Investigating the Relation between Walkability and the Changes in Pedestrian Policy through Wearable Sensing
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors present a study on correlating walkability quality in a urban environment with gait measurement gathered from smartphones during real world experiment.
The article is well structured and the authors describe well what they want to achieve. The methodology is clear and it can be understood easily. The results are also matching their hypothesis.
There are few points to be improved. First, there should be a more comprehensive related work discussion. For example, one of the co-author has a similar article on MDPI sustainability (Kim, H. Wearable Sensor Data-Driven Walkability Assessment for Elderly People. Sustainability 2020, 12, 4041. ). I would suggest the author to report the difference with previous work from them and from the research community.
Further, the “literary” aspect of the text can be improved. There are too many long sentences and too many passive forms. When the two appear together, a sentence become very hard to digest. I would suggest the authors to have an extensive proof-read of the article. Sometimes there are also repetition of sentences.
The sentence in the introduction “Studies concerning Japan have also been conducted” has no reference and not much context.
Some references used to show a trend are a bit old (more than a decade) (e.g., references [12,13]). Can the authors find more recent works?
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
The authors wish to thank the reviewer for his/her time and effort in reviewing this manuscript. We hope the changes listed have made the manuscript suitable for publication and the authors looks forward to your response.
Please see the attached.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper describes a study that can be summarized through the following 5 steps: 1) first the policy changes related to Korea Nation are considered to improve the pedestrians’ right to walk; 2) second, urban environments built at a time when policy changes are evident are selected; 3) third, data on gait patterns are collected in the individual urban environments; 4) fourth, the collected data are analyzed to calculate the repeatability of the gait pattern and quantify it; 5) finally, the changes in the system are compared using the gait patterns of the actual pedestrians and their associations are examined.
In a few words, this study quantifies gait patterns collected through IMU sensors built into smartphones and examines the relationship between their values and the changes in the walking environment according to policy changes.
From a quick check in the main scientific journals it is evident that this research area is greatly investigated by scholars. It is therefore very difficult to provide an innovative scientific contribution.
Based on my scientific skills I can say that this study has some limits especially from the point of view of the experimental setup. In fact, when a person. The measurements made using the IMU sensor are considerably conditioned by the positioning of the smartphone on the body of the observed subject. For example, a further experiment that would greatly enrich the paper is to compare the measurements in the selected sites as the sensor position on the body varies.
A very important question for the authors is: the walkability is only influenced by road conditions? Moreover, how age affects the measurements? In a review of the paper, I would take these issues into account.
Other considerations:
1) For reference [9] and [10] it is advisable to headline strenght and weakness as described for reference [11];
2) DTW is a well known algorithm, so the authors could avoid describing the theoretical aspects in the paper, just a reference is needed;
3) Improve the quality of Figure 4, the characters are too small to read.
Some minor typos:
In general never insert "," before and;
row 84 : (inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor) change in :(inertial measurement unit – IMU)
row 92: delete the ripetition
row 152: it is not clear the sentence: “Currently, it is classified as an old city center (underdeveloped area) in the 2030 Seongnam City Basic Plan for Urban and Residential Environment Improvement”.
row 168: it instead It
row 170: "weparated" what does he means? I thinh that the right word is "separated"
row 211: "The location of and distance" ...is correct?
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
The authors wish to thank the reviewer for his/her time and effort in reviewing this manuscript. We hope the changes listed have made the manuscript suitable for publication and the authors looks forward to your response.
Please see the attached.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have addressed all my comments.
However there are some errors in the written sentence, especially in the new generated text:
line 507: the MaxLE algorithm can an advanteagous….
Line 510: This is a study in which In this study,
Reviewer 2 Report
Following the significant improvements made, the paper in my opinioncan be published in the journal
