Attuning speech-enabled interfaces to user and context for inclusive design: technology, methodology and practice

This paper presents a methodology to apply speech technology for compensating sensory, motor, cognitive and affective usage difficulties. It distinguishes (1) an analysis of accessibility and technological issues for the identification of context-dependent user needs and corresponding opportunities to include speech in multimodal user interfaces, and (2) an iterative generate-and-test process to refine the interface prototype and its design rationale. Best practices show that such inclusion of speech technology, although still imperfect in itself, can enhance both the functional and affective information and communication technology-experiences of specific user groups, such as persons with reading difficulties, hearing-impaired, intellectually disabled, children and older adults.

An inclusive design approach for developing video games for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The efficacy of therapeutic treatments for Autism Spectrum Disorder is mainly associated with the treatment's intensity in terms of weekly hours. This has led mental health professionals to explore the use of video games to complement traditional treatments. However, major weaknesses have been found due to poor game design, which has failed to fulfill therapeutic objectives or to properly engage children. These weaknesses are typically characterized by the poor integration of knowledge from mental health experts, children's interests and designers' expertise. Starting from this necessity, we propose an inclusive design approach to develop therapeutic games. The method presents strategies to integrate the expertise of clinicians, contributions of children and experience of designers through a set of elicitation and merging techniques. The goal of this method is to design games that are effective in terms of therapeutic objectives and that are enjoyable for children. To describe this method, we present its application in the design and development of a Kinect-based game for high-functioning children with ASD called “Pico's Adventures”. This game aims at promoting social initiation in young children with autism. Findings from a first exploratory study with 10 children with ASD showed the effectiveness of the game in eliciting social initiation behaviors. This provides a first validation of the method. An essential aspect of the game's success was the use of elements and mechanics that were appealing for the children. As a result, we have identified effective design concepts and paths for further research on games for children with ASD.     

Category theory-based collaborative design methodology for mechatronic systems

Recent advances in companies are characterized by highly dynamic, knowledge-intensive and collaborative process. This has become primary concern for mechatronic systems since they involve multiple disciplines and knowledge. This requires a close exchange in order to share knowledge between the different design teams. The first step in knowledge sharing is to identify the most important knowledge that need to be capitalized, which we call “crucial knowledge”. During this exchange, heterogeneous knowledge and modelling languages are involved in the design process, which can lead to conflicts. Hence, the challenge is to continuously capture and handle such conflicts between expert models. Thus, the focus of this paper is to propose a new collaborative design model suitable for mechatronic concurrent design. Our contribution lies in identifying crucial knowledge and resolving conflicts in a formal way in order to ensure efficient collaboration. Our methodology called Category Theory-based Collaborative Design (CaTCoD) is described with its associated meta-model. A demonstrator is also used to validate the proposed methodology using an example from the aeronautic field.     

Embracing diversity in user needs for affective design

To develop product portfolios and affective design we need to understand the diversity in user needs. The challenge is how to predict what users want and how they will behave. One approach is to understand user emotions and affective needs, and predict successful product design that can match the needs. This paper discusses affect and its link to cognition. To provide a context, several theories are presented. A framework is described that incorporates characteristics of users, tasks, products, and use environment. The goal is to highlight the importance of emotions in enhancing the value of products. This research field, which we call Hedonomics, is new. There are many challenges in developing valid and reliable measurements of affect, which can influence human factors research as well as design.     

Joint mobility and inclusive design challenges

The aim of this research study was to understand and evaluate the effect of different factors including age, gender, disabilities and medical conditions on joint mobility. Joint mobility data from a group of 66 people from a previously existing database has been re-analysed. Twenty four participants had disabilities and 42 participants were considered to be ‘able bodied’ with no recognised disability. For each individual, 18 joint range of motion values were measured and an ANOVA test was employed to demonstrate the influence of the selected factors on joint range of motion. Post Hoc (Tukey) tests were also performed to gain deeper insight into significance levels and correlations between the factors. The results clearly indicate that joint ROM significantly decreases (p < 0.05) with increasing age for arm abduction, arm medial and lateral rotation, wrist flexion and wrist adduction. Moreover, people with disabilities (wheelchair users and arthritis sufferers) showed a considerable decrease in joint mobility for arm flexion, arm abduction, arm lateral rotation, elbow flexion, elbow supination, wrist extension and wrist flexion. The results also highlight that designing products, equipment, services or workplaces against 5th and 95th percentile criteria is unable to provide appropriate and necessary support for achieving the objective of design inclusiveness. Rather designers should have a deep insight of the data variations at a predesign phase so that more appropriate and informed design decisions can be made that are more likely to be acceptable for a broad range of the population.     

