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The purpose of this paper is to explore the actual walking distance to public transport (PuT) stations and to report passenger perceptions on route choice.

A systematic case study has been conducted after administrating a tailor-made paper-based intercept survey in a German city (Munich). It can determine the interrelation between the accessibility of the transit service and evaluation on walking distance acceptance. Statistical analysis and geo-spatial approach were completed for obtaining major findings.

Statistical and geo-spatial analysis shows that respondents living in low-density areas walk longer than residents living in nearby inner city areas. In terms of PuT modes, residents walk longer for suburban train and subway/metro (U-Bahn) than for bus/tram services. Transit users accept a longer walking distance to reach a train station than other PuT modes and they choose the most direct and quickest route to reach PuT stations.

Findings of this study would help to formulate future strategies and standards for the sustainable planning of public transportation systems in the context of Munich and many other cities around the globe with similar conditions. However, future research should be conducted using a large-scale survey for evaluating the comprehensive picture of walking patterns to PuT stations. Accessibility to PuT stations can also be modeled and evaluated by adopting open data and voluntary social media information. Unfortunately, this study only presents a partial evaluation of walking focused on accessibility at selected PuT stations in different settings of the urban fabric.

This empirical study can be considered as an initial finding in the favor of the city transport authority to provide a design scale for improved accessibility of transit users; however, further investigation should be conducted using a large-scale survey for evaluating the comprehensive walking patterns.

A systematic case study has been conducted after administrating a tailor-made paper-based intercept survey in a German city (Munich). Findings of this study would help to formulate future strategies and standard for the sustainable planning of the public transportation system in the context of Munich and many other cities in the globe with similar conditions.

The most sustainable forms of urban mobility are walking and cycling. These modes of transportation are the most environmental friendly, the most economically viable and the most socially inclusive and engaging modes of urban transportation. To measure and compare the effectiveness of alternative pedestrianization or cycling infrastructure plans, the authors need to measure the potential flows of pedestrians and cyclists. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors have developed a computational methodology to predict walking and cycling flows and local centrality of streets, given a road centerline network and occupancy or population density data attributed to building plots.

The authors show the functionality of this model in a hypothetical grid network and a simulated setting in a real town. In addition, the authors show how this model can be validated using crowd-sensed data on human mobility trails. This methodology can be used in assessing sustainable urban mobility plans.

The main contribution of this paper is the generalization and adaptation of two network centrality models and a trip-distribution model for studying walking and cycling mobility.

This study aims to validate a model for estimating platoon delay due to pedestrian crossing for use in Kuwait City.

The model was modified slightly for the scenario used in Kuwait, in which the presence of raised crosswalk meant that all incoming traffic would slow down automatically. Using video footage to observe the site, several variables were collected, and a model was used to calculate the delays suffered by the vehicles because of pedestrian crossing. The model was validated using the actual footage and manual observation to measure the delays.

The model showed a good match fit to the observed data, as the average delays differed by 22.5% between the two methods. Following the comparison, a sensitivity analysis was made on three variables: the acceleration rate, deceleration rate, as well as the pedestrian walking time. The analysis has shown that deceleration rate has approximately twice the effect on the model than the acceleration rate has. It has also shown that the pedestrian walking time has a major effect on the model, in an almost one-to-one correlation. A 50% change of the pedestrian walking time is associated with approximately 50% change in the model’s output delay.

A model for estimating platoon delay because of pedestrian crossing was validated for use in Kuwait City. The model was modified slightly for the scenario used in Kuwait, in which the presence of raised crosswalk meant that all incoming traffic would slow down automatically.

This study aims to establish a Japanese-style healthcare program customized for Japan and Asia under ISO 9001: 2008 (ISO: International Organization for Standardization) to improve problem areas and to inspect the effectiveness of the program. Furthermore, the authors wanted to create this health program using the ISO widely available in Asian countries and make an international contribution.

The authors implemented a 6- to 10-month health program in Minowa Town, Matsumoto City and Nagano City in Japan. This study assessed findings from pedometric, anthropometric and blood pressure measurements and physical fitness, blood chemistry and brain function tests.

