Safefollowing: A collaborative model for public security agents to assist people with disabilities and the elderly

Abstract

In the last survey about the Brazilian population conducted by IBGE, more than 45.6 million of Brazilians declared that they have some kind of disability. Besides that, the same survey revealed that the number of elderly people has been increasing over the years and at that time it already represented 12.1 % of the total. In this scenario, public policies that can efficiently ensure the rights of this share of the population became even more necessary. In the same manner, with the popularization of mobile devices, opportunities to develop new solutions are arising, offering more independence and quality of life to them. Ubiquitous accessibility support solutions have been proposed, such as the MASC model, which resorts to the concept of smart assistive city. This article proposes the SafeFollowing, a model that enables integrated and collaborative acting of the community aiming to assist people with some kind of disability or elderly people. The SafeFollowing predicts the use of police cars mapping, to provide a specific follow-up in adverse daily situations. The validation of the model is also presented in the article, which was performed through experiments in real test scenarios.