Social and Active Inclusion of the Elderly in the City Through Affective Walkability

The development of cities aware of the needs of all citizens is a priority, especially in the case of elderly people. In this context, particular attention should be paid to the analysis of walkability. It has been proved that performing walking activities produces significant benefits both for physical and mental health, above all in elderly subjects. Besides traditional criteria adopted to evaluate walkability, we here propose a novel approach defined affective walkability. Being able to interpret the emotions of elderly walking in the urban environment and interacting with vehicles and other citizens, it is possible to evaluate if and to which extent an environment is perceived safe, comfortable and walkable. One way to obtain quantitative measures of walkability is to assess safety perception relying on physiological signals that can be considered indicators of emotions and mood. The assessment of affective walkability requires the design and performance of rigorous experiments to properly collect data. In this paper, the proposal of an affective walkability is presented and the developed experimental protocols, their performance and preliminary results are illustrated.