Stockholm’s City Council, a member of our Living Labs Global initiative, declared in 1999 its intention to be the most accessible capital city in the world by 2010. To achieve this goal the Easy Access programme was started through the Stockholm Real Estate and Traffic Administration implementing different measures. Initially, investments were made into physical adaptations of pedestrian crossings, bus stops, playgrounds, installing ramps or hearing devices in public buildings.
Yet, these Easy Access measures failed to meet the needs of visually impaired, at 162 Million constituting about 1.7% of the world population, the local community petitioned to find better solutions. As a result, the digital pedestrian network programme was started in 2005 (now e-Adept).
Astando, a medium-sized company was commissioned to digitize the pedestrian road network and develop related services that could benefit the visually impaired. Two consultation meetings involving, amongst many others, the National Association of Blind and a newspaper for the visually impaired discussed the ideas for a navigation aid on mobile phones.
Shortly after, Astando carried out a pilot project together to investigate the possibilities to navigate using a mobile telephone and the pedestrian road network database. In the meantime, the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency offered development funding to launch the development of e-Adept.
Development work on this navigational aid was carried out working closely with over 200 visually impaired citizens to maximise impact, and in spring 2011 20 users tested e-Adept 24/7 for sustained periods. Involving the citizens helped to design the solution around their needs and brought to light their surprising capabilities. The speed at which users adopted e-Adept was quite astounding.
Today, in February 2012, 16 citizens in Stockholm live full time with e-Adept. For them, the solution has broken with a long history of dependence – imagine, asking for help on almost any step you take. This transformative freedom also has a significant business value. In Stockholm full deployment is expected to cost an annual EUR 365,000 with direct economic benefits projected to be EUR 16 Million. Stockholm is a relatively small city. In New York City 383,000 visually impaired citizens would see their lives transformed with economic benefits reaching into hundreds of millions of US Dollars in times of economic crisis.
Piloting and involving citizens not only brought a revolutionary service to our cities. The underlying digitized pedestrian roadmap inspired further innovations, most notably the “Billy Bike” Bicycle Route Planner, that uses the available data on pedestrian and bicycle routes (and not just the commonly available road maps) to provide efficient guidance to citizens and visitors moving in the city. In 2010, this solution became the City of Copenhagen’s favourite solution for the Future of Biking in the city.
Sascha Haselmayer is the General Director and Co-Founder of Living Labs Global and CityMart.com. Trained as an architect, he has dedicated his career to promote open markets and more accountable decision-making in cities, in particular in the high-impact area of technologies which should spread rapidly. He is an Ashoka Fellow, has published recent guidebooks on service innovation in cities and new trends in public procurement and has lectured widely around the world.
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