First meeting preparations

To go back to the mainpage: PRE2017 3 Groep6.

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Problem statement and objectives
Researching the positive and negative effects that the application of autonomous mobility scooters for elderly and disabled people could pose for both the users and their environments.
The following objectives can be pursued:

• Ensuring safe usage of mobility scooters for those in need of the technology.
• Making the public aware of how they can behave around and assist scooter-users.
• Make sure that wheelchair-salesmen are aware of the potential dangers of their product and communicate these to their customers.
  

Who are the users?
The primary users in this research are both elderly and disabled people who are no longer capable of traveling on foot, either for long distances or permanently.
Secondary users could be current caretakers of the primary usergroup, whose job could end up less intensive. Also, family and friends of primary users can be positively affected by increased social contact.

What do they require?
The primary users require safe but efficient means of mobility throughout their daily lives. They need to be able to provide for themselves in terms of household management, grocery shopping, posting letters, visiting the doctor and various other tasks. Secondary users require some relief from helping their disabled friends or family. They could spend more fun-time with them if they are not required to help with daily tasks.
Making the mobility scooters autonomous is a necessary step towards mass-scale adoption, considering most users are not known to be the most qualified drivers, and both physical and mental capabilities might be declining.

Approach, milestones and deliverables
(to be edited)
As an approach to our problem statement an obvious method would be creating a literature research paper. Lots of information is available from various resources and these combined should enable us to create a complete overview of the employment and use of autonomous mobility scooters, including al benefits and downsides they pose for both the users and their environments. Also, many ways of machine-to-machine communication can be researched in order to decide which would work best in our scenario. Should there be one central database that communicates with all scooters simultaneously, or should the scooters als communicate among themselves when near eachother? Which kind of updates and warnings should be generated and shared through the system?

Who's doing what?
(to be edited)
Currently, every teammember started out by looking up multiple articles and research papers that could be relevant for the project, in order to reach the amount of 25 we need according to the course manual. Also, we will all summarize our own findings on the wiki to enable the others to grasp the information in a timely manner.
The further task-division will be decided upon during our next meetup. For myself (Daan), I know that the field of machine-to-machine communication immediately grabs my attention. Researching the various ways this can be pursued and all the positive and negative consequences surrounding them is something I would love delving into. This has direct relevance towards my bachelor in Computer Science.