Can wearable technologies contribute to an age-friendly walkability environment? First insights from a systematic review of the literature

Research on wearable devices and sensors applied to older adults has witnessed significant growth, primarily focusing on health monitoring but also on researching real-world applications of urban walking, specifically, walkability. The use of pedestrians’ bodily responses to the environment, known as the people-centric sensing strategy, has been demonstrated to be more suitable for detecting challenging environmental conditions and enhancing walkability. However, the extent to which such data may accurately pinpoint environmental distress in a particular demographic, such as older adults, has not been thoroughly investigated. The purpose of this in-progress systematic review of the literature is to outline the strategy employed and highlight some preliminary findings on the use of wearable sensors or sensor-based technologies in gathering the bodily responses of older adults and/or their family caregivers to stimuli originating from real urban walking scenarios. Our preliminary findings showed that the current research on using wearable devices to detect bodily responses in older adults (or informal caregivers) population in relation to walkability in outdoor environments tends to exhibit a uniform strategy, that is, collecting physiological and location data from older adults through controlled outdoor walking routes using wrist-wearable and GPS; training supervised classifiers to differentiate between physiological stress and non-stress signals to environmental conditions of external interaction; and finally, using hotspot analysis to group together individual physiological responses in areas with high-stress interactions with the external environment using GIS. Although the body of literature appears to be still in its early stages, using wearable sensors and a GIS-based approach could be a promising method for spatio-temporally capturing people’s direct bodily responses to the environmental stressors, and this offer rooms for potential integration of simulation-based models into Digital Twins environments with GIS-based analysis to further enhance our understanding of older adults mobility in urban settings. However, our preliminary findings indicates a gap in the research regarding the detection of bodily responses to stimuli on outdoor walking paths using wearable sensors, specifically among informal carers.