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EmoCyclingConcept – Smart and safe mobility – Workshop

Abstract

Safety is one of the most important goods we have these days. When it comes to traffic in our cities and the interactions between the different traffic participants it is especially the everyday cyclist whose need for safety is crucial. How can you measure a good feeling or perceived safety? One possibility is to do a survey for some specific routes through the cities. To get more detailed results you invert the idea of safety. You measure unsafety by collecting negative emotional experiences while cycling. But how is this done? The Department of Computer Aided Design in Urban Planning and Architecture (CPE) from the University of Kaiserslautern has dealt with this method for more than 5 years. Meanwhile we collected data in the context of accessibility of pedestrians (Bergner, et al. 2011) as well as cyclists (Buschlinger, et al. 2013) in different countries and with a variety of cooperations. Within the latest DFG-project “Urban Emotions”, over 75 cyclists have been measured. For this method, three different instruments are used: The main instrument is the “Smartband” (www.bodymonitor.de). It measures the galvanic skin response as well as the skin temperature to analyse the body signals. There is a special relation between psychological arousal and physiological reactions like the skin conductance and the temperature (Kreibig 2010). If you recognize this unique pattern, in which the level of skin conductance rises and the skin temperature decreases 3 seconds later, it can be interpreted as a “negative arousal” (Bergner et al. 2011). The body data is located with a GPS-tracker. For further analysis a GoPro records the trip. With the help of this setup, it is possible to identify severe problems (Rittel 1973), on which urban planners should react by trying to eliminate them. The project should be understood as a work for progressing research, dealing with the optimization of the method by testing in use cases

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