The comparisons were made by examining the interaction effects between groups of participants. Groups from three regions in Japan showed significant differences on the physical fitness tests; regarding the 10-meter obstacle walk, the results of the Minowa participants showed the greatest improvement and the Matsumoto participants showed the second greatest improvement. In the six-min walk, the time of the Minowa participants significantly improved.

This health education program, which has been conducted by the Japanese authors since 1998, measures anthropometry, brain function and physical fitness and performs blood tests before and after the program and it measures energy consumption with a pedometer during the program. With the aim of improving exercise via encouragement from friends and a sense of community with fellow participants, participants learn together with hands-on training in tai chi and aerobics about the importance of ongoing exercise and proper nutrition. This health education met the Health Education ISO in 2014.

Since 2010, Nagano Prefecture, including Minowa Town, Matsumoto City and Nagano City, where our study was carried out, has been the area with the highest life expectancy rates in Japan.

The authors want to make this health promotion through ISO widely available in Asian countries and an international contribution.

This study aimed to appropriately establish a Japanese-style healthcare program under the ISO 9001:2008 to improve problem areas and inspect its effectiveness.

Mobile phone-based human activity recognition (HAR) consists of inferring user’s activity type from the analysis of the inertial mobile sensor data. This paper aims to mainly introduce a new classification approach called adaptive k-nearest neighbors (AKNN) for intelligent HAR using smartphone inertial sensors with a potential real-time implementation on smartphone platform.

The proposed method puts forward several modification on AKNN baseline by using kernel discriminant analysis for feature reduction and hybridizing weighted support vector machines and KNN to tackle imbalanced class data set.

Extensive experiments on a five large scale daily activity recognition data set have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in terms of error rate, recall, precision, F1-score and computational/memory resources, with several comparison with state-of-the art methods and other hybridization modes. The results showed that the proposed method can achieve more than 50% improvement in error rate metric and up to 5.6% in F1-score. The training phase is also shown to be reduced by a factor of six compared to baseline, which provides solid assets for smartphone implementation.

This work builds a bridge to already growing work in machine learning related to learning with small data set. Besides, the availability of systems that are able to perform on flight activity recognition on smartphone will have a significant impact in the field of pervasive health care, supporting a variety of practical applications such as elderly care, ambient assisted living and remote monitoring.

The purpose of this study is to build and test an accurate offline model by using only a compact training data that can reduce the computational and memory complexity of the system. This provides grounds for developing new innovative hybridization modes in the context of daily activity recognition and smartphone-based implementation. This study demonstrates that the new AKNN is able to classify the data without any training step because it does not use any model for fitting and only uses memory resources to store the corresponding support vectors.

The paper aims to identify and analyze passengers’ riding paths for providing better operational support for digital transformation in megacity metro systems.

The authors develop a method to leverage certain passengers’ deterministic riding paths to corroborate other passengers’ uncertain paths. Using Automatic Fare Collection data and train schedules, a witness model is built to recover the actual riding paths for passengers whose paths are unknown otherwise. The identification and analysis of passenger riding paths between three different types of origin–destination) pairs reveal the complexity of passenger path choice.

The results show that passenger path choice modeling is usually characterized by complexity, experience and partial blindness. Some passengers choose paths that are not optimal due to their experience and limited access to overall metro system information. These passengers could be the subject of improved path guidance in light of riding efficiency improved through digital transformation.

This research contributes to the improvement of metro management and operations by leveraging ongoing digital transformation in megacity metro systems. Based on the riding paths and trip chains of a large number of individual passengers identified by the proposed method, metro operation management could prevent risks in areas with concentrated passenger flow in advance, optimally adjust train schedules on a daily basis and deliver real-time riding guidance station by station, which would greatly improve megacity metro systems’ service safety, quality and operational efficacy over time.

