Policy and Innovation Alignment Analysis for Cross-Referencing Shanghai's Barrier-Free Mobility

Despite increasing policy attention to age friendly and disability focused initiatives, urban mobility systems remain insufficiently aligned with universal design principles and a comprehensive barrier free mobility paradigm capable of ensuring inclusive access for all citizens. This requires addressing the needs of five key groups whose challenges are often overlooked in planning (1) individuals with permanent or temporary disabilities; (2) older adults; (3) pregnant women, infants, and children under five; (4) foreign tourists and visitors facing language or cultural barriers; (5) future autonomous travelers, including delivery robots and assistive robots. The central challenge is not a shortage of policy goals or technological know-how, but a critical misalignment between them. Addressing this, we propose a systematic text mining-driven policy-innovation alignment study to investigate this misalignment. We demonstrate this through a case study of Shanghai, China, cross-referencing policy objectives for barrier-free navigation against the landscape of technological innovation (through patents). Through the application case, we are able to identify areas of alignment and policy-technology deserts, i.e., the areas where a lack of landscape support exists for the defined barrier-free groups.