Francisco Nunes

Self-Care Technologies in HCI: Trends, Tensions, and Opportunities

Many studies show that self-care technologies can support patients with chronic conditions and their carers in understanding the ill body and increasing control of their condition. However, many of these studies have largely privileged a medical perspective and thus overlooked how patients and carers integrate self-care into their daily lives and mediate their conditions through technology. In this review, we focus on how patients and carers use and experience self-care technology through a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens. We analyse studies of self-care published in key HCI journals and conferences using the Grounded Theory Literature Review (GTLR) method and identify research trends and design tensions. We then draw out opportunities for advancing HCI research in self-care, namely, focusing further on patients everyday life experience, considering existing collaborations in self-care, and increasing the influence on medical research and practice around self-care technology.

Designing tablet-based games for seniors: the example of CogniPlay, a cognitive gaming platform

This paper describes the analysis and design of a tablet-based gaming platform for seniors that promotes their quality-of-life and well-being by incorporating cognitive training mechanisms. A literature review of age-related changes and games for seniors indicated casual games have the characteristics necessary to provide an enjoyable user experience for the senior audience. Having concluded that these games should target cognitive stimulation, the authors analysed mechanisms to achieve this purpose and compiled them into a matrix to be used as a starting point for the games design process. In parallel, the authors also gathered seniors preferences and requirements regarding games, through observations and a game book. Low-, medium-, and high-fidelity prototypes for a gaming cognitive platform were developed, evaluated with end-users, and iteratively improved. Results showed that seniors easily interacted with the platform and were willing to use it in the future. Results and experience led to the identification of 10 rules of thumb that can be beneficial if applied to related projects. This paper concludes by identifying exciting areas for future research and development.

Human-computer interaction and the older adult: an example using user research and personas

This paper reports on the outcomes of the first phase of the eCAALYX project -- an European project which aim is to develop a complete solution that improves the quality of life of the older adult with chronic conditions by monitoring his health and by improving the communication with his caretakers. Specifically, the authors are responsible for creating a TV user interface for older adults with chronic conditions.n The work described followed a multi-disciplinary approach strongly influenced by Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies. The main contributions of this paper are two-fold and materialize into i) a user research study that covers aspects such as perception, cognition, mental and psychosocial changes that occur with age and ii) an example-based description of the process of creating personas. John, the diabetic persona, is the example provided that abstracts the process followed to generate the remaining personas in the project.

Self-Care Technologies and Collaboration

The self-management of a chronic condition is a collaborative activity, performed by patients and carers. However, to date, self-care technologies have been mostly designed for individual use. This article uses a case study of people living with Parkinson’s disease to (a) illustrate how patients and carers collaborate in self-management, (b) discuss the reasons why self-care technology is designed for individual use, and (c) explore the implications of recognizing collaborations for the design of self-care technologies. This work is based on a qualitative study with interviews and observations with people living with Parkinson’s. The analysis illustrates how people living with Parkinson’s collaborate in self-care to build a good life. In particular, it exemplifies how the complex interplay of actions and of patients and carers enables the different self-care activities to take place. To further integrate self-care technology in everyday life, designers need to consider collaborations when studying the context, conceptualizing a technology, and planning an evaluation.

Design recommendations for tv user interfaces for older adults: findings from the eCAALYX project

While guidelines for designing websites and iTV applications for older adults exist, no previous work has suggested how to best design TV user interfaces (UIs) that are accessible to older adults. Building upon pertinent guidelines from related areas, this paper presents thirteen recommendations for designing UIs for TV applications for older adults. These recommendations are the result of iterative design, testing, and development of a TV-based health system for older adults that aims to provide a holistic solution to improve quality of life for older adults with chronic conditions by fostering their autonomy and reducing hospitalization costs. The authors work and experience shows that widely known UI design guidelines unsurprisingly apply to the design of TV-based applications for older adults, but acquire a crucial importance in this context.

