Shaping accessible public spaces for visually impaired people. The BUDD-e research experience
From Firenze University Press Journal: TECHNE
Andrea Rebecchi, Dipartimento di Architettura, ingegneria delle costruzioni e ambiente costruito, Politecnico di Milano
Marcello Farina, Dipartimento di Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano
Giuseppe Andreoni, Dipartimento di Design, Politecnico di Milano
Stefano Capolongo, Dipartimento di Architettura, ingegneria delle costruzioni e ambiente costruito, Politecnico di Milano
Matteo Corno, Dipartimento di Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano
Paolo Perego, Dipartimento di Design, Politecnico di Milano
Emanuele Lettieri, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, Politecnico di Milano
Theoretical background, context scenario and needs analysis
The COVID-19 pandemic and related social policies have strongly impacted the population’s life and, even more dramatically, that of vulnerable groups, for instance people with visual impairments. The possibility of developing healthy relationships, of taking part in social events and activities, and of visiting public spaces has been restricted. Even everyday activities (e.g. using public services, shopping, practicing sports) have been severely limited in the last years.The COVID-19 pandemic is an im-portant demonstration of the dual effects of urbanisation on the built environment (Capolongo et al., 2020), precisely the inherent capacity of the contemporary city to be a place of social and economic opportunities and, at the same time, one presenting multiple risk factors for Public Health and Sanitary Welfare, due to the health in-equalities that may develop. Moreover, COVID-19 was a key accelerator of several social and digital issues, which were already present in our contemporary societies, but struggled to be considered as crucial issues to be addresed, particularly the problem of accessibility, especially for fragile population categories. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) people particularly suffered from the COVID-19 emergency, and are still dramatically affected by the containment measures, being also particularly prone to the risk of contagion. This situation is caused by the fact that BVI people need tactile contact with the environment and a guide for moving and orienteering.Visually impaired people account for 4% of the global population (about 253 Million); in Italy, they are just under 2 Million, of which 219,174 are abso-lutely blind (0.3% of the population), while 1,383,922 (2.3%) have a visual residue. Between 2010 and 2030 an ap-proximate 25% increase in people with visual disabilities is expected due to population ageing.Nowadays, people with visual impairments face barriers in accessing services and goods. Shared spaces could result almost inaccessible for BVI people, also since inclusive environmental tools are missing. Scientific studies (Manduchi and Kurniawan, 2011) show that vision loss increases the risk of injury, and highlight a significant correlation between type, severity, and frequency of injuries, and the degree of vision loss. A considerable num-ber of BVI individuals need sighted companions when travelling outdoors (Zeng, 2015). Finding and getting to places, e.g. medical centres, hospitals, and shopping centres (that often do not have enough staff to offer help), is problematic also because guide dogs are often refused access.In many Countries, Laws, regula-tions and programmes have been introduced to promote equal access to services for disabled people, for instance the UK’s Equality Act of 2010 (UK government, 2010) and the USA’s Americans with Disabilities Act (U.S. Department of Justice, 1990; 2008). Complex and public architectures need to develop sustainable and im-mediate adjustments to make their services accessible. For both public and private companies, it is becoming increasingly important to employ in-clusion practices. Shoppers are, in fact, turning to retailers that apply them (Accenture, 2019).Independent mobility should be en-couraged by designing and building accessible public architectures, and by developing assistive technologies. In indoor and structured places the most widespread devices are those for locali-sation and tracking, which span those making use of smartphone sensors and camera-based systems (where a remote guide gives instructions), and beacons (Guerreiro, 2019a). There has been also growing research dedicated to enhanced canes and guide robots, which are de-vised to copy functions of traditional navigation aids while overcoming some of their limitations, e.g. navigating envi-ronments unfamiliar to the user.To drive the research on this topic, Hersh and Johnson (Hersh and John-son, 2012) provide a survey question-naire on the requirements of BVI people for a robot guide, from which design specifications are drawn, e.g. compactness, robustness, reliability, the presence of a telescopic handle, and wheeled locomotion. Initial func-tionalities should include obstacle avoidance and navigation to destina-tion, but the robot should be customis-able for a wider range of settings.The few robot guides (Chuang et al., 2018; Elgendy et al., 2019; Guerreiro et al., 2019b; Kulkarni et al., 2017; Tobitaet al., 2017; Zeng et al., 2019) proposed recently are not compliant with these requirements, being mostly focused on obstacle avoidance alone. They are not customisable, and have rigid handles.The robot guide BUDD-e (“Blind-assistive aUtonomous Droid Device”) will overcome the limitations of pre-sent robotic guides as it is dynamic, robust and flexible, besides being eas-ily customisable. This will be possible also thanks to the smart tether system, which permits a more intuitive and natural robot-user interaction, com-pared to the previous ones already available on the market. The analysis of the scientific literature, the licenses present, and the market analysis have highlighted the opportunity and the need to develop a robot guide with functions such as the ability to move independently in crowded spaces, flex-ibility and adaptability to the user’s behaviour (step speed and frequency), and the need for an acoustic signal.From an architectural point of view, places of experimentation will be out-door sites and indoor architectures for public use, such as healthcare and sports facilities (in the early phase of experimentation), as well as commercial and cultural/museum spaces (in the second phase), as they represent overall the essential and strategic places for interaction and social inclusion (Mosca et al., 2019a).This situation could also positively af-fect the recovery of many economic activities, facilitating access for visually impaired users (including the elderly with senile deterioration of vision) to public facilities, services, entertainment, sports and commercial venues.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/techne-13738
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/techne/article/view/13738
