Preliminary Exploration and Evaluation of Smart Support for Homeless Community

Abstract

Nowadays, the homeless situation is getting worse especially under the pandemic. The rates of homelessness in the United States have expanded by over 130 percent in just the past two years. Our society has been highly changed and our life quality has significantly improved thanks to technologies like Artificial Intelligence in nearly a decade. However, for people experiencing homelessness, and other such vulnerable groups are under social circumstances lacking humanistic consideration and facing moral issues. Over the past few years, many policies, technologies and approaches have been developed in directions like developing information-collecting platforms, building and classifying emergency shelters and creating robots dedicated to solving comprehensive problems to help people overcome the influences of poverty, illness and unaffordable housing that lead to homelessness, but the actions are never enough because of the partial absence of their focus on user experience, insufficient scope of application and the difficulty of promotion. Under this comprehensive circumstance of the crisis of homelessness, in this paper, we explore homeless status, difficulties and both internal and external challenges with their actual need and various technical solutions. More importantly, we are trying to analyze reasons for not being able to help homeless solve problems and evaluate breakthroughs in application and promotion, summarizing existing technologies and future innovations, proposing possible direction of improvement with a perspective of promoting sustainable development, universal design, and communicative action to help the homeless in various situations.