Requirements of Transport Information Service and Route Guidance Service for Older Adults Jia Zhou, Pei-Luen Patrick Rau, Qin Gao, Ju Qin, Qingzi Liao Department of Industrial Engineering Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China This study aims to acquire the requirements of older adults for transport information service and route guidance service. The objectives include: 1) to understand the difficulties of older adults when they take a trip and find a route; 2) to find out necessary and unnecessary functions; 3) to recommend what functions should be added. Previous studies showed older adults had poorer navigation performance in terms of longer task completion time, more errors and more disorientation. Multimodal presentation could help them construct landmark knowledge. 9 older adults aged between 68 and 75 participated in two focus group discussions. The discussion procedure included five major sections: the warm-up and introduction, use case description, individual assessment, group discussion and feedback. After detailed description of each function of the two services, they individually rated its necessity. Then they discussed with others about whether they need certain function and what functions should be added. Results show that, first, pre-trip information and real-time positioning function are perceived very necessary. Second, older adults tend to rely on landmark. Multimodal presentation of landmark was desired. Third, additional functions suggested by older adults were collected, such as information about possible risk. Finally, older adults were more likely to use navigation aids in a short-range trip instead of a long-range trip. INTRODUCTION Population aging is a worldwide trend in the 21st century. The percentage of older adults aged above 60 will increase from 21% in 2005 to 32% in 2050 for developed countries, and from 8% to 20% for developing countries over the same period (World economic and social survey 2007:Development in an ageing world 2007). Information technology is a potential solution to help older adults lead an independent and autonomous life. Mobility of older adults relates to wellbeing and quality of life. As the mobile devices become more and more popular, they can be a platform for various services, therefore, could enhance mobility of older adults. There are abundant researches on navigation guidance system, but the most of them fail to consider the special requirements of older adults. As a part of project OASIS (Open Architecture for Accessible Services Integration and Standardisation), this study starts with use case development, followed by focus group discussions to gather specific requirements of older adults. Finally, implications for services that assist older adults to take a trip and find a route are discussed. LITERATURE REVIEW Navigation Performance In real environment, older adults are less skilled in learning specific environmental layout than younger adults (Kirasic, 2000). They are less accurate in distance estimation along routes from discontinuous slides (Kirasic & Bernicki, 1990), and have poorer performance in memorizing the route (Caplan & Lipman, 1995). In virtual environment, poorer navigation performance of older adults is seen in desktop environment (Sayers, 2004) and mobile environment (Ziefle & Bay, 2005; Ziefle, Schroeder, Strenk, & Michel, 2007). They need more task completion time, more detour steps and returns (Sjölinder, 2006; Sjölinder, Höök, Nilsson, & Andersson, 2005; Ziefle & Bay, 2005; Ziefle et al., 2007), and more blind clicks (Ziefle et al., 2007), and are easier to get lost (Zaphiris, 2001). Spatial Knowledge Spatial knowledge is learned through travelling in real environment and spatial information such as maps, visual and verb description (Munzer, Zimmer, Schwalm, Baus, & Aslan, 2006; Peruch, Belingard, & Thinus-Blanc, 2000). High quality or detailed spatial information contributed to better transformation of spatial knowledge from virtual to real environment than that of large quantity (Peruch et al., 2000). Poorer spatial knowledge of older adults is seen in a physical environment, 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional virtual environment. Navigation in natural environment involves landmark knowledge, procedural knowledge (or route knowledge), and survey knowledge (or configural knowledge), (Ziefle & Bay, 2004). In two dimensional virtual environments, older adults (Range=50-64) had inferior landmark knowledge, route knowledge, and survey