Modeling the user state for context-aware spoken interaction in ambient assisted living

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems must provide adapted services easily accessible by a wide variety of users. This can only be possible if the communication between the user and the system is carried out through an interface that is simple, rapid, effective, and robust. Natural language interfaces such as dialog systems fulfill these requisites, as they are based on a spoken conversation that resembles human communication. In this paper, we enhance systems interacting in AAL domains by means of incorporating context-aware conversational agents that consider the external context of the interaction and predict the user’s state. The user’s state is built on the basis of their emotional state and intention, and it is recognized by means of a module conceived as an intermediate phase between natural language understanding and dialog management in the architecture of the conversational agent. This prediction, carried out for each user turn in the dialog, makes it possible to adapt the system dynamically to the user’s needs. We have evaluated our proposal developing a context-aware system adapted to patients suffering from chronic pulmonary diseases, and provide a detailed discussion of the positive influence of our proposal in the success of the interaction, the information and services provided, as well as the perceived quality.     

Articulating a right to the Web for persons with cognitive disabilities

Given major developments in the field of technology, law, policy and disability rights, this book review examines the recent publication by Cambridge University Press of eQuality: The Struggle for Web Accessibility by Persons with Cognitive Disabilities, by Peter Blanck. This review analyses the contribution of eQuality as a basis for future research in universal access law, policy and technology development. The analysis demonstrates that while Blank’s proposed legal and technical solutions have yet to emerge substantively, eQuality will nonetheless become an anchor for future research at the intersection of technological innovation, human rights, intellectual property and anti-discrimination regulation. This review argues that eQuality provides a substantial academic basis and acts as a seminal starting point for articulating a right to the Web for individuals with cognitive disabilities.     

Developing a limb repositioning robotic interface for persons with severe physical disabilities

Limb repositioning is necessary for individuals with severe physical disabilities to sustain muscle strength and prevent pressure sores. As robotic technologies become ubiquitous, these tools offer promise to support the repositioning process. However, research has yet to focus on ways in which individuals with severe physical disabilities can control robots for these tasks. This paper presents a study that examines the needs and attitudes of potential users with physical disabilities to control a robotic aid for limb repositioning. Subjects expressed interest in using brain–computer interface (BCI) and speech recognition technologies for purposes of executing robotic tasks. The performance of four subjects controlling arm movements on an avatar through the keyboard, mouse, BCI, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition was evaluated. Although BCI and speech technologies may limit physical fatigue, more challenges were faced using BCI and speech conditions compared to the keyboard and mouse. This research promotes accessibility into mainstream robotic technologies and represents the first step in the development of a robotic prototype using a BCI and speech recognition technologies for limb repositioning.     

AnAbEL: towards empowering people living with dementia in ambient assisted living

Universal Access in the Information Society - Ambient assisted living aims to support the well-being of people with special needs by offering assistive solutions. Systems focused on dementia...     

Supporting subject matter annotation using heterogeneous thesauri: A user study in Web data reuse

We performed a user experiment in which museum professionals used vocabularies from the Web for annotating the subject matter of museum objects. In this paper, we study the requirements on the underlying RDF dataset, search algorithms and user interface design in a real world setting. We identify the advantages of reusing vocabularies from the Web and discuss how and to what extent the disadvantages can be overcome. The study is performed at the Print Room of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, where currently a large collection of prints, photographs and drawings is being catalogued. We report on the analysis of the current practice of professional cataloguers, the iterative design of an annotation tool and a qualitative evaluation of this tool with a user experiment in a realistic annotation environment. We discuss our findings in terms of their impact on the RDF data, the semantic search functionality and the user interface.     

Mobile manipulators for assisted living in residential settings

We describe a methodology for creating new technologies for assisted living in residential environments. The number of eldercare clients is expected to grow dramatically over the next decade as the baby boom generation approaches 65 years of age. The UMass/Smith ASSIST framework aims to alleviate the strain on centralized medical providers and community services as their clientele grow, reduce the delays in service, support independent living, and therefore, improve the quality of life for the up-coming elder population. We propose a closed loop methodology wherein innovative technical systems are field tested in assisted care facilities and analyzed by social scientists to create and refine residential systems for independent living. Our goal is to create technology that is embraced by clients, supports efficient delivery of support services, and facilitates social interactions with family and friends. We introduce a series of technologies that are currently under evaluation based on a distributed sensor network and a unique mobile manipulator (MM) concept. The mobile manipulator provides client services and serves as an embodied interface for remote service providers. As a result, a wide range of cost-effective eldercare applications can be devised, several of which are introduced in this paper. We illustrate tools for social interfaces, interfaces for community service and medical providers, and the capacity for autonomous assistance in the activities of daily living. These projects and others are being considered for field testing in the next cycle of ASSIST technology development.

