Understanding route choices for wheelchair navigation.

Purpose: To validate a personalized routing technique with wheelchair users, understand their route choices and acquire their feedback on the necessity of wheelchair navigation and the importance of personalized routes.

Method: A routing technique using a weighting method, called Absolute Restriction Method (ARM), was employed to compute personalized routes based on users' routing preferences. The evaluation involves five manual wheelchair users.

Design considerations for a personalized wheelchair navigation system.

Individuals with mobility impairments such as wheelchair users are often at a disadvantage when traveling to a new place, as their mobility can be easily affected by environmental barriers, and as such, even short trips can be difficult and perhaps impossible. We envision a personalized wheelchair navigation system based on a PDA equipped with wireless Internet access and GPS that can provide adaptive navigation support to wheelchair users in any geographic environment. Requirements, architectures and components of such a system are described in this paper.