How age-related constraints reshape transport disadvantage in dynamic railway information systems: Evidence from virtual aging simulation

In South Korea, railway stations provide an important setting for examining information accessibility because travelers must search for and interpret dynamically updated information while moving. Age-related physical and visual constraints may make this process more difficult, but quantitative evidence on these effects remains limited. This study combined an aging simulation suit with a virtual-reality (VR) railway-station experiment in which 41 adults completed a within-subject platform-identification task under no-suit and aging-simulation conditions. Behavioral and questionnaire outcomes were analyzed using all 41 participants, while gaze and pupil outcomes were analyzed using 37 participants after excluding four sessions affected by eye-tracker calibration failure from eye-tracking-derived analyses. Total task duration increased by 31.47 s under the aging-simulation condition, with increases in both moving time and stop-related time. Participants approached the board more closely and showed more concentrated gaze patterns. They also reported greater task-related difficulty, while mean pupil diameter increased under the aging-simulation condition. Using the 7-s display cycle as a descriptive reference, target-page dwell time exceeded 7 s for 19 of 37 participants (51.4%) under aging simulation and 13 of 37 participants (35.1%) under the no-suit condition. These findings indicate that imposed physical and visual constraints altered both locomotion and information-search behavior and suggest that the temporal and spatial design of station information systems warrants further evaluation for users with diverse functional capabilities. The study extends discussion of transport disadvantage from physical accessibility toward information accessibility and illustrates the feasibility of combining VR and aging simulation in a controlled railway-station information-search experiment; validation against actual older-adult behavior remains necessary.