Designing and Evaluating Barrier-Free Travel Assistance Services

Using public means of transport implies making travel arrangements. Passengers have to study route schedules and are required to obtain tickets. For these tasks (mobile) assistance services already enable travelers to comfortably compile their journeys online. Nevertheless, we consider these services inadequate providing complicated interfaces with proprietary handling concepts. People are supposed to operate technical systems and negotiate through a jungle of tariffs, although these tasks could be automated without requiring users’ attention. The Be-In/Be-Out (BIBO) principle implements this consideration and enables hands-free interaction for all travelers (especially handicapped people) automatically obtaining their rights to use means of transport while boarding. The infrastructure in the vehicles detects the presence of passengers and initiates invoicing in the background. We have developed a prototypical BIBO system including elaborated privacy concepts for multimodal barrier-free transport and have been evaluating user acceptance against the background of the transparent passenger. As a result, users confirm simplification of service consumption, convenience of use, efficiency and time