Supporting the creative drive: investigating paralinguistic voice as a mode of interaction for artists with upper limb disabilities

For people with upper limb disabilities visual art is an important activity that allows for expression of individuality and independence. They show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to adapt their remaining capabilities to create visual art. There are significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. Paralinguistic voice recognition technologies have proven to be a particularly promising mode of interaction. Despite these benefits, technological support for people with upper limb disabilities to create visual art is scarce. This paper reports on a number of case studies of several artists with upper limb disabilities. These case studies illustrate the struggles they face to be creative and also show the significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting such artists. An investigation into people’s ability to use the volume of their voice to control cursor movement to create drawings on the screen is also reported. With motivation, training and practise, use of volume to control drawing tasks shows great promise. It is believed that paralinguistic voice has wider implications beyond assisting artists with upper limb disabilities, such as: an alternative mode of interaction for disabled people to perform tasks other than creating visual art, alternative mode of interaction for hands busy environments and as a voice training system for people with speech impairments.     

The quality of evidence in tablet‐assisted interventions for students with disabilities

The purpose of this review is to weigh the evidence of the effectiveness of tablet‐assisted instructions (TAIs) at improving academic outcomes of students with disabilities. An extensive search process with inclusion and exclusion criteria yielded a total of 17 studies to be included in the present study: three group design studies and 14 single‐subject design studies. The quality indicators proposed by Gersten et al. ( 2005 ) and Horner et al. ( 2005 ) were applied to evaluate the methodological rigour of TAI studies and their feasibility to be considered evidence‐based. Results revealed that (a) most group design studies provided little information about the intervention agent and equivalence of groups across conditions, (b) the social validity of using tablets for students with disabilities was strongly established across all single‐subject design studies and (c) procedural fidelity in assessment and intervention implementation was inadequately addressed in group design studies. Although this review suggests that TAI used in single‐subject design studies can be a potentially evidence‐based practice for students with disabilities, there still remains to be established whether the group design studies can be considered evidence‐based, because of the lack of methodological rigour in group design studies. Finally, implications for future directions and practical ideas are discussed.     

Communication system using EOG for persons with disabilities and its judgment by EEG

The aim of this study was to present electrooculogram (EOG) signals that can be used for human computer interface efficiently. Establishing an efficient alternative channel for communication without overt speech and hand movements is important to increase the quality of life for patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or other diseases that prevent correct limb and facial muscular responses. Using EOG signals, it is possible to improve the communication abilities of those patients who can move their eyes. Investigating the possible usage of the EOG for human–computer interface, a relation between sight angle and EOG is determined. In other methodology, most famous approaches involve the use of a camera to visually track the eye. However, this method has problems that the eyes of user must always be open. In this paper, we propose the mouse cursor control system for ALS patients using EOG and electroencephalograph (EEG) signals. We introduced the algorithm using alternating current and direct current of EOG corresponding to the drift. Therefore, EOG measurement system we proposed improved the problems of artifacts caused by eye blinking which was not accepted for other systems, the displacement of electrode positions and the drift. In addition, we introduced the EEG measurement to examine whether the subject could control their eye movement consciously. The EEG signals were not used to control the mouse movement, but to determine the subject’s control state. In order to test whether our system works well, we prepared a questionnaire and asked the subjects to operate our system, and answer with YES or NO by moving the mouse cursor. During the task, we also recorded the subjects’ EEG by MYNDPLAY [7] and checked their conscious level. Three subjects participated in this experiment, and they had never operated this system before. In this experiment, we measured 30 states of EEG signals while EOG was also measuring for one eye movement and analyzed the EEG signals. The results of analysis of the EEG signal changes and the answers to questions indicated that at 26 of 30 states, the subjects’ conscious level while they were moving the cursor by EOG signals was correctly determined from the EEG signals. From these results, we could know that the EEG signals can be used to adjust the EOG system whether it works according to patients’ mind or just a misjudgment.     

