Eduardo Castillejo

Imhotep: an approach to user and device conscious mobile applications

As the dependence on mobile devices increases, the need for supporting a wider range of users and devices becomes crucial. Elders and people with disabilities adopt new technologies reluctantly, a tendency caused by the lack of adaptation of these technologies to their needs. To address this challenge, this paper describes a framework, Imhotep, whose aim is to aid developers in the accessible application creation process, making the creation of user-centered applications easier and faster. Our framework allows to easily adapt the applications to the constraints imposed by the user capabilities (sensorial, cognitive, and physical capabilities) and device capabilities by providing a repository that will manage the compilation and deployment of applications that include a set of preprocessor directives in the source code. These directives are enhanced with concepts that are automatically adjusted to the current trends of mobile devices by using a Fuzzy Knowledge-Eliciting Reasoner. Our final goal is to increase the number of applications targeted to elders and people with disabilities providing tools that facilitate their development. The paper also describes the evaluation of both the accuracy of the fuzzy terms generated for mobile devices and the usability of the proposed platform.

Modeling Users, Context and Devices for Ambient Assisted Living Environments

The participation of users within AAL environments is increasing thanks to the capabilities of the current wearable devices. Furthermore, the significance of considering users preferences, context conditions and devices capabilities help smart environments to personalize services and resources for them. Being aware of different characteristics of the entities participating in these situations is vital for reaching the main goals of the corresponding systems efficiently. To collect different information from these entities, it is necessary to design several formal models which help designers to organize and give some meaning to the gathered data. In this paper, we analyze several literature solutions for modeling users, context and devices considering different approaches in the Ambient Assisted Living domain. Besides, we remark different ongoing standardization works in this area. We also discuss the used techniques, modeled characteristics and the advantages and drawbacks of each approach to finally draw several conclusions about the reviewed works.

A method for automatic generation of fuzzy membership functions for mobile device's characteristics based on Google Trends

While creating a framework for adaptive mobile interfaces for m-learning applications we found that in order to ease the use of our framework we needed to present the mobile device characteristics to non-expert users in a easy to understand manner. Using fuzzy sets to represent the characteristics of mobile devices, non-expert developers such as teachers or instructional designers can actively participate in the development or adaptation of the educational tools. To be able to automatically generate the fuzzy membership functions of the sets we needed the data of the mobile device market, regrettably this information is not publicly available. To tackle this problem we have developed a method to estimate the market share of each mobile device based on the popularity metrics recovered from Google Trends and then we use that estimated value as the input to generate the fuzzy set of each characteristic. The proposed method allows us to not only model the state of the market in different periods of time, but also to localize the results to adapt them to the mobile market of specific countries. In this paper we will describe the proposed algorithm and we will discuss the obtained results.

Modelling users, context and devices for adaptive user interface systems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art in adaptive user interface systems by studying their historical development over the past 20 years. Moreover, this paper contributes with a specific model combining three main entities (users, context and devices) that have been demonstrated to be always represented in these environments. Novel concepts that should be taken into account in these systems are also presented. Design/methodology/approach – The authors first provide a review and a comparison of current user interface adaptive systems. Next, the authors detail the most significant models and the set of techniques used to, finally, propose a novel model based on the studied literature. Findings – Literature solutions for adaptive user interface systems tend to be very domain dependant. This situation restricts the possibility of sharing and exporting the information between such systems. Furthermore, the studied approaches barely highlight the dynamism of these models. Origina...

Ontology-Based Model for Supporting Dynamic and Adaptive User Interfaces

Adaptive user interfaces involves the design of dynamic interfaces, the main purpose of which is to present an adapted alternative to the user to ease the interaction. User’s preferences, context situation, and device’s capabilities help these systems to adapt the interface to make the interaction more adequate to the current situation. Being aware of different characteristics of these entities is vital for reaching the main goals of these systems efficiently. To collect knowledge from these entities, it is necessary to design several formal models to help to organize and give meaning to the gathered data. This article analyzes several literature solutions for modeling users, context, and devices considering different approaches. The article identifies their advantages and drawbacks to finally propose a new ontology model that addresses the identified limitations.

User, Context and Device Modeling for Adaptive User Interface Systems

Personalization and self-customizable environments tend to increase user satisfaction. There are many approaches to face the problem of designing adaptive user interface systems. However, most of the reviewed solutions are very domain dependent. We identify users, context and devices as the most significant entities in adaptive user interface domains. This paper digs into several drawback related to these environments, remarking the incongruity and aggregation of context, and the entities interaction within adaptive user interfaces domains.

Distributed Tracking System for Patients with Cognitive Impairments

The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources required to attend elderly people with cognitive disabilities. These requirements, such as medical staff and financial resources, have been multiplied in the last years, and this tendency will continue in the forthcoming ones. In order to reduce these requirements, the introduction of new technologies will be a key aspect. In this paper we propose a test-question-based memory game that collects the answers given by patients and facilitates access to this information to caregivers and relatives.

Easing the Mobility of Disabled People in Supermarkets Using a Distributed Solution

People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicapped people face many challenges both at home, but especially outside it, where their reduced mobility is a burden. Buying in a supermarket can be sometimes troublesome for them and so as to facilitate this task, a product locator application is proposed. This application runs on heterogeneous personal mobile devices keeping the user private information safe on them, and it locates the desired products over each supermarket’s map.

Semantic Framework for Social Robot Self-Configuration

Healthcare environments, as many other real world environments, present many changing and unpredictable situations. In order to use a social robot in such an environment, the robot has to be prepared to deal with all the changing situations. This paper presents a robot self-configuration approach to overcome suitably the commented problems. The approach is based on the integration of a semantic framework, where a reasoner can take decisions about the configuration of robot services and resources. An ontology has been designed to model the robot and the relevant context information. Besides rules are used to encode human knowledge and serve as policies for the reasoner. The approach has been successfully implemented in a mobile robot, which showed to be more capable of solving situations not pre-designed.

An Approach to Automatic Generation of Fuzzy Membership Functions Using Popularity Metrics

Creating membership functions for fuzzy system can be a difficult task for non-expert developers. This is even more difficult when the information available about the specific domain is limited. In our case, we wanted to create membership functions that model the different characteristics of mobile devices. Due to the lack of public data about the mobile phones sales it is difficult to estimate the market share of each device. To tackle this problem we have developed a mechanism that uses popularity metrics to estimate the market share and generate the membership functions. In this paper we describe the used algorithm and discuss the obtained results.