Assessing the Needs of Mobility Solution for Older Adults Through Living Lab Approach: An Experience Report

Staying mobile is the key to ensuring high quality of life for older adults. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to live and move around independently becomes more critical for the most aging society. While several efforts have been made to invest in mobility solutions to help improve older adults’ mobility, there is still a lack of good practice and guidelines for developing such a niche Information Technology (IT) solution. In this paper, we report our experience of using Living Lab, a design science approach, to assess and capture the needs of mobility solutions for older adults. A semi-structured interview involving 25 older adults was conducted. We identified interesting and practical requirements/functionalities from the participants that might be otherwise overlooked if we followed the traditional software development process. The participants provided valuable feedback to help improve our mobility solution in two main areas, mainly the design and functionality of the application. The findings from this case study can potentially be applied for future work that attempts to address similar problems in the same domain. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Managing capacity for curb spaces in urban transportation system

With the growth of new mobility operators and goods delivery service needs especially after COVID-19, there is an increasing demand for pickup/drop-off and loading/unloading access to the curb spaces. Hence the management of curb spaces in the urban transportation system becomes increasingly challenging and it becomes more important to allocate the curb space effectively to improve the overall traffic system. In this study, we build a capacity allocation model to study the different uses of curb space in the urban transportation system. We consider the interaction between curb space and traffic flow, which are the two important elements of the transportation system that interact with each other and affect the overall system performance. We first build an open migration network to understand the flow of the vehicles by considering the various uses of the curb space (i.e., parking, pickup/drop-off, and loading/unloading). We then formulate the allocation of capacity needed for various uses with a news-vendor model where our objective is to maximize the profit of the cities. We derive optimal capacity allocation policies and implement numerical experiments. With the model developed, capacity allocation decisions for various curb uses can be made more systematically and can result in improvements in the overall traffic system. © 2021 IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2021. All rights reserved.