OmniAcc: Personalized Accessibility Assistant Using Generative AI
This addresses accessibility challenges for people with mobility impairments, offering a practical tool for navigation and urban planning.
The paper tackles the problem of navigation barriers for individuals with ambulatory disabilities by developing OmniAcc, an AI-powered system that identifies and maps wheelchair-accessible features like ramps and crosswalks, achieving 97.5% accuracy in crosswalk detection.
Individuals with ambulatory disabilities often encounter significant barriers when navigating urban environments due to the lack of accessible information and tools. This paper presents OmniAcc, an AI-powered interactive navigation system that utilizes GPT-4, satellite imagery, and OpenStreetMap data to identify, classify, and map wheelchair-accessible features such as ramps and crosswalks in the built environment. OmniAcc offers personalized route planning, real-time hands-free navigation, and instant query responses regarding physical accessibility. By using zero-shot learning and customized prompts, the system ensures precise detection of accessibility features, while supporting validation through structured workflows. This paper introduces OmniAcc and explores its potential to assist urban planners and mobility-aid users, demonstrated through a case study on crosswalk detection. With a crosswalk detection accuracy of 97.5%, OmniAcc highlights the transformative potential of AI in improving navigation and fostering more inclusive urban spaces.