Noelia García Castillo

Participatory Design with On-line Focus Groups and Normative Systems

Participatory design is a generally accepted practice for the construction of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems. The involvement of experts and users in the conception and design of assistive solutions can lead to better systems. A common technique to involve users is called focus-group, which is mainly a moderated group meeting. Despite its benefits, it cannot be neglected the implicit cost of preparing and performing such meetings, and ensuring, later on, that the resulting assistive solution meets the requirements. A disruptive way to change this situation is the application of ICT technologies. This work contributes with a proposal for partial automation of focus-group techniques that support on-line evaluation of assistive solutions during the conception stage. Also, the paper addresses the formalization of the evaluation feedback through the use of normative systems.