FEMroute – Consideration of gender-specific requirements for mobile services
So far the producers of mobility supporting systems have often used little more than fancy packaging and design to reach out to female customers. The underlying software solutions, however, usually have been remained unchanged. Female-specific factors in spatial perception and navigation were either not considered sufficiently, or not at all. This ignores studies that have shown gender-specific differences concerning orientation and strategies of path-finding.
Project goals
The main goal of the project FEMroute is to integrate gender-specific factors in mobility supporting systems. FEMroute aims at advancing the degree of personalisation of such systems in order to support specific target groups in their mobility needs. Through the collection of gender-relevant requirements (Crowdsourcing), the fundamentals for target-oriented routing profiles are created. Furthermore, by means of user profiles the needs are described taxonomically and are weighted according to their relevance. The obtained target-oriented mobility criteria are used, on the one hand to enhance free geo databases (e.g. OpenStreetMap-Data) with this information (e.g. implementation of specific tags), while on the other hand mobility services are designed that are capable of creating target oriented routes and route descriptions based on these criteria. The described methods are evaluated with 6 test routes and 20 test persons in Vienna and Salzburg, which will allow conclusions concerning the expected adaptability and future potentials.
With its project activities FEMroute sets trends in research work concerning the field of personalisation of route planning systems and carries gender dimensions into existing research fields and the OpenStreetMap platform.