Despite the fact that there being a large literature on simulation, there is as yet no generic paradigm or architecture to develop a three-dimensional (3-D) simulator which depends on autonomous intelligent objects. This has motivated us to introduce a 3-D simulation system based on intelligent objects for Physics Experimentation. We formulated the system’s components as an object-orientation model. So, the entities in every experiment’s work cell are modeled by characterizing their properties and functions into classes and objects of the system hierarchy. Intelligent objects are realized by developing a knowledge base (KB) that captures a set of rules/algorithms that operate on 3-D objects. Rules fall into two categories: action and property rules. In the simulation layer, the student is allowed, by using the virtual system, to stroll throughout the Physics laboratory in light of a walking model. Student gets to a simulation region to do an experiment through the detection of mathematical collision. From software engineering perspective, the proposed system facilitates the Physics experiment through making the specification of its applicable parts more modular and reusable. Moreover, a major pedagogical objective is achieved by permitting the student tuning parameters, fixing component of a device then visualizing outputs. This provides student well interpretation by viewing how distinct parameters affect the outcomes of the experiment. With the objective of student performance measuring, we utilized an exploratory group relying upon pre- and post-testing. The application results demonstrate that the simulator contributes positively to student performance in regard to practical Physics.

Free guided walking tours are one of the most successful tourism segments in the digital platform economy. It is beginning to be associated with negative impacts in some of the destinations where it is spreading rapidly. Although the platform economy is generating increasing academic interest, the free tour model remains largely unexplored area in the literature. This study aims to examine how such activity affects cultural destinations.

Focussing on the largest Free Tours platform operating in Spain, GuruWalk, the methodology used analyses its impact in six cultural destinations on two of the sustainability dimensions: the territorial dimension and the governance, through an exploratory study.

The findings help to understand the differences that such activity generates in each destination depending on the phase of its life cycle, and to implement, if necessary, corrective measures. The research confirms that the impacts differ according to the tourist destination’s maturity, concluding that such activity contributes to the increase of tourist agglomerations and the overcrowding of cultural destinations in their middle and mature life cycles. The findings highlighted the importance of the role of local governance on free tour activity.

The main contribution is the association of the impacts they produce (especially in terms of massification) with destination life cycle phases. There were no similar precedents with a spatial or territorial analysis to reliably demonstrate not only that this activity has an impact on the territory but also what type of impact is produced.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology for shaping the tourist spatial identity of the city and to take advantage of it to discover alternative urban outdoor spaces. As the number of indoor visitors has been limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic, open urban areas such as streets, squares and parks have become more important tourist locations.

The assessment methodology consists of two basic steps. In the first step, the authors look for places or points that are carriers of spatial identity. For this purpose, the method of mental mapping is used. In the second step, statistical methods are used to evaluate the spatial suitability for the most common tourist activities. To obtain a holistic picture, a temporal component is included.

The application of the methodology is presented in the form of a case study. The obtained research results provide an insight into the spatial situation of the city of Maribor (Slovenia, Europe). Tourist spatial identity of a city depends on time. Based on the value of spatial sensitivity indicator and the suitability of activities, it is possible to adapt the tourist offer to the temporal component.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is an original perspective on the spatial identity of tourists. The presented approach could be integrated as a good practice in any other city worldwide. It supports the identification of suitable outdoor tourist places that are memorable, cosy, multifunctional and can be recommended by city guides (mobile or printed books). Every city has many hidden gems that tourists have yet to discover.

This paper provides a methodological map for guiding the choice and application of research paradigms and design frames that can be of value to a wide range of researchers in the fields of education, social sciences and interdisciplinary studies who are interested in teaching and learning in context. Following an interpretivist/constructivist paradigm, I used a mixed methods research approach to study the spatial experiences of Emirati female students in a gender--‐ segregated educational context. The main component was qualitative, using ethnography, while the quantitative part included a survey. In such a research approach, my reflexivity and unique positionality as both insider and outsider played a significant role. The paper is divided into three sections: the beginning, which justifies the choice and philosophies of the methodological route; the journey, which illustrates the data collection techniques; and the destination, containing reflexive lessons from the field.