Personalized Tourist Guide for People with Autism

Abstract

Cultural Heritage exploration is interesting for the development of inclusive tourist guides because it exposes visitors to different types of challenges, from steering content recommendation to visitors' interests and cognitive capabilities, to the suggestion of places that can be effectively reached and visited under different types of constraints: e.g., temporal and physical ones. In this work we are interested in the needs of people with Autism in order to support them in the exploration of a geographic area. Specifically, this paper presents a mobile tourist guide that we are developing to help people in visiting new places. The app is an evolution of PIUMA (Personalised Interactive Urban Maps for Autism), conceived to help autistic citizens in their everyday movements. It shows a map tailored to users with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In particular, it presents a personalized selection of safe Points of Interest, i.e., places that are, at the same time, interesting for the user and have "safe" characteristics from the sensory point of view, such as being quiet, scarcely crowded, or with smooth lights. In this paper, we present how we intend to extend PIUMA to support tourists.