Juan Carlos Torrado

AmICog – mobile technologies to assist people with cognitive disabilities in the work place

This paper presents the system AmICog, designed specifically to assist people with cognitive disabilities in their workplaces. To do that we employ mobile devices for two different purposes: on the one hand, to show interactive guides adapted to the user, the task and the user’s context. On the other hand, to locate and provide directions in indoors environments.

Emotional Self-Regulation of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Smartwatches for Monitoring and Interaction

In this paper, we analyze the needs of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to have a pervasive, feasible and non-stigmatizing form of assistance in their emotional self-regulation, in order to ease certain behavioral issues that undermine their mental health throughout their life. We argue the potential of recent widespread wearables, and more specifically smartwatches, to achieve this goal. Then, a smartwatch system that implements a wide range of self-regulation strategies and infers outburst patterns from physiological signals and movement is presented, along with an authoring tool for smartphones that is to be used by caregivers or family members to create and edit these strategies, in an adaptive way. We conducted an intensive experiment with two individuals with ASD who showed varied, representative behavioral responses to their emotional dysregulation. Both users were able to employ effective, customized emotional self-regulation strategies by means of the system, recovering from the majority of mild stress episodes and temper tantrums experienced in the nine days of experiment in their classroom.

Using Smartphones to Assist People with Down Syndrome in Their Labour Training and Integration: A Case Study

This article describes a proposal and case study based on mobile phones and QR Codes to assist individuals with cognitive disabilities in their labour training and integration. This proposal, named AssisT-Task, is a full functional mobile application for Android smartphones and offers step-by-step guidance, establishing a learning method through task sequencing. It has been tested with a group of 10 users and 2 types of labour tasks. Through 7 recorded sessions, we compared the performance and the learning progress with the tool against the traditional assisting method, based on paper instructions. The results show that people with cognitive disabilities learnt and performed better and faster when using AssisT-Task than the traditional method, particularly on tasks that require cognitive effort rather than manual skills. This learning has proved to be essential to obtain an adequate degree of personal autonomy for people with cognitive impairment.

Easing the integration

People with cognitive disabilities have to acquire several skills in order to achieve autonomy and self-development. One of these is indoor navigation through new and complex environments such as their school or work center. We propose a smartphone application that helps them to get from one place to any other in a modeled environment, following a trail of clues. It is based on location through QR codes, which makes it inexpensive, straightforward to implement and reusable. We conducted an experiment on 14 users with several cognitive disabilities in an unfamiliar environment. The results validated both the system and the approach.

An Adapted Wayfinding System for Pedestrians with Cognitive Disabilities

This paper presents a novel wayfinding system adapted to people with cognitive disabilities. It adapts to the user in terms of route calculation, instructions delivery, and interface design. To do so, the system divides the calculated route into atomic instructions and uses street-level photographs at the decision points. To evaluate this approach, we compared it with a commercial navigation application on a field trial with a sample of users (N = 18). From the evaluation, we concluded that our system improves users’ performance in terms of the number who reached the destination and were able to identify it correctly.

Technology: aided authoring tools for ASD coaching support

This paper presents a study about the effects of technology aids in the long-term coaching of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). An assistive system that helps stakeholders to create coaching materials for the emotional self-regulation of people with ASD is presented and evaluated. In the experiment 8 teachers participated. It consisted on creating step-by-step coaching methods of emotional self-regulation with both the traditional support and our mobile system. Performance and satisfaction improved using our system, and the participants created more structured, effective intervention with our system than with the traditional means.

Using smartwatches for behavioral issues in ASD

This article adresses the potential of smartwatchers as interventors in the self-regulation process of individuals with ASD. We study an assistance model from the literature, and then we state some of the main features that lead us to this proposal: ubiquity, sensing and interaction possibilities. Also, we study the suitability of these devices, including previous work that have used them for assistive purposes. Finally, we propose a technologic approach for the emotional self-regulation that uses smartwatches and applies the mentioned model.

The Potential of Smartwatches for Emotional Self-regulation of People with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This paper focuses on the potential of smartwatchers as interventors in the process of emotional self-regulation on individuals with ASD. Parting from a model of assistance in their self-regulation tasks, we review the main advantages of smartwatches in terms of sensors and pervasive interaction potential. We argue the suitability of smartwatches for this kind of assistance, including studies that had used them for related purposes, and the relation of this idea with the affective computing area. Finally, we propose a technological approach for emotional self-regulation assistance that uses smartwatches and applies to the mentioned intervention model.