2019 Volume 6 Pages 96-110
This paper examines the relationship between the knowledge of one’s current location shown by GPS and anxiety. Pedestrian navigation systems on smartphones are assumed to enable us to visualize our current location and make route searches while walking much easier, although the relationship with our mental state while walking has not been studied in detail. In order to investigate how mental states differ while walking when using pedestrian navigation systems or maps for route searches while walking, we applied protocol analysis to the differences in remarks made by subjects while walking towards a destination in a real urban space. The results showed no large difference in the ratio of the number of anxious remarks between the use of maps and the use of pedestrian navigation tools. The points at which anxiety occurred depended on the tool used, and the pedestrian navigation did not necessarily reduce the anxiety of users compared with when using a conventional map. These results suggest that the hypothesis in this research that pedestrian navigation systems, which are usually considered to be convenient, may raise different types of anxiety in the users’ minds from paper maps is reasonable.
