Walking is the most basic means of transportation. Therefore, continuous management of the walking environment is very important. In particular, the identification of environmental barriers that can impede walkability is the first step in improving the pedestrian experience. Current practices for identifying environmental barriers (e.g., expert investigation and survey) are time-consuming and require additional human resources. Hence, we have developed a method to identify environmental barriers based on information entropy considering that every individual behaves differently in the presence of external stimuli. The behavioral data of the gait process were recorded for 64 participants using a wearable sensor. Additionally, the data were classified into seven gait types using two-step k-means clustering. It was observed that the classified gaits create a probability distribution for each location to calculate information entropy. The values of calculated information entropy showed a high correlation in the presence or absence of environmental barriers. The results obtained facilitated the continuous monitoring of environmental barriers generated in a walking environment.
Keywords: environmental barrier; inertial measurement unit (imu); information entropy; k-means clustering; walkability; wearable sensor.