domain is a personally customizable navigation assistant for the physically disabled. Here, we present the theoretical steps toward this target. We propose a mathematical model for the area to be accessed using graphs. A survey study was carried out to determine some critical coefficients representing the relative difficulty of stair climbing and traveling on non-flat surfaces. The proposed algorithm takes in five personal parameters representing the individual’s physical capabilities and the graph representation of the area. First, it prunes the graph by eliminating the non-traversable edges for that person. If the source and destination nodes are still connected, an effort graph is obtained from the area graph considering the relative effort coefficients. Lastly, the minimum effort path is calculated on the effort graph. This three-stage algorithm and the graph structure we propose can lead to personally customizable navigation applications solving many accessibility problems faced by the disabled.