Measuring Accessibility on Public Places using Ubiquitous
Environments and MAS
Donald Rodriguez-Ubeda, Ricardo Rosales, Manuel Castanon-Puga, Dora-Luz Flores,
Luis-Enrique Palafox and Carelia Gaxiola-Pacheco
Engineering and Chemistry Science Faculty, Autonomous University of Baja California,
Calzada Universidad 14418, Mesa de Otay, Tijuana, Baja California, México
Keywords: Accessibility, Ubiquitous, Agents.
Abstract: This paper proposes the use of ubiquitous computing and multi-agent systems to obtain information related
to the locomotion of people with visual impairments on public spaces; and use that information to evaluate
the accessibility of such spaces.
1 INTRODUCTION
The present paper propose the use of ubiquitous
computing as a tool aid in the accessibility
evaluation of public places, tracking people with
visual impairments when they are moving in public
places.
In order to estimate the magnitude of the
population suffering disabilities have been carried
out censuses and surveys in several countries. The
World Health Organization (WHO, 2011) estimates
that 15% of the world's population (approximately
1000 million people) has intellectual disabilities,
physical or sensory impairment. Considering their
families, wich are also affected by disability, the
number of people directly involved is around 2,000
million, which represents almost a third of world
population.
Today society is striving to further integrate all
people, so it is trying to build different equipment
and provide the accessibility for handicap people in
order to facilitate their mobility; and help them to
have a better quality of life; and as far as possible
with a little more independence.
1.1 Accessibility in Mexico
In México the National Commission of Human
Rights has selected a sample from public buildings
and elaborated a first evaluation - National
Accessibility Assessment (Comisión Nacional de los
Derechos Humanos, 2009), in an effort to collect
objective and reliable information about the
accessibility status of the Federal Administration
buildings.
We can see some effort to make accessible many
public buildings like schools, airport terminals,
parks and government offices,. However, much
remains to be done, because even with the necessary
adjustments, many people with disabilities, like
persons with visual impairments, require more
elements that help them to discover the nearest
facilities; before they can use them.
The evaluation results (Comisión Nacional de los
Derechos Humanos, 2009) showed that the greatest
progress in this area has been related to the
building’s physical accessibility, which
demonstrates that Mexican society continued
equating accessibility for people with disabilities by
building ramps for physically disabled people, not
foreseeing the needs of people with other disabilities
(e.g. visual impairments).
The contradictory results reflected that signaling
is missing on the 100% of the sites evaluated in the
sample; which help us explain the lack of use of
these facilities, since in most cases the signs that
advertise them are visual and are placed right on the
spot where the facilities are located and some times
the facilities are not so comfortable to use.
Many accessibilities evaluations are carried out
inspecting the buildings and verifying if they satisfy
the construction regulations but we think it is
possible to get more accurate results observing if
people use them. That's the reason why we propose
the use of ubiquitous computing to evaluate the
312
Rodriguez-Ubeda D., Rosales R., Castanon-Puga M., Flores D., Palafox L. and Gaxiola-Pacheco C..
Measuring Accessibility on Public Places using Ubiquitous Environments and MAS.
DOI: 10.5220/0003997803120315
In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2012), pages 312-315
ISBN: 978-989-8565-11-2
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
accessibility of buildings, and public places, because
many people can carry a cell phone or a small
computing device, which can help us to collect
information related to their locomotion and keep
track if they used any accessible instalation.
1.2 Ubiquitous Computing
In ubiquitous computing environments, the
processing is done in different intercommunicated
devices (most of them have wireless access links)
such as mobile terminals (tablets, smart phones,
laptops), networks of sensors and machines with
which we interact in our daily lives (vending
machines, refrigerators, microwaves, cars, traffic
lights, televisions, computers). These environments,
have a reduced availability of computing resources
(application and network systems), so they must
have to adapt to it, in order to operate efficiently
(Ito, T. et. al, 2010).
A key feature of ubiquitous computing systems
is the ability to adapt their behaviour based on user
activity and context (Privat, G., 2002). The devices
embedded in the environment can have computing
and communication capabilities, which turns a
network of intelligent devices and sensors in an
global interface between users and facilities like
ramps, elevators, light signals, etc.
1.3 MAS and Ubiquitous Computing
A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is a distributed
system consisting of autonomous entities called
agents. These agents need to interact and cooperate
to perform the task overall. One of the main
properties of MAS is based on the distribution of
cooperative algorithms. The decentralized and
loosely coupled nature of the network makes it
possible to design applications that are highly
flexible, scalable and adaptive.
The multi-agent paradigm is well suited to
ubiquitous computing environments from multiple
perspectives. MAS provide a decentralized control
based on distributed autonomous entities. MAS
support complex interactions between entities. This
feature seems essential for ubiquitous computing
environments of diferent heterogeneous information
seeking, physical sensors, services or user
preferences. Integration of these data can only be at
a higher level, where all kinds of information
(service context) are expressed semantically. The
Figure 1 represents all the typical elements that
could be part of the user context in ubiquitous
computing systems based on conventional agents.
The context awareness facet of a pervasive
computing environment can encompass several
diferent aspects, such as the physical position of an
entity as well as its logical (sometimes physical)
role, such as the type of service it represents (e.g. its
a ramp, an elevator or a door access). We will build
a awareness module to manage this kind of
information, and entities will be represented by
specific awareness agents. The (spatial, social,
organizational) environments in which entities are
situated will be modeled as awareness graphs, also
called topological spaces, the agents are connected
to their nodes, also called sites, accordingly.
