Stratégies pour le raisonnement sur le contexte dans les environnements d assistance pour les personnes âgées

Tirant parti de notre expérience avec une approche traditionnelle des environnements d'assistance ambiante (AAL) qui repose sur l'utilisation de nombreuses technologies hétérogènes dans les déploiements, cette thèse étudie la possibilité d'une approche simplifiée et complémentaire, ou seul un sous-ensemble hardware réduit est déployé, initiant un transfert de complexité vers le côté logiciel. Axé sur les aspects de raisonnement dans les systèmes AAL, ce travail a permis à la proposition d'un moteur d'inférence sémantique adapté à l'utilisation particulière à ces systèmes, répondant ainsi à un besoin de la communauté scientifique. Prenant en compte la grossière granularité des données situationnelles disponible avec une telle approche, un ensemble de règles dédiées avec des stratégies d'inférence adaptées est proposé, implémenté et validé en utilisant ce moteur. Un mécanisme de raisonnement sémantique novateur est proposé sur la base d'une architecture de raisonnement inspiré du système cognitif. Enfin, le système de raisonnement est intégré dans un framework de provision de services sensible au contexte, se chargeant de l'intelligence vis-à-vis des données contextuelles en effectuant un traitement des événements en direct par des manipulations ontologiques complexes. L ensemble du système est validé par des déploiements in-situ dans une maison de retraite ainsi que dans des maisons privées, ce qui en soi est remarquable dans un domaine de recherche principalement cantonné aux laboratoiresLeveraging our experience with the traditional approach to ambient assisted living (AAL) which relies on a large spread of heterogeneous technologies in deployments, this thesis studies the possibility of a more stripped down and complementary approach, where only a reduced hardware subset is deployed, probing a transfer of complexity towards the software side, and enhancing the large scale deployability of the solution. Focused on the reasoning aspects in AAL systems, this work has allowed the finding of a suitable semantic inference engine for the peculiar use in these systems, responding to a need in this scientific community. Considering the coarse granularity of situational data available, dedicated rule-sets with adapted inference strategies are proposed, implemented, and validated using this engine. A novel semantic reasoning mechanism is proposed based on a cognitively inspired reasoning architecture. Finally, the whole reasoning system is integrated in a fully featured context-aware service framework, powering its context awareness by performing live event processing through complex ontological manipulation. the overall system is validated through in-situ deployments in a nursing home as well as private homes over a few months period, which itself is noticeable in a mainly laboratory-bound research domainEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

'I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler, I'm a long way from home': exploring participation through music and digital design in dementia care

People with dementia (PWD) living in care are a population commonly termed as ‘vulnerable’, and whose challenging life situations are often described in the literature as being a part of a ‘burden’, both on the part of their families and larger society. The difficult circumstances faced by PWD are often compounded by moving into care, where they can face loneliness, social isolation, and a lack of meaningful experiences. With many millions of people living with the condition worldwide, as well as a lack of available and effective pharmaceutical treatment for dementia, there have been increasing calls for the ‘problem’ of dementia to be addressed through psycho-social pathways, with technological design implicated as one of these. However, the vast majority of extant design research in dementia has focused on alleviating the cognitive problems that come with the condition, leading to a lack of design research that explores experiential aspects of living with dementia. This thesis presents the findings and insights from a three year long, in-depth participatory project carried out in three dementia care settings in the south of Ireland that explored how people with dementia can participate within creative (music) sessions, and how this participation can be folded into an ongoing design process to result in a rich and multi-authored account of experience, as well as in meaningful design processes and objects. This thesis contributes to design research, in particular to experience-centred design approaches, and positions these contributions within the context of their potential when practiced in communities of care. The work outlines an ethnographically-informed design approach which, in this thesis, responds to human potential and creative imagination, and which is realised in an analytic account of an unfolding design process carried out with communities of people with dementia living in care. In particular, the approach describes the potential for design and design processes to be creative and expressive for a population often denied a sense of agency through aspects of living in care settings, as well as through a medicalization of the condition of dementia that persists in the literature surrounding designing for and with this population. The thesis outlines how ethnographic (and later, participatory action research) approaches contribute opportunities for very different community members (e.g., PWD, researchers, artists, carers, nurses – and more) to come together in a process of co-inquiry that utilizes multiple forms of creative imagination and communication. In this thesis, this was achieved through an unfolding process of learning concerning the potential of embodied communication in dementia care and design. The work positions embodied communication as a fruitful way to access and understand the lived experience of participants whose verbal abilities may have waned, but whose ability for communication and expression is still present in alternative ways (such as eye contact, touch, movement, vocalisation, informal chat, gesture, song, and dance), and evidence this with data from my fieldwork. The thesis includes an account of the development and introduction of a design object (SwaytheBand), the creative (and embodied) use of which helps to make visible certain social and communicative processes by participants, and which itself leads to a novel account of creative, spontaneous participation in dementia. Ultimately, the thesis provides a rich analytic account of ways in which people with dementia can communicate and participate within design processes in ways that have not yet been articulated in the design literature surrounding design in dementia, and, positioning itself within this larger literature, indicates a number of ways in which a body of research concerned with the experience and participation of people with dementia may proceed

[DiaGram]; Rethinking Graphic Design Process

Central to any graphic design education is the teaching of a design (or creative) process as an aid to problem-solving. This study draws upon experimental workshops within design education, together with current thinking from the broader arts, emotional psychology and the brain sciences, to explore the idea of repositioning process as the ‘main event’ – rather than it being a means-to-an-end. The study sought to frame learning experiences that enabled students to consciously become the object of their own study; including themes that explored ‘personal identity’, ‘dualism’, ‘mind-wandering’ and ‘habit’ as mechanisms to enhance our creative capacity, and evidenced significant improvements in the students’ confidence, dexterity and working methodologies (including the elusive ‘risk’ and ‘play’). The emerging conclusions propose key anchors (‘dissociative creativity’, ‘process as the main event’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘immersion’) that we believe ought to be central to the development of any new teaching (esp. within graphic design). Keywords: Design, Education, Process, Creativity, Risk Full paper. Delivered 31 May 2017. Page 81–95 of attached document