A Collaborative Platform for the Detection of Non-inclusive Situations in Smart Cities.

The quality of daily life is a key factor in today’s urban development. This is a complex aspect, as different groups of citizens understand it quite differently and have different needs. This is particularly important for people with disabilities. When thinking about solutions for smart cities, there are a few approaches for the identification of the problems or obstacles that their implementation poses for different groups of people. Addressing this issue requires tools that provide an interdisciplinary perspective, so the proposed smart solutions really promote the improvement of the quality and well-being of all citizens in cities. In this line, this paper presents a tool that facilitates collaboration among stakeholders through identifying and analysing the elements that prevent a smart city solution from being inclusive. The platform is based on visual novels that illustrate how the solution would work in real settings. Users comment on the novel, play with it to discover and evaluate the solution, and propose changes. Then, a natural language processing engine analyses their comments, and returns the identified non-inclusive situations, ideas for improvement or solutions, and the degree of affinity that each participant has with each of them. The tool has been validated in a mobility scenario. There, three groups of people with different needs used the tool to identify obstacles and non-inclusive situations. The results have been used to assess and improve the tool.