Inclusive Smart Cities : theory and tools to improve the experience of people with disabilities in urban spaces João Soares de Oliveira Neto To cite this version: João Soares de Oliveira Neto. Inclusive Smart Cities : theory and tools to improve the experience of people with disabilities in urban spaces. Other. Université Paris-Saclay; Universidade de São Paulo (Brésil), 2018. English. NNT : 2018SACLC106. tel-01985873 HAL Id: tel-01985873 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01985873 Submitted on 18 Jan 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Inclusive Smart Cities: theory and tools to improve the experience of people with disabilities in urban spaces 2018SACLC106 : NNT Thèse de doctorat de Universidade de São Paulo et de l'Université Paris- Saclay, préparée à CentraleSupélec École doctorale n°580 Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (STIC) Spécialité de doctorat: Informatique Thèse présentée et soutenue à São Paulo, 06 décembre 2018, par M. João SOARES DE OLIVEIRA NETO Composition du Jury : Edson SPINA Professeur adjoint, Universidade de São Paulo Président Isabela GASPARINI Professeur adjoint, Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina Rapporteur Thais Helena CHAVES DE CASTRO Professeur adjoint, Universidade Federal do Amazonas Rapporteur Nicolas SABOURET Professeur, Université Paris-Sud Examinateur Yolaine BOURDA PR2, CentraleSupélec Directeur de thèse Sergio TAKEO KOFUJI Professeur, Universidade de São Paulo Co-Directeur de thèse To Dona Deja, my mother, To Helton, inexhaustible sources of love and inspiration. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have accompanied me throughout the elaboration of this thesis. Without them, this experience would not have been as enriching and stimulating as it was. I would like to thank: Yolaine Bourda and Sergio Takeo Kofuji, my advisors, for the freedom they granted me, the inspiration, the challenges, the feedbacks, the motivation and all the support they have always provided to me; My collaborators: Fabio Nakano, José Jesus de Pérez-Alcazar, and Thyago Ribeiro from EACH-USP; André Luís Silva from UFS; Leda Sigrist, Maria Luisa Pereira, Willamo Eduardo Loureiro, and the other employees of the Secretariat for the Promotion of the Rights of People with Disabilities in Barueri, São Paulo; to my colleagues from PAD; to Professor Roseli de Deus Lopes and members of the Rede Acessibilidade; to Lionel Husson, Hélène Maynard, and members of the GT Handicap Paris-Saclay; My family: mother, sister, and brothers who have always supported and motivated me; My friends: Ismar and Júnior, Julio, Maurício, Solano and Felipe, Guacira, Paulo, Caio and Gi, and Valentin, for hosting me when I needed to go to São Paulo to solve some issues about my doctoral research and for always having supported me; Max, for reviewing the chapter with the main contributions of this thesis; Mariese, for helping me with calculations and statistics; Anderson (Dinho), for helping me edit some illustrations; Larissa, for the attention when reviewing the text in English; and all my friends who always asked about my thesis and gave me energy to carry on – especially Cibele and Creusa; Employees of the Universidade de São Paulo and Université Paris-Saclay: especially to Florence Goy, Anne Batalie, Fátima Domingues; and the SMART2 project team; Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB); Erasmus Mundus; and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); and Last, but definitely not least, Helton, for your support, patience, motivation, and all the nice moments together. Thank you all. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination (...). (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821) ABSTRACT Cities have employed technologies in several domains to improve the delivery of public services, attend citizens’ demands, and measure the consumption of natural resources. Known as Smart Cities, these initiatives aim to increase the overall citizens’ quality of life, and they have already had a positive impact on the way citizens interact with urban spaces, services, and with each other. On the other hand, urban spaces can be considered as a threat to the independence and autonomy of people with disabilities. In fact, according to the Social Approach, disability is not in the individual, but in society and the environment, which does not provide adequate conditions for the individual to fully participate and be a citizen of social, professional, educational, recreational activities, and so on. Society and the environment need to be corrected and their deficiencies compensated to include a significant portion of the population that is excluded from a range of activities when their abilities are not addressed in urban communication processes. Although this group of citizens has gained access to education, work and leisure, it is necessary to confront the city and all its challenges in order to enjoy these rights. Aiming to extend the benefits of Smart Cities to people with disabilities, we first proposed the idea of an Inclusive Smart City, which employs Smart Cities technology to provide a better urban experience for people with disabilities while overcoming accessibility barriers in urban spaces. To achieve this goal, we began using a multi-instrument approach to collect data from different stakeholders – people with disabilities, professionals that work with people with disabilities, accessibility-related experts, and policymakers –, aiming at understanding the obstacles that people with disabilities face when they are moving around the city, the strategies they use to solve unexpected problems, and how they interact with other people and with urban facilities. Based on an empirical observation, literature review and results collected using this multi- instrument approach, we first defined Inclusive Smart Cities. Then, we proposed some tools to support practitioners and researchers involved in the development of digital urban assistive technologies with the Inclusive Smart City’s vision in mind: a list of requirements, a political structure, an implementation/operation methodology, a business model, a conceptual model, and a system architecture. According to the conceptual model we introduced, people with disabilities are able to interact with inclusive smart objects that are available in urban spaces to obtain information about the environment around them, enabling them to navigate and explore cities in an innovative way. In Inclusive Smart Cities, inclusive smart objects provide people with disabilities with user-adapted information and services, focusing on the individuals’ abilities rather than their disabilities. Moreover, the system architecture is based on equipping users and the environment with smart technologies, aiming at supporting a symbiotic relationship between citizens and inclusive smart objects, a web-based user interface to enable public agents and local authorities to register and maintain the information required by the Inclusive Smart City platform, and the Cloud infrastructure, responsible for storing system data and processing user requests. Finally, we further demonstrated a Proof of Concept to assess the experience that people with disabilities would have when using an Inclusive Smart City solution. To accomplish that, we mapped a city block of Paulista Avenue, in São Paulo, Brazil, as a sequence of QR codes. In a simulated circuit, when users read each code, they received location-based information and services related to the object linked to the code. The participants evaluated the UrbanAssist application positively and recognized the relevance of the functionalities and resources provided by the application, which gave them an inventive interface to explore the urban environment in a new, safer and effective way. In conclusion, this new technology has the potential not only to improve the independence and autonomy of people with disabilities in urban spaces, but also to enable them to play a proactive role in society as a whole. Keywords: Accessibility, Smart Cities, People with Disabilities, Assistive Technology, Internet of Things. RESUMO As cidades têm empregado a tecnologia em diversos segmentos a fim de melhorar a qualidade de serviços prestados, para atender as demandas dos cidadãos, e para medir o consumo de recursos naturais. Conhecidas como Cidades Inteligentes, estas iniciativas buscam aumentar a qualidade de vida dos cidadãos, e já têm causado impactos positivos na maneira como os indivíduos interagem com o espaço urbano, com serviços, e com outros indivíduos. Por outro lado, o espaço urbano ainda é considerado como uma ameaça à autonomia e à independência de pessoas com deficiência. De fato, segundo o Modelo Social, a deficiência não está no indivíduo, mas na sociedade e no ambiente, que não fornecem condições apropriadas para que o cidadão participe inteiramente de