Viamigo: A Monitoring Tool to Support Independent Traveling of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Persons with intellectual disabilities (PwID) often aspire to being more socially included by engaging in more community activities, but encounter (social) barriers when travelling independently. Therefore, PwID are often accompanied by family members, friends or volunteers while travelling. In order to both support the independent outdoor mobility of PwID themselves and to reduce the caregivers’ burden, the geographic information system (GIS)-based application “Viamigo” was developed (www.viamigo.be), by which an individual can be monitored by a personal coach in real-time from a distance. The goal is that PwID are taught a known individual route, which they can accomplish independently afterwards while being monitored by a personal coach – being a caregiver, family member or friend, taking care of this individual while making the trip. Viamigo determines the location of the user and compares this in time and space within a predetermined range, and automatically sends notifications to the coach in case of deviation from the route, an incorrect speed, entering and/or leaving a safe or dangerous zone, among others. Besides this ‘on route’ functionality, Viamigo also allows to create geofences around destinations (to monitor if the user stays within a predefined zone) and to start emergency tracking. The initial results are promising, as PwID successfully used Viamigo for a heterogeneous set of trips: trips performed by several travel modes (bus, cycling and walking trips), for several activity purposes (both daily recurrent trips to the day centre as trips for shopping, social and recreational purposes), and for different distances.