Citizen sensing for collaborative construction of accessibility maps

Abstract

In this demo we present IBM Sidewalks, a mobile application designed to facilitate the identification of accessibility issues in a city via crowdsourcing. This application connects to our Citizen Sensing platform, providing to city administrators an integrated view about issues in the city, such as sidewalks that are obstructed or in bad condition. If a representative amount of data is collected through people engagement, a significant number of issues will be registered, and analytics tools can be used to identify the impact these issues have on people with disabilities' lives. Consequently, we can use such information to build accessibility maps, and possibly to define an appropriate action plan to address the issues, optimizing resource allocation. Copyright 2013 ACM.