A novel accessibility assessment framework for the elderly: evaluation in a case study on office design

Abstract

Elderly and impaired persons constitute an important part of our societies. Existing practices to test accessibility features on forthcoming consumer products and services rely on tests with real impaired users on the industrial prototypes. Our approach comes to automate the evaluation process and introduce it in early phases of the product design. The proposed accessibility assement framework is based on the Virtual User Models (VUMs) concept. VUMs are models containing several parameters used for the emulation of the behavioural characteristics of impaired and elderly populations. In this paper, the simulation framework and a number of VUMs corresponding to real persons are evaluated using two variations of a workplace office design. Results indicated that VUMs are efficient predictors of the corresponding end user's behaviour and thus, their simulated performance can lead into decision making during the product test-and-redesign cycles.