arXiv:2608. 14663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As global populations age, enhancing neighborhood walkability through inclusive urban design is important for mitigating built environment (BE) barriers that discourage physical activity and social participation among older adults.
arXiv:2608. 00815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The 15-minute city promotes access to everyday services within a short walk or bicycle ride, but its relationship with observed mobility remains difficult to quantify.
arXiv:2608. 06934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual perception of walkability varies substantially across individuals, reflecting differences in personal characteristics, experiences, and preferences.
arXiv:2606. 31207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid advance of smart cities increasingly depends on trajectory data mining, yet underrepresented demographic groups, particularly the elderly, are often sparsely represented in public mobility datasets.
arXiv:2602.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cycling is reported by an average of 35% of adults at least once per week across 28 countries, and as vulnerable road users directly exposed...
arXiv:2608.23531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Older adults recovering after lower-limb fracture or hip replacement may experience complex recovery trajectories. Most of the time, these clinical asp...
The study evaluates whether vision‑language models (VLMs) can reliably assess sidewalk accessibility attributes—effective width, longitudinal slope, cross slope, and pavement condition—from pedestrian‑level images. Using sampling‑based conformal prediction on 514 images from Seoul, the authors find that calibrated models achieve nominal 90% coverage, but only effective width yields informative estimates; other attributes remain too uncertain for compliance assessment. The work also demonstrates that raw sampling dispersion is not a trustworthy uncertainty measure without calibration and releases annotated images with ground‑truth measurements.
arXiv:2606. 15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
arXiv:2608.29110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The United States has allocated approximately $65 billion through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for broadband expansion, yet evidence-base...
BEACON is a tri‑modal contrastive learning framework that enriches AlphaEarth embeddings by aligning physical representations from Earth‑observation imagery with semantic POI text and human behavioral POI visitation data, while keeping the deployed model image‑only. In a Houston case study, BEACON outperformed six baselines on nine downstream tasks, achieving up to 43% higher R² for obesity prevalence, 34% for poor mental health, and 22% for median household income under a linear probe.
The paper introduces a vision‑language framework that extracts social indicators from street‑level imagery, converting panoramic views into sidewalk‑facing sideviews with timestamps. Using a VLM‑based activity detection system, it codes each pedestrian across ten observable dimensions, producing a Social Dwelling Index (SDI) that captures grouping, dwelling, activity diversity, and accessibility flags. Applied to over 100,000 sideviews in New York City, the study finds that pedestrian volume and SDI are only weakly correlated, indicating that high foot traffic does not necessarily equate to intense social activity.
arXiv:2607. 24795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Older adults' independent mobility enables out-of-home participation, well-being and health, yet pedestrian navigation systems still optimize primarily for distance or time, often overlooking barriers, safety thresholds, and supportive infrastructure that shape late-life walking decisions.
Housing-level urban physical examination is essential for identifying residential building problems and supporting targeted urban renewal. Existing automated inspection studies primarily rely on individual images and rarely examine whether surrounding urban functional context can provide supplementary information for building-level assessment.