Luis A. Castro

Seamless interaction among heterogeneous devices in support for co-located collaboration

In some working environments users experience a high level of mobility while requiring collaborating and coordinating their activities with colleagues involving the exchange and analysis of documents distributed in space or time. Medical workers stand out among others by the demands imposed by hospital work. These new forms of interaction pose new challenges for the design of pervasive computing environments aimed at seamlessly integrating heterogeneous devices. Based on workplace studies conducted in a hospital, we designed and implemented a mobile collaborative system aimed at supporting co-located collaboration, proximity-based application-sharing, and the remote control of heterogeneous devices. The results of a preliminary evaluation show that users perceive the services provided by the application to be useful and efficient, even though the manipulation of the remote display through the PDA was less efficient than with the keyboard and mouse.

Supporting emotional ties among mexican elders and their families living abroad

The aging of the population is a phenomenon faced by most nations, such as Mexico, where 7.5% of the population is older than 60 years, a significant proportion of whom live alone (10%). This fact is related with the ever increasing migration of one or more of their relatives, mostly to the USA. Our work aims to provide a technological solution that eases the isolation of elder people living alone in Mexico while their families are abroad. To envision and inform our design we interviewed independent old persons living alone. We propose an electronic family newspaper, through which elders and their families share information, personal reminiscences and cultural stories, and occasionally interact with each other. Through its functionality, the electronic newspaper enables elders not only to maintain close social ties, but ameliorate cognitive decline.

Nurse home visits with or without alert buttons versus usual care in the frail elderly: a randomized controlled trial.

Objective To assess whether an intervention based on nurse home visits including alert buttons (NV+AB) is effective in reducing frailty compared to nurse home visits alone (NV-only) and usual care (control group) for older adults. Design Unblinded, randomized, controlled trial. Setting Insured population covered by the Mexican Social Security Institute living in the city of Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. Participants Patients were aged over 60 years with a frailty index score higher than 0.14. Intervention After screening and informed consent, participants were allocated randomly to the control, NV+AB, or NV-only groups. Measurements The primary outcome was the frailty score 9 months later. Quality of life, depression, comorbidities, health status, and health service utilization were also considered. Results The framing sample included 819 patients. Of those, 591 were not located because they did not have a landline/telephone (341 patients), they had died (107), they were ill (50), or they were not currently living in the city (28). A screening interview was applied to 228 participants, and 57 had a score ≤0.14, 171 had ≥0.14, and 16 refused to complete the baseline questionnaire. A home visit was scheduled for 155 patients. However, 22 did not complete the baseline questionnaire. The final 133 subjects were randomized into the NV+AB (n = 45), NV-only (n = 44), and control (n = 44) groups. There were no statistically significant differences in the baseline characteristics of the groups. The mean age overall was 76.3 years (standard deviation 4.7) and 45% were men. At the baseline, 61.65% were classified as frail. At end of follow-up the adjusted prevalence of frailty in NV+AB group was 23.3% versus 58.3% in the control group. Conclusion: An intervention based on NV+AB seems to have a positive effect on frailty scores.

Reducing the Uncertainty on Location Estimation of Mobile Users to Support Hospital Work

The nature of a context-aware application in hospital work demands a reliable and accurate location system. The activity for which this location information is needed determines to a great extent the relevancy of this contextual variable, since a minor error in delivering patient-based information can be critical. In this correspondence, we present an enhanced technique to infer the location of users in a hospital setting based on the strength of radio-frequency signals received by mobile devices that are used to train a neural network. The approach uses the neighbors surrounding the location to be estimated to track users continuously. This neighborhood eases the training and is used to simulate previous time instant guesses to reduce the location estimation error and alleviate the hopping trajectories of users. The results obtained by using this approach are in the order of 1.3 m for the average distance error during continuous motion.

Naturalistic enactment to stimulate user experience for the evaluation of a mobile elderly care application

We describe the use of a technique aimed at allowing users to realistically experience novel mobile applications in a naturalistic environment as part of the formative evaluation of the system. This technique, that we have named naturalistic enactment, is appropriate for application scenarios that are not easily replicated in a laboratory setting and might cause risks to users or other stakeholders if used at a prototyping stage, as is often the case in the healthcare domain. We present and discuss the use of this technique after the recent introduction of a mobile application aimed at assisting geriatric nurses in attending emergency calls. The technique provided nurses with the experience of operating the mobile application in a naturalistic environment (e.g., high ecological validity), thus allowing them to identify adoption issues that they would have missed otherwise.

Supporting relationship maintenance for elders and family living abroad

A user-centered design approach based on ethnographic interviews and prototype evaluations, our research group envisioned a home-based pervasive communication system. The Electronic Family Newspaper (EFN) facilitates communication between elders and their families living abroad. The system is a blogging tool that operates on a tablet PC. Family members can access the system through any Web browser. The EFN lets users share messages, attach pictures, and create news sections, and elders can play the included memory game (based on revealing pairs of pictures).

A Web-based system to facilitate elders communication with their families living abroad

The aging of the population is a phenomenon faced by most nations. Growing old is often accompanied of a loss of close companionship which has been shown may aggravate the cognitive impairment of elders. From a qualitative study, key issues emerged regarding unmet needs of elders communication that we propose to address with Web-based technology. We decided to create an electronic family newspaper to incorporate elders to the current social networks created by their younger relatives who already communicate through Internet applications, such as IM and e-mail. The system uses Web-based technology to make it accessible from any Web browser for those users living abroad. To serve the needs of elders and make the input of information easier, several autonomous agents help the user to interact with the system that can be accessed by any electronic display with a touch screen, such as a tablet PC.

Using ontologies to reduce user intervention to deploy sensing campaigns with the InCense toolkit

This paper presents the InCense research toolkit to facilitate researchers with little or no technical background to implement a sensing application for mobile phones. To reach this end, InCense provides a GUI and an interactive ontology to enable users to define the configuration of the sensing application, i.e. what sensing components to add, and the flow of the sensing session. We illustrate the ease of use of the InCense platform through a scenario in which both opportunistic and participatory sensing paradigms are used.

Collaborative opportunistic sensing with mobile phones

Mobile phones include a variety of sensors that can be used to develop context-aware applications and gather data about the users behavior, including the places he visits, his level of activity and how frequently and with whom he socializes. The collection and analysis of these data has been the focus of recent attention in ubiquitous computing, giving rise to the field known as mobile sensing. In this work, we present a collaborative extension to InCense, a toolkit to facilitate behavioral data gathering from populations of mobile phone users. InCense aims at providing people with little or no technical background with a tool that assists in the rapid design and implementation of mobile phone sensing campaigns. By extending the architecture of InCense to support distributed sensing campaigns we are able to incorporate several strategies aimed at optimizing battery, storage, and bandwidth. These issues represent significant challenges in sensing campaigns that generate considerable amounts of data (i.e., collecting audio) or quickly drain the battery in the device (i.e., GPS), given the limitations of mobile devices. In this work, collaborative sensing is used to decide which mobile phone should capture audio when two or more devices are potentially recording a similar audio signal.

Risky Driving Detection through Urban Mobility Traces: A Preliminary Approach

In Mexico, car accidents are the leading cause of death among young people. Thus, the identification of drivers that can be potentially involved in car accidents is of particular interest. There are certain risky driving behaviors that are highly correlated to car accidents, including speeding, overtaking, and tailgating. In this work, we present a preliminary approach for automated detection of risky driving in urban environments. The system, Tracko, makes use of GPS data to compute mobility traces, which are used to preliminarily characterize driving behaviors. This work presents the design of the system as well as preliminary data to be used for automated identification of risky driving behaviors.