Ken-ichiro Yabu

Social platform for sharing accessibility information among people with disabilities: evaluation of a field assessment

Accessibility information can allow disabled people to identify suitable pathways to reach their destinations, but it is difficult to obtain new accessible pathway information rapidly because of limited local information disclosure. Thus, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive system that acquires barrier-free information from various sources and makes that information available in an intuitive form. In this study, we aimed to develop a social platform to obtain and present appropriate information depending on the users situation, such as the users disabilities and location, and to share the barrier-free information provided by other users.

Sharing Real-World Accessibility Conditions Using a Smartphone Application by a Volunteer Group

Although the rapid progress of real-world accessibility improvements affects the migration pathway of people with mild/severe visual/physical impairments to their destination, up-to-date accessibility information is difficult to obtain quickly because of delays to open information for public and local disclosure. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive system that appropriately acquires and arranges scattered accessibility information, and then presents this information intuitively. However, these systems present volunteers with difficulties when they are gathering accessibility conditions and then arranging them. In this work, our goal is to extract the elements that enable accessibility-sharing applications to collect real-world conditions efficiently. Particularly, we developed a smartphone-based application for sharing accessibility conditions and carried out events to share accessibility information in cooperation with a local volunteer group.

Smartphone-Based Gait Measurement Application for Exercise and Its Effects on the Lifestyle of Senior Citizens

Population aging leads to more expensive social security and medical care in a society. In order to minimize national expenditure dedicated to providing support to the elderly, it is necessary to reduce the cost of treatment. Current prophylactic approaches mainly include training programs tailored towards seniors, who may be assisted by caregivers, for wellness maintenance and enhancement. However, these approaches are mainly administered by volunteers, who are often overburdened because of labor shortages. It is thus necessary to design and implement a system that enables seniors to maintain and improve their health by themselves. In this study, we propose and test a smartphone-based gait measurement application. Our results indicate that the mobile application can help motivate seniors to walk more regularly and improve their walking ability. Moreover, we found in our experiments that since our application helped improve our senior subjects’ physical fitness, some of them became interested in participating in social activities and using new technologies as a consequence.

Visuospatial working memory game and measured memory performances at various ages

Because of rapid population aging, it is necessary to design and develop senior-friendly or disability-friendly interfaces that can decrease the cognitive workload caused by an interface. At that time, the design implications and evaluation criteria of an interface should be needed for creating senior-friendly and disability-friendly interfaces. One of the elements that relate to memory functions for manipulating interfaces include working memory. However, rough standard of visuospatial memory remains unknown. Particularly, there are little reports about the relations between the age and the volume of visuospatial memory. In this paper, we aim to clarify this relations for proposing interface implications by using a visual pattern span test. For effective measurement of the memory, we implemented a gamified measurement application based on visual pattern span tests. The results indicated that the median numbers of memorable buttons on visuospatial memory were and 7.0 (interquartile range: 5.0–9.0). Also, the number of memorable buttons increases as the age increases until the age ranged 21–25 and then decreases gradually as the age increases after 21–25 years. Our evaluation suggest that it can be effective to measure memory performance of, especially, children by the applications that are designed based on the entertainment concepts including a gamification.

Collaborative Accessibility Assessments by Senior Citizens Using Smartphone Application ReAcTS (Real-world Accessibility Transaction System)

Rapid improvements in real-world accessibility conditions have enabled greater mobility of people with disabilities as well as senior citizens. However, while the accessibility information of downtown areas and sightseeing locations is frequently updated, the most recent information on accessibility conditions in areas such as suburbs is difficult to obtain quickly because of infrequent updates of this type of information along with local information upgrades. On the other hand, healthy seniors aged over 65 years are known to engage in volunteer activities in developed countries with a high population of the elderly. In this regard, collaborative work on the accessibility assessments of places unexplored by these senior citizens can enable not only the efficient data collection on local areas but also lead to increase in their awareness and motivation to participate in social activities. In this study, we propose an accessibility-sharing application for volunteers including seniors and youngsters along with a scheme to efficiently record real-world conditions. In particular, we develop a smartphone application named Real-world Accessibility Transaction System (ReAcTS), and we conduct events to share accessibility information in cooperation with volunteer groups mainly composed of senior citizens.

Diagram Presentation using Loudspeaker Matrix for Visually Impaired People: Sound Characteristics for their Pattern Recognition

People with total visual impairments experience difficulty in understanding graphical information. They can comprehend graphics through tactile devices including pin matrices with audio characteristics presented using voice. Although these systems can represent static figures, it is difficult to use them for presenting moving images or details of high-resolution images. For solving this issue, we focused on the characteristics of auditory perception, including time resolution and frequency detection. In this paper, we propose a loudspeaker matrix system that displays 2D patterns such as trajectories or figures. We mainly investigated the design implications of acoustic presentation methods, including readily perceivable sound paths. The results indicate that effective presentation with a loudspeaker matrix would be realized by imposing the following conditions: sound type and duration should be determined as white noise and adjusted for the individual user, respectively.

AcousessMap: Smartphone-based collaborative tool to facilitate assessing acoustical accessibility conditions for visually impaired people

Assistive instruments such as textured paving blocks and acoustical traffic signals are installed for helping visually impaired people to walk comfortably and avoid traffic accidents, who have any inconvenience to move outside. Though these precipitous situations of accessibility progress affect their migration pathway for their destination, up-to-date accessibility information is difficult to gain quickly because of local information disclosure. Thus it is necessary to develop a comprehensive system that appropriately acquires and arranges scattered accessibility information, and then presents this information intuitively. However, these systems present volunteers with difficulties when they are gathering accessibility conditions and then organizing them. Also, most of the volunteers do not know the current situations of acoustical support systems for the visually impaired. In this study, our final goal is to establish an efficient scheme to share the conditions and places of the acoustical support syste...