"Lecture: Understanding and enhancing the interconnections between human experience and the built environment", part of "The future of Infrastructure today!" webinar series

Lecture date: Friday March 7, 2025, 9:00-10:00AM PST

"The future of Infrastructure today!” is a monthly webinar series under the Auspices of the UC Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure (https://smartinfrastructure.berkeley.edu/). 

The seventh webinar in the series is titled "Lecture: Understanding and enhancing the interconnections between human experience and the built environment" and is presented by Prof. Carol C. Menassa (PhD, F. ASCE, Professor and John L. Tishman Faculty Scholar, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan). A brief description of the webinar follows:

The lack of human-centric built environments can lead to problems such as sick building syndrome, lack of productivity, challenges in navigating unknown spaces and other difficulties that affect people of different abilities. Existing human-in-the-loop methods use intermittent human feedback and lack actionable methods for robust human status evaluation, preference identification and improvement of experience throughout life cycle phases of the built environment. Designing assistive robotic systems that are responsive to human status and needs in the built environment has the potential to solve these problems. In this presentation, I will discuss the work that my group is doing to enable independent mobility in people with physical disabilities (PPD). PPD who rely on wheelchairs in their daily activities, encounter several barriers to mobility in the built environment. A typical end-to-end (E2E) mobility scenario involves navigation (i.e., finding accessible routes) and maneuvering tasks (i.e., parking wheelchair in confined spaces). These scenarios demand substantial effort and pose safety and anxiety risks for PPD adversely affecting their quality of life. Prior research has had limited success in creating user-centered autonomy to enable PPD to independently control their E2E travel needs. My research group’s work on this project has resulted in frameworks that address the fundamental aspects of indoor path-planning, particularly in the context of considering human preferences or physical and social constraints present in the built environment. First, the work develops fundamental rules for creating indoor global and local planner algorithms that enable a shared control navigation platform capable of integrating human preferences in the navigation space. Second, my group has been exploring how brain computer interfaces (BCI) can further enhance the shared control experience in two ways: by allowing individuals to contribute to identifying inaccessible attributes in the built environment during their daily travel and integrate that information into any navigation algorithm; and by developing a BCI that allows PPD to control the speed of their wheelchair in the built environment giving them greater flexibility for hands free navigation.