Juan Carlos Naranjo

Behaviour patterns detection for persuasive design in Nursing Homes to help dementia patients

Nursing homes usually host large accounts of persons with different levels of dementia. Detecting dementia process in early stages may allow the application of mechanisms to reduce or stop the cognitive impairment. Our ultimate objective is to demonstrate that the use of persuasive techniques may serve to motivate these subjects and induct re-learning mechanisms to stop mental impairment. Nevertheless, this requires the study of the behaviour of each patient individually in order to detect conduct disorders in their living ambient. This study presents a behavior pattern detection architecture based on the Ambient Assisted Living paradigm and Workflow Mining technology to enable re-learning mechanisms in dementia processes via providing tools to automate the conduct disorder detection. This architecture fosters the use of Workflows as representation languages to allow health professionals to represent persuasive motivation protocols in the AAL environment to react individually to dementia symptoms detected.

Ambient assisted living spaces validation by services and devices simulation

The design of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) products is a very demanding challenge. AAL products creation is a complex iterative process which must accomplish exhaustive prerequisites about accessibility and usability. In this process the early detection of errors is crucial to create cost-effective systems. Computer-assisted tools can suppose a vital help to usability designers in order to avoid design errors. Specifically computer simulation of products in AAL environments can be used in all the design phases to support the validation. In this paper, a computer simulation tool for supporting usability designers in the creation of innovative AAL products is presented. This application will benefit their work saving time and improving the final system functionality.

Virtual reality for AAL services interaction design and evaluation

AAL Solutions are not part of mainstream industry yet, being one of the main reasons the complexity of the technologies involved in relation to its targeted beneficiaries, the elderly, and its acceptance by them. Applying HCD methodologies for user involvement and creating physical prototypes is both costly and time consuming, particularly in this domain that combines software artifacts, devices and physical environments. VR techniques are very suited to create Virtual Prototypes that offer the beneficiaries the possibility to visualize and interact with proposed solutions before they exist. This paper presents the results of VAALID project in developing this approach of creating tools for design and simulation of AAL Solutions using VR and Mixed Reality, supporting the early involvement of beneficiaries in the process.

Implementation of the ISO/IEC 24756 for the interaction modeling of an AAL space

This paper presents the results of the implementation of an accessibility verifier tool for AAL systems using the ISO/IEC 24756 standard. The accessibility verifier tool is based in an interaction model where the Common Accessibility Profile (CAP), as defined by the standard, is used to perform the checking of the accessibility constrains of the system configuration against the user capabilities. The paper gives information of the major design decisions in developing the tool, the context of use in the VAALID project and the relation with the standard.

Design Framework for Ambient Assisted Living Platforms

Nowadays the new technological advances offer the possibility to provide a great number of different personalized services that cover the needs of diverse categories of users. The application of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) concept makes possible the creation of new applications that can significantly improve the quality of life of elderly and dependant people. This paper presents an interaction framework that provides a new generation of user interfaces for AAL services in the context of an AmI-based platform. This solution aims to develop the technological context where elderly and dependant citizens can increase their life independence.

AmIVital: Digital Personal Environment for Health and Well-Being

This work introduces AmIVital, a Spanish project which aims to provide a platform that meets the bases of AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) and facilitates the development of applications and business models for an emerging sector. AmIVital focuses on social needs of first order, and presents the work undertaken in developing the mobile platform. This platform creates a digital personal environment for health and well-being that produces new and innovative e-Health, e-Information, e-Learning, e-Leisure, and e-Assistance services based on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm. AmI helps make easier the development of services thought to be consumed by elderly, disabled and people with chronic diseases in order to improve their life quality.

VERITAS approach for parameterization of psychological and behavioral models

This paper focuses on the description of the approach used to parameterize the psychological and behavioural user models developed under the FP7 EU Founded project VERITAS: Virtual and Augmented Environments and Realistic User Interactions To achieve Embedded Accessibility DesignS. The present paper will focus on the methodology used to define the relevant psychological and behavioural parameters within the context of VERITAS. Two complementary approaches have been selected: on one hand, the use of existing models of the cognitive architecture Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) for cognitive simulation purposes; on the other hand, a second approach based on existing metrics coming from medical and human behavior studies and biomedical models.

Process choreography for human interaction computer-aided simulation

Design errors can suppose a unaffordable load for the production costs. Allowing product designers to de ne behavioral patterns that describe the interaction of future users of the system can reduce the number of design errors. These patterns can be used to simulate how users respond to stimuli of products detecting problems at early stages of product development. Choreography systems to simulate the interaction among devices and services defined using commercially available workflow engines have been used in previous work (as the European project VAALID). However, the complexity of human behavior models requires much more expressive workflow languages for their definition. In this work, a highly expressive Workflow engine is presented. This system solves the problem of expressiveness in the representation of the interaction of human behavior models in the VAALID project