Stefan Carmien

Socio-technical environments supporting people with cognitive disabilities using public transportation

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities.An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing “how things are” for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project.This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an “in-the-world” research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling techniques; and the design of universally accessible interfaces for complex systems through participatory design processes.This article provides both a near-term vision and an architecture for transportation systems that are socially inclusive, technologically appealing, and easier for everyone to use.

Increasing Workplace Independence for People with Cognitive Disabilities by Leveraging Distributed Cognition among Caregivers and Clients

This paper describes a group configuration that is currently employed to support the everyday living and working activities of people with cognitive disabilities. A client receiving face-to-face, often one-to-one, assistance from a dedicated human job coach is characteristic of this “traditional” configuration. We compare it with other group configurations that are used in cooperative and distributed work practices and propose an alternative configuration titled active distributed support system. In so doing, we highlight requirements that are unique to task support for people with cognitive disabilities. In particular, we assert that the knowledge of how to perform such activities is shared not only among people, but also between people and artifacts. There is a great potential for innovative uses of ubiquitous and mobile technologies to support these activities. A survey of technologies that have been developed to provide these individuals with greater levels of independence is then presented. These endeavors often attempt to replace human job coaches with computational cognitive aids. We discuss some limitations of such approaches and present a model and prototype that extends the computational job coach by incorporating human caregivers in a distributed one-to-many support system.

The Interplay of Internal and External Scripts

This chapter describes different script types that are involved when a person X is accomplishing a particular task Y. We refer to concepts and ideas from distributed cognition theories. It is assumed that individuals are holding internal scripts that guide them in the way they process tasks they are faced with, and these internal scripts are standing in a complex relationship to the external scripts provided by an artifact or by other persons. Three factors are regarded as crucial in order to describe the accomplishment of a task, namely (a) the actual activity, (b) knowledge underlying the activity, and (c) the executive function, a (meta-)cognitive instance that is setting the goals for the task and controls the system’s task accomplishment. For each of these three main factors, several sub-categories are introduced, on which two script approaches are compared. The first approach represents the socio-technical environment Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS) designed to support individuals with cognitive disabilities in accomplishing everyday tasks with a focus on “tools for living”. The second approach, the so-called collaborative argumentation script, represents a computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning environment to facilitate students’ collaborative argumentation with a focus on “tools for learning”. Implications of the comparison for the design of external scripts are derived and directions for future research are discussed.

End user programming and context responsiveness in handheld prompting systems for persons with cognitive disabilities and caregivers

Providing instructions via handheld prompters holds much promise for supporting independence for persons with cognitive disabilities. Because users of these tools are paired - caregivers who make scripts and a person with cognitive disabilities who uses them - designing such a system presents unique meta-design problems. The problems of changing content and configuration on a handheld computer, as needs and abilities change of the users with cognitive disabilities, produce a critical need for end-user programming tools. This paper describes the design and testing of the MAPS (Memory Aiding Prompting System) system, consisting of a handheld prompter and a multimedia editing tool for script creation, storage, and modification. The unique meta-design challenges of supporting end-user programming of context-responsive systems, and its broader implications, are presented.

MAPS: dynamic scaffolding for independence for persons with cognitive impairments

Individuals with cognitive disabilities are often unable to live independently due to their inability to perform daily tasks. Computationally enhanced dynamic prompting systems can mitigate this inability. Poor user interfaces, however, drive high levels of assistive technology abandonment by this population. To address this issue, MAPS (Memory Aiding Prompting System) provides an effective prompting system with an intuitive interface for configuration. User modeling techniques facilitate simple and effective prompting scripts for individual user needs.

Elders Using Smartphones - A Set of Research Based Heuristic Guidelines for Designers

Smartphones and an increasingly aged population are two highly visible emergent attributes in the last decade. Smartphones are becoming the canonical front end for the cloud, web, and applications from email to social media - especially so if you include pads in the same category. In Europe, the Americas and Asia the ratio of over those over 65 compared to the total population that is becoming increasingly skewed. This paper is about the intersection of these two socio-technical vectors, or more to the point about the mismatch between them: a mismatch which can lead to an increase in the digital divide rather than the decline that the more affordable smartphones could promise. We present a study of literature and results of a design process in the form of heuristics to support smartphone/tablet designers making useable and useful products for elder end-users.

MAPS: creating socio-technical environments in support of distributed cognition for people with cognitive impairments and their caregivers

Individuals with cognitive disabilities are often unable to live independently due to their inability to perform daily tasks. By providing socio-technical environments to increase their independence, they can have richer, fuller lives. MAPS (Memory Aiding Prompting System), provides a simple effective prompting system with an interface for caregivers designed to affect high rates of integration into daily life. MAPS contributes the base upon which a distributed support system can provide mobile, context-aware error detection and repair. The process of designing and evaluation of the MAPS system utilizes and extends HCI frameworks, such as distributed cognition, situated action and end-user programming.

Supporting Industry in the Development of Design for All Curriculum

There are very few sources of information about industry needs in regard to the required Design for All knowledge and skills for designers and engineers. A common finding of many studies, besides technical feasibility and commercial viability, is the lack of awareness among suppliers and users on DfA. In this paper, some of the results of a series of workshops organized by Fraunhofer FIT under the scope of some EU-financed projects will be presented. We claim the need to create common guidelines on teaching DfA, which should not be limited to curriculum at universities but also for training employees within the companies. The guidelines should contain topics like: what to teach, whom to teach, how to teach and where to teach.

A generic OSGi-based model framework for delivery context properties and events

Content adaptation systems rely on standards-based modeling of user needs and preferences, rendering platforms, assistive technologies and other relevant aspects of the overall delivery context. Despite their differing domains, these models overlap largely in respect of their digital representation and handling. We present hereby our work on a generic model framework exhibiting a novel set of features developed to tackle commonly found requirements in the area of user and delivery context modeling.