Silvia Ceccacci

Smart Objects: An Evaluation of the Present State Based on User Needs

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting people’s independent living. However an inventory of characteristics of smart products currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products in order to: (1) understand if their features really match users’ needs, answering to the definition of assistive technology and, consequently, (2) understand if an environment embedded with SOs can be considered as assistive too, taking into consideration the attributes given by the definition of the SOs, of being embedded in familiar objects and immerse in the users’ surround.

Method to design adaptable and adaptive user interfaces

In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modelling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction to generate the user profiles, subjects older than 40 years with different levels of technology affinity have been considered. The new adaptive user interfaces prototypes will be tested through different use cases in the context of smart home environments.

Design Adaptable and Adaptive User Interfaces: A Method to Manage the Information

Designing a multi-user adaptive interface means designing for diversity in end-users and contexts of use, and implies making alternative design decisions, at various levels of the interaction project, inherently leading to diversity in the final design outcomes. Nowadays Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) is becoming one of the major objectives addressed by Human Computer Interaction research. The present study provides an overview about the methods currently applied to the definition and development of AUIs. In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modeling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction. In order to generate the user profiles, subjects older than 40 years with different levels of technology affinity will be considered. These prototypes will be tested through different use cases in the context of smart home environments. The final goal is to produce smart objects and consumer goods able to automatically satisfy the different skills, abilities, needs and human preferences, in an environment where each solutions address different individuals.

Smart Object for AAL: A Review

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting independent living. However, an inventory of characteristics of smart assistive devices currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products and in particular to analyse their functionalities in order to understand if they can be considered inclusive and if they effectively match the needs of elderly. This review can be useful for researchers and designers of Ambient Intelligent Environments, to realise where efforts should be focused in order to match the demand from the elderly people’s side.

User centred approach for home environment designing

Highly usable human-system interfaces can have a large benefit on the quality of life for the elderly and disabled. New emerging product design technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), give many opportunities to evaluate and improve system usability in the early design stages. In this way different design alternatives can be evaluated in terms of physical and cognitive performance. In this context the present paper describes a systematic approach for designing highly usable home environments and optimizing human-machine interaction. VR/AR technologies are adopted for user interface evaluation. The approach will be applied to the design of a new kitchen.

How Older People Who Have Never Used Touchscreen Technology Interact with a Tablet

Touchscreen technologies have become increasingly common in personal devices, so it seems necessary to improve their accessibility and usability for the older people. In the past years, a lot of studies have been conducted to improve touch interfaces, however, most them do not consider older people with very low attitude with ICTs. Moreover, the majority of studies date back 2014, so they lack to consider the most innovative technologies available today. The present study involves a sample of older people without previous experience with ICTs with the aim of analyzing how basic features of a touchscreen interface affect their performances with typical touch-gestures. A total of 22 participants have been involved. Results partially confirm the existent literature and partially reveal new interesting findings that can be useful to improve the touch screen accessibility for older people.

Adaptive Interface for Smart Home: A New Design Approach

In an inclusive and accessible smart environments context the implementation of the “design for all” method presents several critical issues. In fact, the universal design represents a difficult challenge for the designer because it depends on the complexity of human intentions in a particular time and place. For this reason, we propose a new approach that aims to support the design of inclusive environments by improving the user-environment interaction.

A method to identify VR-based set-up to foster elderly in design evaluation

User involvement during design process is an important issue in inclusive design ID. To this purpose, in the last years, virtual reality VR technologies have been introduced to construct virtual prototypes, in order to allow test with users even at the end of the conceptual design phase. The present paper aims to propose a method to support the selection of VR interaction technologies, which can be suited by end users accordingly to their physical and cognitive abilities. The proposed method is applied in order to compare the main VR interaction technologies with the objective to identify an optimal low-cost VR set-up to involve elderly people in evaluation of an innovative concept of kitchen environment which implement smart grid and home automation technologies.

An inclusive approach for home environment design

Quality of life of various types of people can strongly benefit of a design process developed to take into account needs and requirements of end users. In this context the paper present a study on the cognitive and physical abilities of elderly persons, to design a friendly kitchen, that is considered one of the most complex home environment for the provided functionalities and involved human capabilities. A robust inclusive design approach is conceived to make simple and intuitive the interaction between humans and the systems installed in the kitchen environment. An investigation of virtual prototyping techniques is proposed to find the best Virtual Reality system to create a living lab to involve elderly in user-based assessment.

The User-Product Ontology: A New Approach to Define an Ontological Model to Manage Product Searching Based on User Needs

Search engines play an important role in determining the success of e-commerce. Despite many efforts have been made to improve searching methods (SM) they remain mostly limited to semantic elaboration of keywords. This implies that the SM are not capable of supporting the research of products that best satisfy customers, according to their characteristics and background. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces an approach able to define a new ontological model that formalizes the knowledge necessary to implement a search engine capable to guide the customer to search the desired product or service according to his/her characteristics and needs. To this purpose, three essential aspects have been considered: a User Ontology (UO), a Product Ontology (PO) and rules (or properties) to link the user and product ontologies. The described approach is applied, as an example, to the products class known as Smart Objects that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) market.