Age-Friendly Route Planner: Calculating Comfortable Routes for Senior Citizens

The application of routing algorithms to real-world situations is a widely studied research topic. Despite this, routing algorithms and applications are usually developed for a general purpose, meaning that certain groups, such as ageing people, are often marginalized due to the broad approach of the designed algorithms. This situation may pose a problem in cities which are suffering a slow but progressive ageing of their populations. With this motivation in mind, this paper focuses on describing our implemented Age-Friendly Route Planner, whose goal is to improve the experience in the city for senior citizens. In order to measure the age-friendliness of a route, several variables have been deemed, such as the number of amenities along the route, the amount of comfortable elements found, or the avoidance of sloppy sections. In this paper, we describe one of the main features of the Age-Friendly Route Planner: the preference-based routes, and we also demonstrate how it can contribute to the creation of adapted friendly routes.