Identifying motion and interest patterns of shoppers for developing personalised wayfinding tools

The development of wayfinding and information tools for pedestrians faces several challenges. In contrast to common navigation tools used for vehicles, navigation services for pedestrians must fulfil more complex requirements in order to be accepted. For pedestrians, the shortest path does not always represent the optimal route for an individual´s purposes, as studies have revealed that people often forgo to take the shortest path and prefer the `most beautiful´, `most convenient´ or `safest´ path. People exploring a new environment on foot would therefore especially benefit from systems providing information concerning route qualities, interesting facilities in the vicinity and other useful location-related suggestions. As part of the scientific project `UCPNavi´, we investigate group-specific spatio-temporal behaviour and related influence factors of shoppers in order to identify homogeneous behaviour types based on motion patterns and information requirements. We use an eclectic approach combining several complementary empirical methods of data collection and analysis to thoroughly comprehend pedestrian spatio-temporal behaviour. In this contribution, we present results of motion and interview data analysis based on data collected from more than 100 participants during two empirical phases on a shopping street in Vienna. We further introduce an initial pedestrian typology comprising five different homogeneous behaviour types based on qualitative-interpretative and quantitative-statistical data. Types are described according to characteristic attributes identified by route choice behaviour, walking patterns and interest foci. The relevant factors include velocities, stopping behaviour, categories of visited facilities and individual preferences. The resulting typology of lifestyle-based pedestrian mobility styles and the identified characteristic attributes can serve as a basis to create pedestrian interest profiles in ubiquitous environments and to customise navigational and environmental information for mobile applications in order to fulfil individual needs.