Francesca Gullà

Method to design adaptable and adaptive user interfaces

In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modelling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction to generate the user profiles, subjects older than 40 years with different levels of technology affinity have been considered. The new adaptive user interfaces prototypes will be tested through different use cases in the context of smart home environments.

Design Adaptable and Adaptive User Interfaces: A Method to Manage the Information

Designing a multi-user adaptive interface means designing for diversity in end-users and contexts of use, and implies making alternative design decisions, at various levels of the interaction project, inherently leading to diversity in the final design outcomes. Nowadays Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) is becoming one of the major objectives addressed by Human Computer Interaction research. The present study provides an overview about the methods currently applied to the definition and development of AUIs. In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modeling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction. In order to generate the user profiles, subjects older than 40 years with different levels of technology affinity will be considered. These prototypes will be tested through different use cases in the context of smart home environments. The final goal is to produce smart objects and consumer goods able to automatically satisfy the different skills, abilities, needs and human preferences, in an environment where each solutions address different individuals.

How Older People Who Have Never Used Touchscreen Technology Interact with a Tablet

Touchscreen technologies have become increasingly common in personal devices, so it seems necessary to improve their accessibility and usability for the older people. In the past years, a lot of studies have been conducted to improve touch interfaces, however, most them do not consider older people with very low attitude with ICTs. Moreover, the majority of studies date back 2014, so they lack to consider the most innovative technologies available today. The present study involves a sample of older people without previous experience with ICTs with the aim of analyzing how basic features of a touchscreen interface affect their performances with typical touch-gestures. A total of 22 participants have been involved. Results partially confirm the existent literature and partially reveal new interesting findings that can be useful to improve the touch screen accessibility for older people.

Adaptive Interface for Smart Home: A New Design Approach

In an inclusive and accessible smart environments context the implementation of the “design for all” method presents several critical issues. In fact, the universal design represents a difficult challenge for the designer because it depends on the complexity of human intentions in a particular time and place. For this reason, we propose a new approach that aims to support the design of inclusive environments by improving the user-environment interaction.

The User-Product Ontology: A New Approach to Define an Ontological Model to Manage Product Searching Based on User Needs

Search engines play an important role in determining the success of e-commerce. Despite many efforts have been made to improve searching methods (SM) they remain mostly limited to semantic elaboration of keywords. This implies that the SM are not capable of supporting the research of products that best satisfy customers, according to their characteristics and background. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces an approach able to define a new ontological model that formalizes the knowledge necessary to implement a search engine capable to guide the customer to search the desired product or service according to his/her characteristics and needs. To this purpose, three essential aspects have been considered: a User Ontology (UO), a Product Ontology (PO) and rules (or properties) to link the user and product ontologies. The described approach is applied, as an example, to the products class known as Smart Objects that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

A Universal Design Method for Adaptive Smart Home Environment

Nowadays to design a product able to adapt to end-users with different needs and abilities it is necessary to manage a multitude of information coming from the analysis of different context of use. This means that we have to handle parallel and interdependent UCD multiple process. This research aims to define a methodology, which may apply this philosophy into design practice. In particular, it aims to provide tools to summarize the information needed to analyze user characteristics and needs, allows the designer to extrapolate the user’s needs and support the selection of prototype technologies suitable to the user categories.

How touch glove and expertise influence the basic touch gestures performances for people with Systemic Sclerosis

The technology has become a common part of our daily lives, and the integration of touchscreen technology into devices is quickly becoming equally common. In recent years, much research has been conducted on how people interact with handheld devices and on different types and uses of touchscreen technology, but there are few studies regarding people with severe problems of dexterity. For this reason, the present study aims to understand the effect of expertize with touchscreen on the performance of basic touch-gestures (i.e., tapping, dragging, pinching and spreading) in the case of people with Systemic Sclerosis. The performances of a total of twelve patients with SSc, six with and six without previous experience with touchscreen technology, were compared in the study. Recommendations based on the results of this study are proposed to improve the accessibility of touch-screen interfaces for these patients.

Assessment of a Smart Kitchen to Help People with Alzheimer’s Disease

The ageing population is leading to a significant impact on current society and it is introducing new challenges to find innovative solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently. In this context, the present paper provides a usability assessment of a Smart Kitchen developed to support people with the early-stage dementia in cooking activities. The smart system is managed through an adaptable user interface, which provides information on the meal preparation and allows to configure and manage all household appliances in a simple and intuitive way. Although this preliminary evaluation only included a small number of participants, the results showed that the system could be useful to help and guide people to remain independent in their own home environment for daily kitchen activities.

A Method to Make an Existing System Adaptive.

The Adaptive systems are becoming essential into our daily life, thanks to the fast improvement of computing technology and the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Despite many efforts have been made to improve adaptive systems design methods they remain very heterogeneous and mostly limited to each domain of application. Moreover, the most of existing adaptive applications propose specific approaches for the development of new systems, without considering the opportunity to convert existing smart systems into adaptive systems. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces an approach able to support the designers in adapting an already existing system. To this purpose, a new design method, consisting of the three following steps, has been developed: (1) context analysis; (2) adaptive module design; and (3) system re-design. The described approach is applied, as an example, to a Wi-Fi system for the control and management of household appliances developed by a large Italian company.

Introducing Wearables in the Kitchen: An Assessment of User Acceptance in Younger and Older Adults

Wearable computers allow users to record and access information at any time. The adoption and use of such devices is largely dependent on the users’ acceptance of the technology. Previous studies investigated technology acceptance of wearables without having end-users directly trying the technology. The present paper aims at assessing the user acceptance of a wearable device to support cooking related activities, together with aspects of usability and experience of use. To this end, we developed a kitchen apron with embedded commands for navigating through the contents of a digital cookbook and asked a group of younger (N = 15, mean age 23.9 SD = 2.5) and older users (N = 15, mean age 30.3 SD = 7.6) to deploy it while preparing a recipe. Respondents’ opinions were collected using questionnaires after they had accomplished the cooking task required. Overall, the kitchen apron was well received by both younger and older adults. Findings suggest that the perceived usefulness of the device and the compatibility of it with users’ common activities accounted for the intention to adopt and use a wearable device in the kitchen.