Kotaro Hara

Poorly maintained sidewalks pose considerable accessibility challenges for mobility impaired persons; however, there are currently few, if any, mechanisms to determine accessible areas of a city a priori. In this paper, I introduce four threads of research that I will conduct for my Ph.D. thesis aimed at creating new methods and tools to provide unprecedented levels of information on the accessibility of streets and sidewalk. Namely, I will (i) conduct a formative study to better understand accessibility problems, (ii) develop and evaluate scalable map-based data collection methods, (iii) integrate computer vision algorithms to increase the scalability of the methods, and (iv) develop accessible-aware map-based tools that demonstrate the utility of our data (Figure 1 and 6).