Jayalakshmi Baskar

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.

Cognitive Architecture of an Agent for Human-Agent Dialogues

This paper proposes a cognitive architecture of an intelligent agent that can have a dialogue with a human agent on health-related topics. This architecture consists of four main components, namely, the Belief Base, the Dialogue Manager, the Task Manager and the Plan Generator. Each component has sub-components that perform a set of tasks for the purpose to enable the agent to be enrolled in a dialogue. In this paper the particular sub-component of the Dialogue Manager, the Dialogue Strategy has been discussed in detail. A notion of scheme is introduced, which functions as a template with variables that are instantiated each time a state is entered. The agent’s dialogue strategy is implemented as a combination of the schemes and the state transitions that the agent makes in response to the human’s request. We used a combination of finite-state and agent-based dialogue strategies for dialogue management. This combined dialogue strategy enables a multi-topic dialogue between a human and an agent.

Human-Agent Dialogues on Health Topics - An Evaluation Study

A common conversation between an older adult and a nurse about health-related issues includes topics such as troubles with sleep, reasons for walking around nighttime, pain conditions, etc. This di ...

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.

Instrument-Oriented Approach to Detecting and Representing Human Activity for Supporting Executive Functions and Learning

The goal of this study is to develop a computer-interpretable model for activity detection and representation, based on existing informal models of how humans perform activity. Appropriate detection of purposeful human activity is an essential functionality of active assistive technology aiming at providing tailored support to individuals for improving activity performance and completion. The main contribution is the design of a model for detection and representation of human activities based on three categories of instruments, which is implemented as two generic and supplementary terminology models: an event ontology and a core ontology. The core ontology is extended for each new knowledge domain into a domain ontology. The model builds the base for personalization of services generated by the cooperative reasoning performed by a human collaborating with an intelligent and social software agent. Ongoing and future work includes user studies in the different application domains.

A Multipurpose Goal Model for Personalised Digital Coaching

Supporting human actors in daily living activities for improv- ing health and wellbeing is a fundamental goal for assistive technology. The personalization of the support provided by assistive tech ...

User-Control of Personalised Intelligent Environments which Support Health

This research project aims at supporting workers in the mining and construction industries and older adults at home, in monitoring the risks of their daily work or living situation. A goal is to create awareness in the individual about risks and how to decrease risks. Methods and knowledge-based applications are developed, which synthesise knowledge about the user, the users activities, the environment and generic domain knowledge for the purpose of providing tailored support and advice to individuals. This knowledge is also what the user can relate to, interact with and control through different methods. In this paper we investigate different approaches to user control of intelligent environments and propose a dialogue-based method for user control.