As a task for CAP4Access project, on Monday 11th of August, members of the Smart Simulation group (Mohamed Bakillah, Amin Mobasheri and Sarah Labusga) of GIScience at Heidelberg University performed a field experiment together with people with limited mobilities.
Several GPS trackers (with different characteristics and predefined parameters for data collection) were installed on three wheelchairs and for a selected route in Altstadt area, multiple coordinate points of the position of wheelchairs were collected. This field experiment was done in order to come up with a simple and cost-effective approach for deriving sidewalk paths and its characteristics.
One of the aims of this experiment is to come up with an efficient approach to derive and enrich OpenStreetMap data with pedestrian sidewalk information. Click here for further information.
It is worth to mention that similar experiments and researches have been done by the Geoinformatics laboratory at School of Information Sciences of University of Pittsburgh, where an algorithm has been defined and developed to construct pedestrian network data based on GPS traces. For more information please refer to:
Kasemsuppakorn, P., & Karimi, H. A. (2013). A pedestrian network construction algorithm based on multiple GPS traces. Transportation research part C: emerging technologies, 26, 285-300.