Figure 1: User context information in a ubiquitous
environment.
However, diferent agents may have diferent
perceptions of the same aspect (diferent notions of
distance in a spatial arrangement) thus requiring a
more precise definition of interaction on awareness
graphs.
The awareness module will be designed
according to the perception-reaction paradigm: the
behavior of agents will be driven by the perception
of signals, emitted by other agents and propagated
across the awareness graph (to notify the presence in
a specific site). The propagation of information will
be mediated in intensity according to a graphic
specific distance function evaluated between sites.
The closeness of some entities can be considered
a fundamental awareness information: agents can
have a sensitivity function based on intensity of the
perceived presence field where a high threshold can
be set to perceive entities in the close neighborhood
while a lower threshold can be set to perceive also
entities further apart. That information will be used
to record when a person is aproaching to some
facilities and more precisely register information
about the use of accessible entities.
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2 RELATED RESEARCHES
The project named GATHERING (Sociologyindex,
2011), based on the principles of the theory of
perception’s control, is used to simulate, in a
simplified way, the experiment of collective
locomotion. The main conclusion of the experiment
is the most common reference signals led to greater
coordination of collective behaviour, which was
repeated in the simulation. The program’s ability to
reproduce the collective behaviour observed in the
field and in the experiment provides evidence of the
usefulness of the theory of individual behaviour in
which the program is based. The simulation proves
the assumption that collective behaviour is the result
of similar reference signals.
The project GATHERING allows us to make the
following questions: How the collective locomotion
affects the accessibility of places? And how
collective locomotion affects the use of them by
disabled people?
The work of (Ali, W., Moulin, B., 2005)
demonstrates that is possible to use multi-agent
systems to model and simulate the behaviour of
humans in a mall, where they focus on the
distribution of physical spaces and the interests of
each individual to navigate through mall, they also
solved the issue of collecting information about the
routes followed by visitors through surveys.
Some important advances has been done in order
to improve the accessibility to some services, like
(Lee, J., Pinheiro dos Santos, W., 2010) where they
studied the chromatic abnormalities of the human
visual system and develop computational tools for
adaptability of human-machine interfaces, providing
the inclusion of individuals with colour blindness
and creating more accessible solutions.
The research project (Thriault, M., Des Rosiers,
F., 2004) shows some advances related to modeling
the accessibility perception by individuals, applying
fuzzy logic to the microspatial analysis of individual
trip patterns and duration, while taking into account
various types of households and a large set of
activity nodes, allows measuring the actual
willingness to travel of urban dwellers, thereby
building more subtle and comprehensive
accessibility indexes.
3 STUDY CASE
As a study case it must be carried out some
evaluations for public spaces that may represent a
real example, both the variety of its physical
facilities as the various situations that can emerge
due to the presence of people.
In the first instance due to the extent of its
facilities and the dynamic that presents product of
the daily activities, the installations of the
Engineering and Chemistry Science Faculty at the
Autonomous University of Baja California, are a
magnificent stage for the case study. We already
selected the different areas and made some tests
detecting people using ramps and stairs but we are
planning to install cameras to record more
information related to people walking on the campus
(see Figure 2).
We have taken a few measures of people walking
on campus and observed that in most cases
(approximately 45%) the regular people decreased
their speed when they used the ramps and many
people failed to answer the questions about the
location of the nearest ramps.
Once it is evaluated the first study case and have
made the appropriate adjustments, is intended bring
it to another stage where can be seen a greater
presence of people with disabilities and has the
facilities to their displacement, as is the case of the
local museum named El Trompo. In this museum we
are planning to install sensors on different areas and
will implement a badge with sensors that can be
carried by visitors with some disability, so we can
register where they are, if they used some facilities
and at the same time we are planning to install video
cameras to record it and complement the information
regarding if these visitors used them easily or not.
Figure 2: UABC campus map.
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4 CONCLUSIONS
People with different disabilities present challenges
that are difficult to understand for most people.
Although many countries have regulations about
facilities for disabled people, those are usually
focused on very few types of facilities. It is required
to analyze the behaviour of the individuals with
disabilities from a systemic point of view, since they
are part of society where we all live.
Ubiquitous computing, we help us to get closer
to the scene, observe and measure the usefulness of
the existing facilities and get relevant information
about how they affect the movement of people. We
also believe that information collected in this project
will be useful to support disabled people through
ubiquitous environments (e.g. aid them to find
facilities), but also believe that the behaviour of
users in the system is complex.
We believe that this behaviour must be
understood first, then propose new designs that
improve the social environment and user support. In
the future we observe that we can use all the
information collected in this project and use it to
create models that can help us to evaluate
accessibility of places in a virtual environment.
5 FUTURE WORK
Collect more information on developments related to
modelling human mobility, systems and
technologies to assist people with disabilities in
order to understand the previous work. Also review
regulations and legislation, national and
international accessibility and accommodations for
public spaces. Finally gather information about the
mobility needs of disabled people.
Propose a model to simulate real environments
with obstacles and accessible facilities based on the
knowledge acquired during the first two phases.
Create models of real scenes using the products
of last stages. Build a database with information and
make a compilation of results for further analysis.
Analyze the data collected on previous stages to
formulate the conclusions of the research.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the many people who made
this research possible as the Mexican National
Council for Science and Technology (Consejo
Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, CONACYT), the
Engineering and Chemistry Science Faculty at the
Universidad Autonoma de Baja California and the
Museum El Trompo for the economic support
granted for this research.
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Ali, W., Moulin, B., 2005, 2D-3D Multi-agent
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