Using the Smartphone Accelerometer to Monitor Fall Risk while Playing a Game: The Design and Usability Evaluation of Dance! Don't Fall

Falls are dangerous, and unfortunately common for older adults. Dance! Don’t Fall is a game that assesses the quality of the user’s locomotion based on data from the accelerometer of a smartphone. By providing a form of exercise, the game may actually reduce fall risk as well as monitoring it. In this paper, we document the development of the prototype and a usability study with ten seniors that suggested the game is well suited to its primary users.

mobileWAY -- A System to Reduce the Feeling of Temporary Lonesomeness of Persons with Dementia and to Foster Inter-caregiver Collaboration

This paper presents mobileWAY (mobile Where Are You), a system that enables caregivers of persons with dementia (PwD) to remotely display dynamic, customized and illustrated information on the home television of the PwD. In particular, caregivers can, through the use of a mobile device, provide information about their identity, their whereabouts and the time remaining until they return to the house of the PwD. When adequate, caregivers can also define an entertainment activity for the PwD. The development of mobileWAY followed an iterative and incremental user-centered design approach. Semi-structured interviews with nine informal and two professional caregivers furthered a literature review and a competitive analysis of the research projects around this scope. Building upon these, a low-fidelity prototype was created and iterated twice through usability testing with seven PwD and fourteen caregivers. Results show that PwD comprehend the displayed information and caregivers effectively use and recognize the usefulness of mobileWAY.

Tangible interaction on tabletops for elderly people

The urge to improve the life of older adults grows as this segment of society expands. Computers have an enormous potential to benefit the lives of older adults, however, the unawareness or disregard of their characteristics, renders technology, many times, impossible to use. Peripherals are a common obstacle when learning to operate computers, because the most common ones do not directly map the input in the user interface. It has been argued that touch- and gesture-based user interfaces, due to their direct mapping of input, can reduce the obstacles that older adults face, when using the computer. To assess this, this paper presents a project that uses a multi-touch tabletop system as a gaming platform for older adults. Specifically, it reports on the low-fidelity prototype that was built to test whether tangible objects can be used. Conclusions regarding the viability of tangible objects for that purpose are also drawn.

Leveraging Electronic Ticketing to Provide Personalized Navigation in a Public Transport Network

Public transport networks (PTNs) are difficult to use when the user is unfamiliar with the area she is traveling to, as shown by a user survey that we present in this paper. This is true for both infrequent users (including visitors) and regular users who need to travel to areas with which they are not acquainted. In these situations, adequate on-trip navigation information can substantially ease the use of public transportation and be the driving factor in motivating travelers to prefer it over other modes of transportation. However, estimating the localization of a user is not trivial, although it is critical for providing relevant information. In this paper, we propose the use of an electronic ticketing infrastructure of a PTN operator for positioning within the context of the PTN to give on-trip personalized navigation cues. To our knowledge, this is an innovative contribution that has not been described or deployed, to date, elsewhere. We assess relevant design issues for a modular cost-efficient user-friendly on-trip navigation service that uses position sensors and present the details of a proof-of-concept prototype running in our laboratory. We also present and analyze the results of a user survey on the usefulness of the service and its acceptance by users.

User interface design guidelines for smartphone applications for people with Parkinson's disease

AbstractParkinson’s disease (PD) is often responsible forn difficulties in interacting with smartphones; however, research has not yet addressed these issues and how these challenge people with Parkinson’s (PwP). This paper specifically investigates the symptoms and characteristics of PD that may influence the interaction with smartphones to then contribute in this direction. The research was based on a literature review of PD symptoms, eight semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals and observations of PwP, and usability experiments with 39xa0PwP. Contributions include a list of PD symptoms that may influence the interaction with smartphones, a set of experimental results that evaluated the performance of four gestures tap, swipe, multiple-tap, and drag and 12 user interface design guidelines for creating smartphone user interfaces for PwP. Findings contribute to the work of researchers and practitioners’ alike engaged in designing user interfaces for PwP or the broader area of inclusive design.