Demand Collection System using LPWA for Senior Transportation with Volunteer

Recently, the transportation means of the elderly have been insufficient due to aging and depopulation, therefore, the area volunteers have provided the demand-responsive transport (DRT) for seniors such as senior transportation service and demand bus. However, the demands collection via telephone or mobile applications has problems: the telephone call imposes a heavy burden on volunteers, and the mobile applications hinder the elderly who are not using or familiar with smartphone from using the service. In this paper, we propose a pick-up demand collection system that easily collects the demands from the elderly and makes them visible to the transportation manager. To collect demands, we designed the demand transmission device having LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) and a user interface for the elderly. As a result of asking the elderly to operate our prototype demand transmission device, it was found that the operability was better for the elderly than the existing input interface with the smartphone. In addition, we confirmed that the transmission device can transmit the demands through repeater devices with multihop communication by LPWA even if the demand request is not directly reachable to gateway due to the influence of radio shielding objects.