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Co-Designing Interactions between Pedestrians in Wheelchairs and Autonomous Vehicles

Published: 28 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

In the near future, mixed traffic consisting of manual and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be common. Questions surrounding how vulnerable road users such as pedestrians in wheelchairs (PWs) will make crossing decisions in these new situations are underexplored. We conducted a remote co-design study with one of the researchers of this work who has the lived experience as a powered wheelchair user and applied inclusive design practices. This allowed us to identify and reflect on interface design ideas that can help PWs make safe crossing decisions at intersections. Through an iterative five-week study, we implemented interfaces that can be placed on the vehicle, on the wheelchair, and on the street infrastructure and evaluated them during the co-design sessions using a VR simulator testbed. Informed by our findings, we discuss design insights for implementing inclusive interfaces to improve interactions between autonomous vehicles and vulnerable road users.

Supplementary Material

Demo video and thumbnail image (p339-asha-supplements.zip)

References

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Does Another Pedestrian Matter? A Virtual Reality Study on the Interaction Between Multiple Pedestrians and Autonomous Vehicles in Shared SpaceIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems10.1109/TITS.2024.348255826:1(196-209)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Shared eHMI: Bridging Human–Machine Understanding in Autonomous Wheelchair NavigationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1401046314:1(463)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
  • (2024)“Shotitwo First!”: Unraveling Global South Women’s Challenges in Public Transport to Inform Autonomous Vehicle DesignProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661553(3193-3209)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
DIS '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
June 2021
2082 pages
ISBN:9781450384766
DOI:10.1145/3461778
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 28 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Pedestrians in wheelchairs
  2. autonomous vehicles
  3. co-design

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  • Research-article
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  • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

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DIS '21
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DIS '21: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021
June 28 - July 2, 2021
Virtual Event, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Does Another Pedestrian Matter? A Virtual Reality Study on the Interaction Between Multiple Pedestrians and Autonomous Vehicles in Shared SpaceIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems10.1109/TITS.2024.348255826:1(196-209)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Shared eHMI: Bridging Human–Machine Understanding in Autonomous Wheelchair NavigationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1401046314:1(463)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
  • (2024)“Shotitwo First!”: Unraveling Global South Women’s Challenges in Public Transport to Inform Autonomous Vehicle DesignProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661553(3193-3209)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Introducing AV-Sketch: An Immersive Participatory Design Tool for Automated Vehicle — Passenger InteractionProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3640792.3675705(83-93)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Multi-Modal eHMIs: The Relative Impact of Light and Sound in AV-Pedestrian InteractionProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642031(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Are the External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMI) Accessible for People with Disabilities? A Systematic Review2024 IEEE 4th International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS)10.1109/ICHMS59971.2024.10555703(1-6)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
  • (2024)Safe Road-Crossing by Autonomous Wheelchairs: A Novel Dataset and Its EvaluationComputer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2024 Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-68738-9_4(47-60)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Scalability in External Communication of Automated VehiclesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35962487:2(1-26)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
  • (2023)On the Road to Enhancing Transportation Access for People with Disabilities: A Data Review of Accessible Autonomous Vehicles ResearchAdjunct Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3581961.3609867(150-155)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Scoping Out the Scalability Issues of Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian InteractionProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3580585.3607167(167-177)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
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