Using Sensory Wearable Devices to Navigate the City: Effectiveness and User Experience in Older Pedestrians

Preserving older pedestrians’ navigation skills in urban environments is a challenge for maintaining their quality of life. However, the maps that are usually used by older pedestrians might be unsuitable to their specificities and the existing digital aids do not consider older people’s perceptual and cognitive declines or user experience. This study presents a rich description of the navigation experience of older pedestrians either with a visual (augmented reality glasses), auditory (bone conduction headphones), or a visual and haptic (smartwatch) wearable device adapted to age-related declines. These wearable devices are compared to the navigation aid older people usually use when navigating the city (their own digital or paper map). The study, with 18 participants, measured the navigation performance and captured detailed descriptions of the users’ experience using interviews. We highlight three main phenomena which impact the quality of the user experience with the four aids: (1) the shifts in attention over time, (2) the understanding of the situation over time, and (3) the emergence of affective and aesthetic feelings over time. These findings add a new understanding of the specificities of navigation experience by older people and are discussed in terms of design recommendations for navigation devices.

Review of safety and mobility issues among older pedestrians

Although old people make up an extremely vulnerable road-user group, older pedestrians' difficulties have been studied less extensively than those of older drivers, and more knowledge of this issue is still required. The present paper reviews current knowledge of older-adult problems with the main components of pedestrian activity, i.e., walking and obstacle negotiation, wayfinding, and road crossing. Compared to younger ones, old pedestrians exhibit declining walking skills, with a walking speed decrease, less stable balance, less efficient wayfinding strategies, and a greater number of unsafe road crossing behaviors. These difficulties are linked to age-related changes in sensorial, cognitive, physical, and self-perception abilities. It is now known that visual impairment, physical frailty, and attention deficits have a major negative impact on older pedestrians' safety and mobility, whereas the roles of self-evaluation and self-regulation are still poorly understood. All these elements must be taken into consideration, not only in developing effective safety interventions targeting older pedestrians, but also in designing roads and cars. Recent initiatives are presented here and some recommendations are proposed.