Supporting parents for in-home capture of problem behaviors of children with developmental disabilities

Ubiquitous computing has shown promise in applications for health care in the home. In this paper, we focus on a study of how a particular ubicomp capability, selective archiving, can be used to support behavioral health research and practice. Selective archiving technology, which allows the capture of a window of data prior to and after an event, can enable parents of children with autism and related disabilities to record video clips of events leading up to and following an instance of problem behavior. Behavior analysts later view these video clips to perform a functional assessment. In contrast to the current practice of direct observation, a powerful method to gather data about child problem behaviors but costly in terms of human resources and liable to alter behavior in the subjects, selective archiving is cost effective and has the potential to provide rich data with minimal instructions to the natural environment. To assess the effectiveness of parent data collection through selective archiving in the home, we developed a research tool, CRAFT (Continuous Recording And Flagging Technology) and conducted a study by installing CRAFT in eight households of children with developmental disabilities and severe behavior concerns. The results of this study show the promise and remaining challenges for this technology. We have also shown that careful attention to the design of a ubicomp system for use by other domain specialists or non-technical users is key to moving ubicomp research forward.     

A multimedia social interaction service for inclusive community living: Initial user trials

The move from institution to community care has resulted in many people receiving care at home. For some, disability or frailty restricts their involvement in social activities outside the home, resulting in unacceptable social isolation. This problem is compounded if the person has a speech or language impairment. In this paper, we will describe a communication service designed to provide nonspeaking people with a means to interact socially when living independently, based on the sharing of stories using pictures and other media. Initial exploration on the usability of the system by a pair of representative users will be described. Published online: 6 November 2002     

CoCaMAAL: A cloud-oriented context-aware middleware in ambient assisted living

Research into ambient assisted living (AAL) strives to ease the daily lives of people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions. AAL systems typically consist of multitudes of sensors and embedded devices, generating large amounts of medical and ambient data. However, these biomedical sensors lack the processing power to perform key monitoring and data-aggregation tasks, necessitating data transmission and computation at central locations. The focus here is on the development of a scalable and context-aware framework and easing the flow between data collection and data processing. The resource-constrained nature of typical wearable body sensors is factored into our proposed model, with cloud computing features utilized to provide a real-time assisted-living service. With the myriad of distributed AAL systems at play, each with unique requirements and eccentricities, the challenge lies in the need to service these disparate systems with a middleware layer that is both coherent and flexible. There is significant complexity in the management of sensor data and the derivation of contextual information, as well as in the monitoring of user activities and in locating appropriate situational services. The proposed CoCaMAAL model seeks to address such issues and implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for unified context generation. This is done by efficiently aggregating raw sensor data and the timely selection of appropriate services using a context management system (CMS). With a unified model that includes patients, devices, and computational servers in a single virtual community, AAL services are enhanced. We have prototyped the proposed model and implemented some case studies to demonstrate its effectiveness.     

Elderly activities recognition and classification for applications in assisted living

Assisted living systems can help support elderly persons with their daily activities in order to help them maintain healthy and safety while living independently. However, most current systems are ineffective in actual situation, difficult to use and have a low acceptance rate. There is a need for an assisted living solution to become intelligent and also practical issues such as user acceptance and usability need to be resolved in order to truly assist elderly people. Small, inexpensive and low-powered consumption sensors are now available which can be used in assisted living applications to provide sensitive and responsive services based on users current environments and situations. This paper aims to address the issue of how to develop an activity recognition method for a practical assisted living system in term of user acceptance, privacy (non-visual) and cost. The paper proposes an activity recognition and classification method for detection of Activities of Daily Livings (ADLs) of an elderly person using small, low-cost, non-intrusive non-stigmatize wrist worn sensors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a high classification rate (>90%). Statistical tests are employed to support this high classification rate of the proposed method. Also, we prove that by combining data from temperature sensor and/or altimeter with accelerometer, classification accuracy can be improved.     

Supporting a crowd-powered accessible online art gallery for people with visual impairments: a feasibility study

Universal Access in the Information Society - While people with visual impairments are interested in artwork as much as their sighted peers, their experience is limited to few selective artworks...