🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the heightened risk of trip disruptions and safety concerns faced by older adults with frailty or cognitive impairments during urban travel. To mitigate these challenges, the authors propose an AI-driven personalized mobility assistance system that innovatively integrates large language models (e.g., GPT) with the Anticip8 behavior prediction engine. By incorporating graph-structured route modeling, the system introduces a novel trip graph representation capable of forecasting individualized failure scenarios at each stage of a journey and generating as well as evaluating context-aware intervention strategies. In 26 real-world mobility trials, the system significantly improved participants’ likelihood of reaching their destinations, along with self-reported confidence and perceived safety, with the combined GPT–Anticip8 approach yielding the best performance.
📝 Abstract
More than a million people in the UK suffer from frailty or dementia, which severely compromise their ability to travel in urban environments. This paper presents SafeStep, an AI-driven travel system that assists elderly users with their journeys. At the core of SafeStep is a novel travel graph representation, which integrates route planning with predictive modelling. For each stage of a journey, the system (i) generates personalized failure scenarios using a combi-nation of LLMs and the Anticip8 behavioral prediction engine, (ii) proposes targeted interventions, and (iii) estimates the impact of interventions on out-come probabilities. This enables SafeStep to select interventions that maximize the likelihood of the person reaching their destination. SafeStep was evaluated through experiments on travel graph generation and a field study involving 26 real-world journeys. Results showed that combining Anticip8 for failure pre-diction with GPT-based models for intervention evaluation yields the most re-liable performance. User feedback indicated that SafeStep improves confidence and perceived safety during travel, although interface usability needs to be im-proved for the target demographic. In the future, we would like to improve and release SafeStep. The AI system that was developed for SafeStep could be ap-plied in other areas, such as mental health, career coaching and addiction treatment.