An evaluation methodology for crowdsourced design

In recent years, the “power of the crowd” has been repeatedly demonstrated and various Internet platforms have been used to support applications of collaborative intelligence in tasks ranging from open innovation to image analysis. However, crowdsourcing applications in the fields of design research and creative innovation have been much slower to emerge. So, although there have been reports of systems and researchers using Internet crowdsourcing to carry out generative design, there are still many gaps in knowledge about the capability and limitations of the technology. Indeed the process models developed to support traditional commercial design (e.g. Pugh’s Total Design, Agile, Double-Diamond etc.) have yet to be established for Crowdsourced Design (cDesign). As a contribution to the development of such a general model this paper proposes a cDesign framework to support the creation of crowdsourced design activities. Within the cDesign framework the effective evaluation of design quality is identified as a key component that not only enables the leveraging of a large, virtual workforce’s creative activities but is also fundamental to almost all iterative optimisation processes. This paper reports an experimental investigation into two different Crowdsourced design evaluation approaches; free evaluation and ‘Crowdsourced Design Evaluation Criteria’ (cDEC). The results are benchmarked against a ‘manual’ evaluation carried out by a panel of experienced designers. The results suggest that the cDEC approach produces design rankings that correlate strongly with the judgements of an “expert panel”. The paper concludes that cDEC assessment methodology demonstrates how Crowdsourcing can be effectively used to evaluate, as well as generate, new design solutions.     

Human-centered design for advanced services: A multidimensional design methodology

Advanced services have caught the attention of industries and academics as a way to exploit new customer value propositions. However, the existing design methodologies for advanced services are limited to partially addressing one or some key design elements, hence causing confusion in practice. Moreover, human factors are not often addressed, even though the design for advanced services requires human-centered thinking. Aiming to advance the body of research, the current study aims to conceptually propose a multidimensional design methodology called DIMAND that captures the key design elements and their relations in a single-view structure in accordance with a human-centric approach. Specifically, DIMAND encapsulates the (i) life-cycle service design interrelated with other key design elements—(ii) stakeholder networks, (iii) new service development methods, and (iv) design skills—that must be considered to develop effective advanced service design. Based on a hybrid research design, DIMAND was conceptually developed through systematic reviews and structured analysis of existing design methodologies, as well as an elicitation of expert knowledge in the domain through the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). For validation, the average usability score of DIMAND as evaluated by 26 practitioners was 72.2, which falls into “excellence” on the simplified system usability scale (SUS), hence confirming its potential utility. As a result, DIMAND offers a novel and holistic guideline for design practitioners and engineers to obtain coherence in all the life-cycle design processes by simultaneously taking these key design elements and their relations into account, making the design of advanced services more practical.     

面向控制器设计的多变量系统辨识实验信号

给出一种当多交量系统辨识模型用于控制器设计时的开环实验输入信号．假定系统未楚模动态可以用加性不确定性表示，取实际输出和理想输出误差平方均值最小，将其与系统辨识最小二乘法相结合，得到一种最优输入信号的设计方法．因输入信号与控制性能的相关性，可获得比普通随机信号更好的辨识结果．仿真结果证明了该方法的有效性．     

Characterising user capabilities to support inclusive design evaluation

Designers require knowledge and data about users to effectively evaluate product accessibility during the early stages of design. This paper addresses this problem by setting out the sensory, cognitive and motor dimensions of user capability that are important for product interaction. The relationship between user capability and product demand is used as the underlying conceptual model for product design evaluations and for estimating the number of people potentially excluded from using a given product.     

An integrated methodology for fixture design

In this paper, a methodology to perform fixture design as an integrated aspect of process planning is proposed. A three-phase methodology for the fixture design activity has been developed. The three phases include predesign analysis (phase I), functional analysis (phase II), and productivity improvement (phase III). In phase I, the product design information is studied, and initial fixture design aspects are developed. In phase II, the clamping and location aspects of fixture design are addressed for the given initial process sequence and product design information. Phase III involves studying ways to increase the productivity including using simultaneous machining approaches, multiclustering, use of specialized jigs, etc.     

Model Predictive Control oriented experiment design for system identification: A graph theoretical approach

We present a new approach to Model Predictive Control (MPC) oriented experiment design for the identification of systems operating in closed-loop. The method considers the design of an experiment by minimizing the experimental cost, subject to probabilistic bounds on the input and output signals due to physical limitations of actuators, and quality constraints on the identified model. The excitation is done by intentionally adding a disturbance to the loop. We then design the external excitation to achieve the minimum experimental effort while we are also taking care of the tracking performance of MPC. The stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed by employing robust MPC during the experiment. The problem is then defined as an optimization problem. However, the aforementioned constraints result in a non-convex optimization which is relaxed by using results from graph theory. The proposed technique is evaluated through a numerical example showing that it is an attractive alternative for closed-loop experiment design.     

