Borja Gamecho

Automatically generating tailored accessible user interfaces for ubiquitous services

Ambient Assisted Living environments provide support to people with disabilities and elderly people, usually at home. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access intelligent machines such as information kiosks. One of the key issues in achieving full accessibility is the instantaneous generation of an adapted accessible interface suited to the specific user that requests the service. In this paper we present the method used by the EGOKI interface generator to select the most suitable interaction resources and modalities for each user in the automatic creation of the interface. The validation of the interfaces generated for four different types of users is presented and discussed.

A Context-Aware Application to Increase Elderly Users Compliance with Physical Rehabilitation Exercises at Home via Animatronic Biofeedback

Biofeedback from physical rehabilitation exercises has proved to lead to faster recovery, better outcomes, and increased patient motivation. In addition, it allows the physical rehabilitation processes carried out at the clinic to be complemented with exercises performed at home. However, currently existing approaches rely mostly on audio and visual reinforcement cues, usually presented to the user on a computer screen or a mobile phone interface. Some users, such as elderly people, can experience difficulties to use and understand these interfaces, leading to non-compliance with the rehabilitation exercises. To overcome this barrier, latest biosignal technologies can be used to enhance the efficacy of the biofeedback, decreasing the complexity of the user interface. In this paper we propose and validate a context-aware framework for the use of animatronic biofeedback, as a way of potentially increasing the compliance of elderly users with physical rehabilitation exercises performed at home. In the scope of our work, animatronic biofeedback entails the use of pre-programmed actions on a robot that are triggered in response to certain changes detected in the users biomechanical or electrophysiological signals. We use electromyographic and accelerometer signals, collected in real time, to monitor the performance of the user while executing the exercises, and a mobile robot to provide animatronic reinforcement cues associated with their correct or incorrect execution. A context-aware application running on a smartphone aggregates the sensor data and controls the animatronic feedback. The acceptability of the animatronic biofeedback has been tested on a set of volunteer elderly users, and results suggest that the participants found the animatronic feedback engaging and of added value.

Evaluation of a Context-Aware Application for Mobile Robot Control Mediated by Physiological Data: The ToBITas Case Study

We present the ToBITas mobile Context-Aware application to control a mobile robot using electromyographic and accelerometric signals acquired from the user’s right-hand arm. The signals are acquired by means of an off-the-shelf low-cost device called BITalino and are processed by an Android smartphone. Our work was developed as a case study to validate the quality of the mobile applications created with a rapid-prototyping framework called MobileBIT. We evaluated the application with thirteen participants and the results suggest that participants were able to adapt to the proposed control mode, completing the task in a suitable time.

Extending In-Home User and Context Models to Provide Ubiquitous Adaptive Support Outside the Home

Ubiquitous Computing has proved to be an excellent way of providing technological support for the daily life of people within its range. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which is largely based on Ubiquitous Computing, aims at tutoring and supervising elderly people and users with physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities in the performance of routine household activities. AAL’s main aim is to increase the autonomy of dependent people in their daily life by providing them with supportive instructions for everyday routines and warnings about home safety issues. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access location-dependent web services (providing maps, addresses, transport schedules, etc.) and local intelligent machines (such as information kiosks or ATMs). This approach allows existing knowledge about the users, their common activities, and their environment to be used to extend the in-home AAL concept to the support of common routines performed outside the home. This chapter surveys the modelling techniques used inside the home and discusses the methodologies required for their extension for out-of-home use, including interoperation and sharing of models.

Combination and abstraction of sensors for mobile context-awareness

In this paper, we describe a context server application for mobile computing. Its main objective is to assist developers to exploit context-aware features in their applications. This approach uses the extraction of new context information using a combination of sensors and proposes a sensing abstraction layer to avoid having to deal with specific hardware.

A Sensor-Driven Framework for Rapid Prototyping of Mobile Applications Using a Context-Aware Approach

The development of mobile context-aware applications using sensors require the developers to understand several diverse issues: signal acquisition, network protocols, embedded systems, data filtering, etc. We designed and implemented a software framework in order to assist developers in prototyping. Our framework facilitates the use of sensors from wearable devices and supports the reusability of components following a modular approach. This paper describes the design of our approach and highlights the benefits of the framework for the development of mobile applications. To evaluate the framework, representative context-aware applications are described as a case study. The usability of the applications were tested with 26 participants and good results were obtained.

Physiological Data Acquisition System Based on Mobile Computing

The way to achieve enough data for data mining is by accessing existing databases or directly acquiring data with the aim of creating new databases. In this paper we present the DAFIESKU system built to acquire different types of physiological data via experiments and the factors taken into account when developing it, in order to facilitate the creation of new datasets by means of mobile and wearable devices. DAFIESKU has been evaluated on a case study associated to non-classroom learning.

Some issues regarding the design of adaptive interface generation systems

This paper describes the main issues related to the design of user adaptive interaction systems, in order to discuss their applicability to a specific domain: the automatic generation of accessible user interfaces for people with disabilities who make use of ubiquitous services. Advances in the domain of the accessible Web are especially interesting for this purpose. Nevertheless, even if several procedures are similar, there are specific features that require new approaches, such as the formal specification of the functionality of the interface that will be generated.

DAFIESKU: A System for Acquiring Mobile Physiological Data

Gathering physiological data when they are performing experiments requires a great effort from researchers. Very often, a considerable time is required to prepare the signal acquisition equipment, conduct the experiments, and properly label the data of each participant. Nevertheless this data is valuable for the analysis of personal characteristics, such as behavior, health conditions, and preferences. With the aim of assisting researchers with such tedious tasks, we have developed the DAFIESKU system. This system serves to acquire several types of physiological data. DAFIESKU facilitates the creation of new datasets with physiological data by means of mobile and wearable devices. The usability of the system was evaluated in two case studies in a two-step iterative process. Before conducting the second case study, the whole system was improved using the feedback obtained from the first case study. The results achieved show that usability was enhanced in the second version of DAFIESKU.

Benchmarking Bluetooth SPP Communications for Ubiquitous Computing

Seamless integration of devices in Ubiquitous Computing requires partaking nodes to perform periodic scans for new nodes in the area, and a set of protocols for interchanging information between devices, among them Bluetooth. In this paper we show an evaluation of the Bluetooth Serial Port Profile (SPP) to study how the communication performance behaves under the discovery process of Bluetooth for new nodes in the vicinity. The results so far show that the performance loss is not dramatic but that it can be improved using different strategies.