- Program: "Italy-China Mobility Program"
- Title: SmartPMS: Smart Personal Mobility Systems for Human Disabilities in Future Smart Cities
- Area: ICT
- Code: M00551
- Start Date: 01/01/2013
- End Date: 31/12/2015
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Italy: Prof. Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria
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China: Prof. Wenfeng Li, Wuhan University of Technology
The increase of average lifetime expectancy worldwide, along with the need for more independency of disabled people, is posing urgent demand for novel and more effective personal mobility systems within urban environments. In Italy the elderly population is almost 21% of the citizenship; 5% of it is affected by disabilities and about 1.1M Italians suffer of motor disabilities. In China 89.26M people are disabled today and the elderly population is 185M; citizens with motor disabilities are the 3.74% of the population.
As a consequence, many governments are pursuing the development of Smart Cities. Italy invested about 700M euros in project calls specifically addressing Smart Cities and Social Innovation, e.g. PON Smart Cities and Communities and Social Innovation. China kicked off many projects on Smart Cities. Currently, 154 Chinese cities have Smart City development plans.
Driven by increasing urbanization and serious economic and environmental challenges, Smart Cities are emerging as effective ways to fill the gap between supply and demand while providing innovative social services to improve quality of life of citizens. They will play a central role to support disabled and elderly people in their life, especially with respect to personal mobility within the urban boundaries. The goal of the proposed project is to develop a smart personal mobility system (SmartPMS), based on a smart wheelchair fully integrated with the smart city, which provides support for elderly and disabled users in moving across the city safely and independently. SmartPMS will provide path planning based on multiple transportation modes, active safety, and real-time health status monitoring. Secondly, SmartPMS will include a full-fledged distributed information system supporting and managing the smart wheelchairs circulating in the city through cloud computing-based information sharing and distributed environmental sensing systems.