Luis Gardeazabal

Optimisation of the Selection Set Features for Scanning Text Input

Scanning is one of the most popular text input methods for people with severe movement restrictions due to diverse kinds of disabilities. It is frequently used to input messages into communication systems, such as text-to-voice translators in order to maintain conversations. Nevertheless, the rate of text production usually obtained is very slow. For this reason, every effort to save time and optimize communication speed is welcome. In this way, this paper presents a study on the influence on the character input rate of diverse parameters related to the matrix that contains the selection set, such as shape, size, number of dimensions and layout of the selectable items. Its purpose is to extract a set of guidelines to design efficient input systems well adapted to the user, based on the scanning of items and its selection by means of one switch or push-button.

Managing Intelligent Services for People with Disabilities and Elderly People

Ambient Supported Living systems for people with physical, sensory or cognitive restrictions have to guarantee that the environment is safe, fault tolerant and universally accessible. In addition it is necessary to overcome technological challenges, common to ubiquitous computing, such as the design of a middleware layer that ensures the interoperability of multiple wired and wireless networks and performs discovery actions. On top of that the system has to provide efficient support to the intelligent applications designed to assist people living there. In this paper we present the AmbienNet architecture designed to allow structured context information to be shared among the intelligent applications that support people with disabilities or elderly people living alone.

Mobile Interface for a Smart Wheelchair

Smart wheelchairs are designed for severely motor impaired people that have difficulties to drive standard-manual or electric powered-wheelchairs. Their goal is to automate driving tasks as much as possible in order to minimize user intervention. Nevertheless, human involvement is still necessary to maintain high level task control. Therefore in the interface design it is necessary to take into account the restrictions imposed by the system (mobile and small), by the type of users (people with severe motor restrictions) and by the task (to select a destination among a number of choices in a structured environment). This paper describes the structure of an adaptive mobile interface for smart wheelchairs that is driven by the context.

A Context-Aware Application to Increase Elderly Users Compliance with Physical Rehabilitation Exercises at Home via Animatronic Biofeedback

Biofeedback from physical rehabilitation exercises has proved to lead to faster recovery, better outcomes, and increased patient motivation. In addition, it allows the physical rehabilitation processes carried out at the clinic to be complemented with exercises performed at home. However, currently existing approaches rely mostly on audio and visual reinforcement cues, usually presented to the user on a computer screen or a mobile phone interface. Some users, such as elderly people, can experience difficulties to use and understand these interfaces, leading to non-compliance with the rehabilitation exercises. To overcome this barrier, latest biosignal technologies can be used to enhance the efficacy of the biofeedback, decreasing the complexity of the user interface. In this paper we propose and validate a context-aware framework for the use of animatronic biofeedback, as a way of potentially increasing the compliance of elderly users with physical rehabilitation exercises performed at home. In the scope of our work, animatronic biofeedback entails the use of pre-programmed actions on a robot that are triggered in response to certain changes detected in the users biomechanical or electrophysiological signals. We use electromyographic and accelerometer signals, collected in real time, to monitor the performance of the user while executing the exercises, and a mobile robot to provide animatronic reinforcement cues associated with their correct or incorrect execution. A context-aware application running on a smartphone aggregates the sensor data and controls the animatronic feedback. The acceptability of the animatronic biofeedback has been tested on a set of volunteer elderly users, and results suggest that the participants found the animatronic feedback engaging and of added value.

Interfacing users with very severe mobility restrictions with a semi-automatically guided wheelchair

TetraNauta is an on-going R&D project aimed to develop a controller for standard electric-powered wheelchairs that permits users with very severe mobility restrictions (such as people with tetraplegy) to easily navigate in closed environments (home, hospital, school, etc.). This project intends to design a non-expensive guidance system to help this kind of users to drive the wheelchair with the minimum effort, but maintaining the user as active as possible. For this reason the design of the user interface is a key factor. Some characteristic of this interface can be taken as a workbench for the design of more complex and security critical mobile systems.

Wheelchair-based open robotic platform and its performance within the AmbienNet project

This paper presents the design and development of the Robochair robotic wheelchair and its performance within the AmbienNet project. Robochair is an open robotic platform intended to assist challenged users with their daily driving tasks. It uses and extents the Player robotics framework providing uniform access to either robotics hardware and user input/output devices. In addition to that, and from low level point of view, the CANopen communication layer is used for the communication of any device within Robochair, which allows interoperability and exchangeability of different third party devices. In addition, the paper describes a navigation assistance application within the context of AmbienNet project, where an intelligent environment called AmbienNet supports the global navigation of Robochair wheelchair.

Evaluation of Prediction Methods Applied to an Inflected Language

Prediction is one of the techniques that has been applied to Augmentative and Alternative Communication to help people enhance the quality and quantity of the composed text in a time unit. Most of the literature has focused on word prediction methods that may easily be applied to non-inflected languages. However, for inflected languages, other approaches that mainly distinguish roots and suffixes may enhance the results (in terms of keystroke savings and hit ratio) of predictive systems. In this paper, we present the approaches we have applied to the Basque language (highly inflected) and the results they achieve with a particular text (that was not used while creating the initial lexicons the systems use for prediction). Starting from this evaluation, one of the presented approaches is suggested as being the best.

Evaluation of a Context-Aware Application for Mobile Robot Control Mediated by Physiological Data: The ToBITas Case Study

We present the ToBITas mobile Context-Aware application to control a mobile robot using electromyographic and accelerometric signals acquired from the user’s right-hand arm. The signals are acquired by means of an off-the-shelf low-cost device called BITalino and are processed by an Android smartphone. Our work was developed as a case study to validate the quality of the mobile applications created with a rapid-prototyping framework called MobileBIT. We evaluated the application with thirteen participants and the results suggest that participants were able to adapt to the proposed control mode, completing the task in a suitable time.

Extending In-Home User and Context Models to Provide Ubiquitous Adaptive Support Outside the Home

Ubiquitous Computing has proved to be an excellent way of providing technological support for the daily life of people within its range. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which is largely based on Ubiquitous Computing, aims at tutoring and supervising elderly people and users with physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities in the performance of routine household activities. AAL’s main aim is to increase the autonomy of dependent people in their daily life by providing them with supportive instructions for everyday routines and warnings about home safety issues. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access location-dependent web services (providing maps, addresses, transport schedules, etc.) and local intelligent machines (such as information kiosks or ATMs). This approach allows existing knowledge about the users, their common activities, and their environment to be used to extend the in-home AAL concept to the support of common routines performed outside the home. This chapter surveys the modelling techniques used inside the home and discusses the methodologies required for their extension for out-of-home use, including interoperation and sharing of models.

Combination and abstraction of sensors for mobile context-awareness

In this paper, we describe a context server application for mobile computing. Its main objective is to assist developers to exploit context-aware features in their applications. This approach uses the extraction of new context information using a combination of sensors and proposes a sensing abstraction layer to avoid having to deal with specific hardware.