Design Interactive, Inc. — Department of Transportation SBIR Phase I: 180FT1

Description

Guided Augmented Independence Travel Aid (GAIT-Aid) 3/20/2018 Two million people in the U.S. never leave their homes, with 560,000 never leaving due to transportation challenges. Critically, the likelihood of transportation challenges increases fourfold for people with disabilities. Lack of mobility outside the home causes decreased social and economic participation and deteriorated health. Fortunately, an opportunity exists to leverage augmented reality (AR) to remove barriers to independent public transit use, regardless of individual abilities. Toward that end, Design Interactive proposes the Guided Augmented Independence Travel Aid (GAIT-Aid), a mobile-enabled AR wayfinding aid for people using public transportation. GAIT-Aid will integrate data from geo-specific databases with public transit schedules and authored public transit station data to support public transit users across the entire travel chain, from route planning through arrival at the desired destination. GAIT-Aid will provide heavy support for perceptual, cognitive, and action-based information processing to support users with a range of ability levels. Objectives for the Phase I effort include review of existing wayfinding science and technology, user needs evaluation via survey and task analysis with potential end users, conceptual design of the GAIT-Aid software, development of a limited-scope feasibility demonstration, and Phase II planning to develop, evaluate, and refine a platform-independent functional prototype.