| Title |
Walkability Evaluation for Elderly People using Wearable Sensing |
| Authors |
Yang, Kanghyeok ; Hwang, Sungjoo ; Kim, Hyunsoo |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5659/JAIK_PD.2019.35.7.119 |
| Keywords |
Walkability; Wearable Sensing; Crowd Sensing; Elderly People |
| Abstract |
The active living of the elderly leads to improve their lives and enhance social networks. In the view of the active living, the walkability is
an essential factor for the elderly’s daily life. To support the active living, making age-friendly environment is important. Considering that the
elderly mainly carry out activities through walking, making the age-friendly walking environment is a preliminary action. The existing studies
applied various methods such as surveys by experts. In spite of the benefits in theirs, there is still a limitation that current walkability
measurement methods did not incorporate the actual elderly’s walking activity. Thus, the purposes of this study is to measure the elderly’s
walking quantitatively using a wearable sensor, and to investigate the feasibility of comparing several walking environments based on the data
collected from the actual elderly’s walking. To do this, experiment was conducted in four types environments with 22 senior subjects. The
walkability was measured by walking stability represented quantitatively as Maximum Lyapunov Exponent (MaxLE). Through the experiment
results, it was confirmed that the stability of the elderly walking was different according to the walking environment, which also meant that
bodily responses (walking stability) is highly related to walkability. The results will provide an opportunity for the continuous diagnosis of
walking environments, thereby enhancing the active living of the elderly. |