SafeStep: AI-powered Travel Assistance for Elderly People with Frailty or Dementia

More than a million people in the UK suffer from frailty or dementia, which severely compromise their ability to travel in urban environments.

This paper presents SafeStep, an AI-driven travel system that assists elderly users with their journeys.

At the core of SafeStep is a novel travel graph representation, which integrates route planning with predictive modelling.

For each stage of a journey, the system (i) generates personalized failure scenarios using a combi-nation of LLMs and the Anticip8 behavioral prediction engine, (ii) proposes targeted interventions, and (iii) estimates the impact of interventions on out-come probabilities.

This enables SafeStep to select interventions that maximize the likelihood of the person reaching their destination.

SafeStep was evaluated through experiments on travel graph generation and a field study involving 26 real-world journeys.

Results showed that combining Anticip8 for failure pre-diction with GPT-based models for intervention evaluation yields the most re-liable performance.

User feedback indicated that SafeStep improves confidence and perceived safety during travel, although interface usability needs to be im-proved for the target demographic.

In the future, we would like to improve and release SafeStep.

The AI system that was developed for SafeStep could be ap-plied in other areas, such as mental health, career coaching and addiction treatment.