For model-based control design, closed-loop identification gives better performance

We compare open loop versus closed loop identification when the identified model is used for control design, and when the system itself belongs to the model class, so that only variance errors are relevant. Our measure of controller performance (which is used as our design criterion for identification) is the variance of the error between the output of the ideal closed loop system (with the ideal controller) and that of the actual closed loop system (with the controller computed from the identified model). Under those conditions, we show that, when the controller is a smooth function of the input-output dynamics and the disturbance spectrum, the best controller performance is achieved by performing the identification in closed loop with an operating controller that we characterize. For minimum variance and model reference control design criteria, we show that this ‘optimal operating controller for identification’ is the ideal controller. This then leads to a suboptimal but feasible iterative scheme.     

Robust optimal experiment design for system identification

This paper develops the idea of min-max robust experiment design for dynamic system identification. The idea of min-max experiment design has been explored in the statistics literature. However, the technique is virtually unknown by the engineering community and, accordingly, there has been little prior work on examining its properties when applied to dynamic system identification. This paper initiates an exploration of these ideas. The paper considers linear systems with energy (or power) bounded inputs. We assume that the parameters lie in a given compact set and optimise the worst case over this set. We also provide a detailed analysis of the solution for an illustrative one parameter example and propose a convex optimisation algorithm that can be applied more generally to a discretised approximation to the design problem. We also examine the role played by different design criteria and present a simulation example illustrating the merits of the proposed approach.     

A methodology for evolutionary product design

this paper describes a function-based approach for conceptual design support in the context of evolutionary product development. The main objective is to improve a designers productivity by the effective reuse of existing design information in design alternative identification, evaluation, and modification. An integrated evolutionary design methodology, EPD, is presented. The proposed methodology divides the whole process into three inter-related phases: information recovery, information management, and information reuse. The detailed steps in each phase are elaborated, and various techniques are employed to improve information reuse efficiency. A case study on commercial electrostatic air cleaner was used to illustrate the whole process of product evolutionary design. The proposed methodology will have a positive impact on the future development of the conceptual design support system.     

An assertion-based verification methodology for system-level design

In this paper, we integrate an assertion-based verification methodology with our object-oriented system-level synthesis methodology to address the problem of HW/SW co-verification. In this direction a system-level assertion language is defined. The system-level assertions can be used to monitor the current state of system or flow of transactions. These assertions are automatically converted to “monitor hardware” or “monitor software” during the system-level synthesis process depending on their type and also synthesis style of their corresponding functions. The synthesized assertions are functionally equivalent to their original system-level assertions, and hence, can be reused to verify the system after HW/SW synthesis and also at run-time after system manufacturing. This way, not only system-level assertions are reused in lower-levels of abstraction, but also run-time verification of system is provided. In this paper, we describe the system-level assertion language and explain the corresponding synthesis method in our object-oriented system-level synthesis methodology; however the concept can be applied to any system-level design methodology with modifications to assertion types and synthesis method.     

A comparison of methods currently used in inclusive design

Inclusive design has unique challenges because it aims to improve usability for a wide range of users. This typically includes people with lower levels of ability, as well as mainstream users. This paper examines the effectiveness of two methods that are used in inclusive design: user trials and exclusion calculations (an inclusive design inspection method). A study examined three autoinjectors using both methods (n = 30 for the user trials). The usability issues identified by each method are compared and the effectiveness of the methods is discussed. The study found that each method identified different kinds of issues, all of which are important for inclusive design. We therefore conclude that a combination of methods should be used in inclusive design rather than relying on a single method. Recommendations are also given for how the individual methods can be used more effectively in this context.     

Computer-based task representation: a methodology for improving system design

Task analysis procedures can be used in all stages of system development to examine the nature and severity of performance demands placed upon human operators. Task analyses involve considerable effort in obtaining a detailed set of measurements that represent the behavioural and cognitive tasks performed by the operators; these measures are referred to as task representation. The present article describes a flexible method for incorporating task representation data into an electronic spreadsheet. Such a computer-based procedure has many advantages over the more traditional paper and pencil approaches to task representation and analysis, including greater flexibility in data analysis and the inclusion of both objective and subjective measures of workload. Portions of an illustrative task representation and task analysis are presented along with a discussion of the strengths of computer-based task representation and analysis.     

Observer design for range and orientation identification

A reduced-order globally convergent observer to estimate the depth of an object projected on the image plane of a camera is presented, assuming that the object is planar or has a planar surface and the orientation of the plane is known. A locally convergent observer can be obtained when the plane unit normal is unknown, and the latter is estimated together with the depth of the object. The observer exploits the image moments of the object as measured features. The estimation is achieved by rendering attractive and invariant a manifold in the extended state space of the system and the observer. The problem is reduced to the solution of a system of partial differential equations. The solution of the partial differential equations can become a difficult task, hence it is shown that this issue can be resolved by adding to the observer an output filter and a dynamic scaling parameter.