NSF Convergence Accelerator Track H: Leveraging Human-Centered AI Microtransit to Ameliorate Spatiotemporal Mismatch between Housing and Employment for Persons with Disabilities

Persons with disabilities (PWD) have historically faced significant employment challenges mainly due to lack of transportation to employment-related Points of Interest (ePOIs) such as work, education, and training locations. Paratransit services that provide door-to-door and curb-to-curb services could alleviate the first/last mile problem. However, they often require submitting pick-up requests a few days to a few weeks in advance, which is not flexible enough to handle more urgent requests to arrive at ePOIs on time. A main reason for such temporal lags is the lack of accessible technology that helps make complex yet prompt decisions for the determination of pick-up/drop-off location, routing, scheduling, and re-routing. This project promotes disability inclusion in workplaces by enhancing the availability and reliability of paratransit services. Specifically, our vision is to deliver an open-source human-centered Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that aids microtransit services to determine when and where to pick up/drop off PWD, and incorporates near real-time routing algorithms to serve more urgent PWD requests between residential and ePOI-rich regions. This project will be built on the already established strong collaboration among several organizations operating in the Metro Detroit Area, including paratransit service providers, disability research institutions, workforce development institutions, outreach communication services, and Wayne State University. Specifically, in this project we plan to: (1) Organize outreach activities, focus groups, and workshops to involve more organizations, have a convergent stakeholder discussion to better understand their needs, how best to provide near real-time paratransit services to meet identified needs, and identify data and ePOIs for testing; (2) Study inflow and outflow of paratransit service demand across regions and accessibility for PWD in the identified service area; (3) Create measurement tools for success of our prototype for each stakeholder type (user, service provider, employers). The data and measurement tools generated by this project will shape the development and design of the proposed technology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.