PureNav: A Personalized Navigation Service for Environmental Justice Communities Impacted by Planned Disruptions

Planned disruptions such as highway constructions are commonplace nowadays and the communities living near these disruptions generally tend to be environmental justice communities -- low socioeconomic status with disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects. A major concern is that such activities negatively impact people's well-being by disrupting their daily commutes via frequent road closures and increased dust and air pollution. This paper addresses this concern by developing a personalized navigation service called PureNav to mitigate the negative impacts of disruptions in daily commutes on people's well-being. PureNav has been designed using active engagement with four environmental justice communities affected by major highway construction. It has been deployed in the real world among the members of the four communities, and a detailed analysis of the data collected from this deployment as well as surveys show that PureNav is potentially useful in improving people's well-being. The paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of PureNav, and offers suggestions for further improving its efficacy.
Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)