SCC-PG: Smart Technologies for Evaluating and Enhancing Building Accessibility for People with Disabilities

Although the adoption of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) shifted the paradigm for physical accessibility, many aspects of the built environment are still not easy or satisfying for people who use wheelchairs. This is mainly due to the practice of the building industry, i.e., the compliance of those guidelines mainly focuses on design and construction requirements whereas the actual experience of wheelchair users is not fully investigated after the construction phase.

One viable solution is to acquire and utilize the data from the community with disabilities on how they use wheelchairs to navigate and experience buildings. In this project, three main activities will be conducted. First, a community meeting will be prepared and executed to understand the environmental experience and stressors that wheelchair users experience in their daily environment.

Based on the foundational knowledge of their environmental stressors, the research team will further develop WheelComV2 to acquire thermal stress of wheelchair users via non-intrusive sensing of chair monitoring. Finally, we will pilot our technological approach together with the community of local citizens who use wheelchairs. Ultimately, the proposed approach will enable them to be citizen scientists, leading to the disability-centric evaluation process to improve the physical accessibility of the built environment.

The proposed research will establish the new field of disability-centric building accessibility evaluation, which aims at discovering the fundamental knowledge of human (with disability) and building interaction. In the field of human-building interaction, building scientists have used the concept of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) to quantify occupants’ environmental comfort (or more often stress) in buildings.

However, none of these building IEQ guidelines are tailored for occupants with disabilities (e.g., people who use wheelchairs). Our disability-led research activities will define the environmental stress of wheelchair users, which we often naively assume from ambulatory occupants. Furthermore, our development of WheelComV2 will test the research hypothesis, i.e., the detection of irregular patterns in temporal data stream of wheelchair movement monitoring is indicative of wheelchair user’s thermal discomfort.

The newly gained insight on our experiment will provide a foundational technological basis to develop non-intrusive sensing approach to better understand the experience of people who use wheelchairs in buildings.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.