Audrey Serna

Modeling the progression of Alzheimer's disease for cognitive assistance in smart homes

Smart homes provide support to cognitively impaired people (such as those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease) so that they can remain at home in an autonomous and safe way. Models of this impaired population should benefit the cognitive assistance’s efficiency and responsiveness. This paper presents a way to model and simulate the progression of dementia of the Alzheimer’s type by evaluating performance in the execution of an activity of daily living (ADL). This model satisfies three objectives: first, it models an activity of daily living; second, it simulates the progression of the dementia and the errors potentially made by people suffering from it, and, finally, it simulates the support needed by the impaired person. To develop this model, we chose the ACT-R cognitive architecture, which uses symbolic and subsymbolic representations. The simulated results of 100 people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease closely resemble the results obtained by 106 people on an occupational assessment (the Kitchen Task Assessment).

Introducing mobility in serious games: enhancing situated and collaborative learning

This paper explores the introduction of mobile technologies in a particular serious games subset called learning games. We focus on two main purposes where mobility turns out to be useful: situated learning and collaborative learning. The article outlines the opportunities and the remaining challenges for these learning situations. Some important issues are highlighted for immerging learners in real context. We also propose some scenarios to illustrate the benefits of mobile devices in classroom situations

How assessing plasticity design choices can improve UI quality: a case study

In Human Computer Interaction, plasticity refers to the capacity of User Interfaces (UIs) to withstand variations of context of use while preserving quality in use. Frequently, insuring more or less smooth transition from one context of use to the other (from the end-user perspective) is conducted ad hoc. To support a more systematic approach for characterizing UI tuning in terms of quality in use along context of use variations, we present an exploratory study focused deliberately on platform aspects. The design process of this particular case study is detailed and all design decisions have been recorded in terms of their influence on UI ergonomic quality, using Ergonomic Criteria. The interesting result is that most design choices when changing the platform lead to the reexamination of the initial designs. Ongoing work is done to support the insight that considering plasticity seems to help in explicitly broadening UI design choices and sharpening the solution.

Envisioning Advanced User Interfaces for E-Government Applications: A Case Study

The increasing use of the Web as a software platform together with the advance of technology has promoted Web applications as a starting point for improving communication between citizens and administration. Currently, several e-government Web portals propose applications for accessing information regarding healthcare, taxation, registration, housing, agriculture, education, and social services, which otherwise may be difficult to obtain. However, the adoption of services provided to citizens depends upon how such applications comply with the users’ needs. Unfortunately, building an e-government website doesn’t guarantee that all citizens who come to use it can access its contents. These services need to be accessible to all citizens/customers equally to ensure wider reach and subsequent adoption of the e-government services. User disabilities, computer or language illiteracy (e.g., foreign language), flexibility on information access (e.g., user remotely located in rural areas, homeless, mobile users), and ensuring user privacy on sensitive data are some of the barriers that must be taken into account when designing the User Interface (UI) of e-government applications.

Immersion and Persistence: Improving Learners’ Engagement in Authentic Learning Situations

According to the recent technological advances, a new type of digital learning games has emerged. These games integrate virtual worlds persistence and immersion devices allowing the learners to experience more authentic and rich situations. Several studies highlighted their pedagogical value, knowledge transfer and learners’ engaged-behaviors. In this paper, we draw the characteristics of these learning games based on the integration of new technologies according to two characteristics: immersion and persistence. To investigate the impact of such technological components, we developed a game and evaluated it in ecological conditions. Four groups of fifteen high school students played the game through two testing conditions: two groups used a prototype allowing only classical interactions limited on usual devices, while the two other groups used a prototype integrating persistent and immersive interactions using Oculus Rift vision. All the interactions were recorded and their analysis suggests more engaged behaviors from students using the immersive and persistent prototype.

Using Collaborative Activities on Tabletops to Enhance Learning and Knowledge Transfer

Digital tabletops are gaining increasing relevancy within commercial and educational sectors. These devices, with their multi-touch surfaces, can support collaborative activities while maintaining natural face-to-face communication. However, we still know little about possible learning outcomes and the situations they favor. We have conducted a study to explore how group activities on tabletops could potentially encourage collaboration on tabletops. We have particularly focused on the potential of tabletops to favor knowledge transfer, which can be translated to the question how knowledge might be assimilated, understood and transferred in the best way. This paper presents a comparative study of a learning session using concept-maps on tabletops and a learning session using traditional paper and pencil tools. The comparison revealed a tendency for the tabletop-environment to effectively support knowledge transfer.

Exploring the potential of tabletops for collaborative learning

Digital tabletops, with their multi-touch surfaces, are innovation that could provide new opportunities for learning. They could support rich interactive collaborative activities while maintaining natural face-to-face communication. Nevertheless, we still know little about the potential learning outcomes and the situations they favor. We have explored how group activities on tabletops could encourage collaboration on the same tabletop but also between multiple tabletops. In particular, we focus on the potential of tabletops to favor learning during a brainstorming activity.

Towards Supporting Caregivers to Monitor the Whereabouts of People with Dementia

Dementia is a complex neurodegenerative syndrome that is accompanied by a progressive decline in cognitive abilities. People with dementia develop problems in coping with activities of daily living, including orientation and way-finding tasks. People with moderate to severe dementia are withdrawn and sensitive, which can make caring for and working with them challenging, especially for caregivers. Our work focusses on people with moderate to severe dementia and nursing homes. Building upon previous work in supporting way-finding for people with dementia, we propose an integrated platform to support caregivers and other stakeholders in localizing people and monitoring their whereabouts. Real-time monitoring, a history of location data and heat maps help caregivers to quickly locate people, identify critical situations and learn about preferred locations of residents. Doctors, technology and architectural designers receive valuable data on movement patterns that support diagnosis and intervention planning.

Towards Intelligent and Implicit Assistance for People with Dementia: Support for Orientation and Navigation

To date, most healthcare technologies for orientation and navigation for people with dementia or with cognitive impairments have been developed for outdoor environments. These systems require skills in handling smartphone or PDA applications from users. In this paper, the authors focus on the needs of people with moderate and severe dementia, who are unable to use smartphones and are living in nursing homes or specialized fulltime care facilities. A new approach is presented, based on iterative people-centered design processes, explores calm computing and implicit interaction paradigms for guiding people with subtle cues integrated in the indoor environment. This intelligent and implicit assistance is supported by a three-part framework: a tracking system, a separate guiding system and an intelligent system. The guiding system approach has been tested on several people with dementia. The first results are promising and the feedback from stakeholders is positive but more participants are needed for an empirical analysis.

Rapid Prototyping for Mobile Serious Games

Mobile Serious Games are new kind of Serious Games which are running on mobile devices, mainly on Smartphones. With continuously increased power and User Interface facilities, they constitute an alternative to the usual entertainment applications proposed on Smartphones. To design and implement such applications, a methodological assistance and development support are required. In this paper, we present our contribution to rapid prototyping for Mobile Serious Games in which we propose to augment App Inventor for Android framework with a methodological assistance. This proposition is based on a study in which we asked to 116 students to use this framework for the development of mobile applications. The results are presented (thematic domain, targeted users, components used...) and we discuss the relevance of using such a tool to achieve rapid prototyping for mobile Serious Game.