Graph Representation of Road Network for Mobility-Impaired Persons

Abstract

One of the recurring issues mobility-impaired persons have to deal with is traveling alone in a wheelchair blindly without prior information regarding the accessibility of the planned route. Ordinary people usually choose the shortest path, but people with ambulant disabilities may prefer a longer route that does not include an uphill. The purpose of this paper is to extract the graph representation for people with reduced mobility across Baguio's Central Business District. The PWD ramps and wheelchair passable drop curbs were located with a smartphone GPS. Google Maps was used to verify the coordinates. The road distance was calculated using the Haversine formula as verified using Google Earth. The Lavene's Test for equality of variances and T-test of equality of means were used to check the significant difference between the derived values against Google's data. The derived latitude and longitude using a mobile phone's GPS did not differ significantly from the Google Maps coordinates. Moreover, the study showed that the calculated road distance using the Haversine formula did not vary considerably from the Google Earth distance. As such, the study aims to provide time and safety benefits by presenting a novel model representing the road network as a graph for mobility-impaired persons.