Mobile crowdsourcing older people´s opinions to enhance liveability in regional city centres

With larger numbers of older people living longer, an increasing proportion of the population will require a more supportive and responsive regional city environment. However, regional local governments have neither the resources nor the appropriate tools needed to understand and respond to the infrastructure needs of older persons. As mobile devices such as tablets and phones proliferate, there is an opportunity to use mobile apps to engage older people more effectively with their local government associations in planning the future of their regional city centres. In this paper we discuss the potential of this application for crowdsourcing older people´s opinions as a form of community engagement. The application was developed in partnership with the Local Government Association and the partnership of the two regional local governments who participated in our pilot. We begin by describing the architecture of our platform, addressing choices regarding user interface design, modes and models for data capture, and standards guidelines. We then discuss methods we use for analyzing and visualizing the collected data to facilitate better decision making by governments. Lastly, we discuss the results of the field trials of our platform with mobile focus groups comprising senior citizens in two coastal regional cities in New South Wales, and interpret how our findings relate with the planning and development of these towns. Our work is the first step towards the use of mobile technologies to enable large scale data collection that can lead to smarter and more liveable cities for senior citizens.