The main focus of this project is on the perceptions, emotions and behaviours of older people regarding different urban street designs. In specific, we are interested in exploring perceived discrimination due to age (ageism), a topic studied from a socio-psychological perspective. Hence, psychology is the main scientific area for this project. However, the multidisciplinary nature of the team is a major advantage, creating the opportunity to investigate people-place factors more deeply and use methodologies commonly used in other fields (architecture, computer science) in order to test our hypotheses (e.g., virtual reality studies).

  The goal of the project is to support the daily living of blind and visually impaired people in challenging tasks like participating in urban mobility, providing a simple, effective and affordable door to door navigation and mobility assistance solution. Contrary to the usual tools providing only outdoor navigation, we also target situations when the blind person plans a journey which includes traveling through unfamiliar indoor environments (subway systems, train/bus stations) or when the journey targets visiting complex buildings (shopping mall, business center, public office). In our view, besides the help provided in the daily living for the blind and visually impaired citizens, the envisioned service would be also interesting for companies, offices or infrastructure operators (e.g. local government) where blind people can work or just turn-out, by helping them to integrate and manage themselves in an open community. In order to provide a truly door to door navigation service, which is currently missing from the market, we design and develop a service framework in which existing outdoor navigation services can be easily “plugged in”. Thus, the already familiar applications can be used in concordance with the proposed indoor mobility service, leading to cheaper and more effective door to door mobility assistance solutions. In the recent years, due to the remarkable steps in ICT innovation, a set of new possibilities have opened up, fostering the R&D related to mobility services (e.g. smartphone-based passenger information systems, route planners, navigators), where the travelers play a more active role like in classical Intelligent Transportation Systems. These people centered approaches aim to bring more interaction between the travelers and service providers, in order to provide user-centric, personalized and integrated multi-modal solutions. While these solutions promise the advent of eco-friendly multi-modal mobility systems by promoting active use...