Esteban Guerrero

Computer-Supported Assessment for Tailoring Assistive Technology

The main purpose of assistive technology is to support an individuals daily activities, in order to increase ability, autonomy, relatedness and quality of life. The aim for the work presented in this article is to develop automated methods to tailor the behavior of the assistive technology for the purpose to provide just-in-time, adaptive interventions targeting multiple domains. This requires methods for representing and updating the user model, including goals, preferences, abilities, activity and its situation. We focus the assessment and intervention tasks typically performed by therapists and provide knowledge-based technology for supporting the process. A formative evaluation study was conducted as a part of a participatory action research process, involving two rehabilitation experts, two young individuals and one senior individual as end-user participants, in addition to knowledge engineers. The main contribution of this work is a theory-based method for assessing the individuals goals, preferences, abilities and motives, which is used for building a holistic user model. The user model is continuously updated and functions as the base for tailoring the systems assistive behavior during intervention and follow-up.

An activity-centric argumentation framework for assistive technology aimed at improving health

Tailoring assistive systems for guiding and monitoring an individual in daily living activities is a complex task. This paper presents ALI, an assistive system combining a formal possibilistic argu ...

Semantic-based construction of arguments: An answer set programming approach

In this paper, we introduce an argumentation approach which takes an extended logic program as input and gives a set of arguments with the respective disagreements among them as output. We establis ...

A Pilot Study on Personalised Coaching to Increase Older Adults' Physical and Social Activities

The aim of this research is to conduct a pilot study of a prototype that provides feedback using theory-based motivating messages developed by older adults, in a context of every day activities that include both physical and social activities. The prototype mobile application integrated the messages, a motivational model, and a personalization module that selects motivational messages based on preferences, motivational profile and the situation. The four participating older adults used the application for planning and following up social and physical activities. They found the messages entertaining and appreciated the dialogues with the application. They used the dialogues primarily to reinforce their satisfaction regarding conducted activities and did not necessarily tell the truth about conduced activities in the interaction with the application. The results are preliminary, but give valuable implications for further development of the personalisation module towards more purposeful use of ambient information, and aspects to explore in future user studies.

Activity Qualifiers in an Argumentation Framework as Instruments for Agents When Evaluating Human Activity

Theoretical frameworks have been developed for enabling software agents to evaluate simple activities such as walking and sitting. However, such frameworks typically do not include methods for how practically dealing with uncertain sensor information. We developed an argument-based method for evaluating complex goal-based activities by adapting two qualifiers: Performance and Capacity defined in the health domain. The first one evaluates what a person does, and the second one how “well” or “bad” an activity is executed. Our aim is to deal with uncertainty and inconsistent information; generate consistent hypotheses about the activity execution; and resemble an expert therapist judgment, where an initial hypothesis assessment can be retracted under new evidence. We conducted a pilot test in order to evaluate our approach using a Physiotherapy assessment test as a goal-based activity. Results show that skeptic argumentation semantics are may be useful for discriminating individuals without physical issues by considering Performance and Capacity; conversely, credulous semantics may be suitable for obtaining information in the evaluation of activity, which an intelligent agent may use for providing personalized assistance in an ambient assisted living environment.

Reasoning about human activities : an argumentative approach

Recognizing and supporting human activities is an important challenge for ambient assisted living. In this paper we introduce a novel argumentation-based approach for dealing with human activity re ...

ALI: An assisted living system for persons with mild cognitive impairment

We introduce the Assisted Living system ALI, which is a novel approach to providing assistance and support in activities of daily life. We integrate a human behavior theory with a default reasoning decision making framework. This integration allows us to model a decision making problem from a human activity centric point of view and at the same time, formalize these elements using a possibilistic argumentation theory. ALI sends personalized notifications suggesting the most suitable activities to perform and determines what activities were performed during a time period.

Deliberative Argumentation for Smart Environments

In this paper, an argumentation-based deliberative approach for fusing contextual information obtained from heterogeneous sources using a multi-agent system is introduced. The system is characterized by three different agents: an Environment Agent, an Activity Agent and a Coach Agent. These agents consider data from heterogenous sources of data. As a method for aggregating data and supporting decision-making, so-called agreement rules are instrumental in the argumentation-based deliberative method. The aggregation rules will be associated to specific beliefs related to the services of each agent.

Personalised Persuasive Coaching to Increase Older Adults’ Physical and Social Activities: A Motivational Model

The overall aim of this research is to develop an adaptive digital coaching system that gives seniors personalized support for increasing physical activity, and promoting participation in social activity and their own care. The main research question is how can different behavioral and motivational factors of an individual be formally integrated into the knowledge base of a coach agent for generating support tailored to the individual’s needs and preferences in a specific situation?

Activity qualifiers using an argument-based construction

Based on an argumentation theory approach, we present a novel method for evaluating complex goal-based activities by generalizing a notion of qualifier defined in the health domain. Three instances of the general qualifier are proposed: Performance, Actuation and Capacity; the first one evaluates what a person does, the second how an individual follows an action plan, and the third one how “well” or “bad” an activity is executed. Qualifiers are intended to be used by autonomous systems for evaluating human activity. We exemplify our approach using a health domain assessment protocol. Main results of this test show a partial correlation between ambiguities assessed by experts and our argument-based approach; and a multi-dimensional perspective how an activity is executed when a combined evaluation of qualifiers is used. This last outcome was interesting for some therapists consulted. Results also show differences between values of qualifiers using different argumentation semantics; two scenarios were proposed by therapist for using different semantics: preliminary activity screening and time-span follow-up evaluation.