A Phone Learning Model for Enhancing Productivity of Visually Impaired Civil Servants

Phone-based learning in civil service is the use of voice technologies to deliver learning and capacity building training services to government employees. The Internet revolution and advancement in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) have given rise to online and remote staff training for the purpose of enhancing workers productivity. The need for civil servants in Nigeria to develop capacity that will enhance knowledge is a key requirement to having competitive advantage in the work place. Existing online learning platforms (such as web-based learning, mobile learning, etc) did not consider the plight of the visually impaired. These platforms provide graphical interfaces that require sight to access. The visually impaired civil servants require auditory access to functionalities that exist in learning management system on the Internet. Thus a gap exist between the able-bodied and visually impaired civil servants on accessibility to e-learning platform. The objective of this paper is to provide a personalized telephone learning model and a prototype application that will enhance the productivity of the visually impaired workers in Government establishments in Nigeria. The model was designed using Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram. The prototype application was implemented and evaluated. With the proposed model and application, the visually and mobility impaired worker are able to participate in routine staff training and consequently enhances their productivity just like their able-bodied counterparts. The prototype application also serves as an alternative training platform for the able-bodied workers. Future research direction for this study will include biometric authentication of learners accessing the applicatio

A Phone Learning Model for Enhancing Productivity of Visually Impaired Civil Servants

Phone-based learning in civil service is the use of voice technologies to deliver learning and capacity building training services to government employees. The Internet revolution and advancement in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) have given rise to online and remote staff training for the purpose of enhancing workers productivity. The need for civil servants in Nigeria to develop capacity that will enhance knowledge is a key requirement to having competitive advantage in the work place. Existing online learning platforms (such as web-based learning, mobile learning, etc) did not consider the plight of the visually impaired. These platforms provide graphical interfaces that require sight to access. The visually impaired civil servants require auditory access to functionalities that exist in learning management system on the Internet. Thus a gap exist between the able-bodied and visually impaired civil servants on accessibility to e-learning platform. The objective of this paper is to provide a personalized telephone learning model and a prototype application that will enhance the productivity of the visually impaired workers in Government establishments in Nigeria. The model was designed using Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram. The prototype application was implemented and evaluated. With the proposed model and application, the visually and mobility impaired worker are able to participate in routine staff training and consequently enhances their productivity just like their able-bodied counterparts. The prototype application also serves as an alternative training platform for the able-bodied workers. Future research direction for this study will include biometric authentication of learners accessing the applicatio

Non-visual Virtual Reality: Considerations for the Pedagogical Design of Embodied Mathematical Experiences for Visually Impaired Children

Digital developments that foreground the sensory body and movement interaction offer new ways of engaging with mathematical ideas. Theories of embodied cognition argue for the important role of sensorimotor interaction in underpinning cognition. For visually impaired children this is particularly promising, since it provides opportunities for grounding mathematical ideas in bodily experience. The use of iVR technologies for visually impaired children is not immediately evident, given the central role of vision in immersive virtual worlds. This paper presents an iterative, design-based case study with visually impaired children to inform the pedagogical design of embodied learning experiences in iVR. Drawing from embodied pedagogy, it explores the process of implementing a classroom-based non-visual VR experience, designed to give visually impaired children an embodied experience of position in terms of Cartesian co-ordinates as they move around a virtual space. Video recordings of interaction combined with feedback from teachers and children contribute to knowledge of iVR learning applications in formal settings by discerning three types of pedagogical practices: creation of a performance space introduction of performative actions and action connected diverse perspectives

Developing e-Examination Voice interface for Visually Impaired students in Open and Distance Learning Context

Voice-based systems allow users access to information on the internet over a voice interface. Prior studies on Open and Distance Learning (ODL) eexamination systems that make use of voice interface do not sufficiently exhibit intelligent form of assessment, which diminishes the rigour of examination. The objective of this paper is to improve on the achievements of previous studies by providing a framework that will guide the development of a voice-based e-examination expert system for the visually impaired students in ODL. The study employs a combination of technologies such as system design, server side scripting, voice-based system development, data management and rule-based reasoning in developing the system. The system was evaluated to determine the level of usability. The results of the usability evaluation showed that the developed application has an ‘average usability’ rating of 3.48 out of 5 scales. The findings show that the voice-based e-examination system will not only be of immense benefit to the visually impaired students in ODL in respective of distance, but will also complement the existing web-based method for online examination

A Framework for The Design of Speech-Enabled Self-Care EHealth Systems

The Internet provides a wide range of health information and services which consumers access for self-care and to participate in a more informed way in their healthcare when they see their physician. This information and services are however, delivered in text form and therefore, does not cater for the needs of the non-computer literate, the visually impaired and the blind. This paper presents a framework for the design of speech-enabled self-care e-Health systems. Reasoning-induced disease diagnosis which existing speech-based disease screening systems lack has been incorporated into the framework to enable systems based on the framework diagnose more than one type of disease. Based on the framework, speechbased self-care e-Health system (SSeS) prototype application was developed. The originality of this framework is that it is speech-based. This takes care of the health needs of the category of people earlier identified and the underserved people, majority of those who are domiciled in Africa

Modeling Internet as a User-Adapted Speech Service

Proceedings of: 7th International Conference, HAIS 2012, Salamanca, Spain, March 28-30th, 2012.The web has become the largest repository of multimedia information and its convergence with telecommunications is now bringing the benefits of web technology and hybrid artificial intelligence systems to hand-held devices. However, maximizing accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of web applications, specially if it is concerned with facilitating access for disabled people. This way, natural spoken conversation and multimodal conversational agents have been proposed as a solution to facilitate a more natural interaction with these kind of devices. In this paper, we describe a proposal to provide spoken access to Internet information that is valid not only to generate basic applications (e.g., web search engines), but also to develop dialog-based speech interfaces that facilitate a user-adapted access that enhances web services. We describe our proposal and detail several applications developed to provide evidences about the benefits of introducing speech to make the enormous web content accessible to all mobile phone users.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN2011-28620- C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02,CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

The Effect of Cervical Muscle Fatigue on Postural Stability during Immersion Virtual Reality

The visual system is part of the nervous system that enables an individual to scan their environment and assess distance to and from objects. The information captured form our navigating environment is communicated to the brain, which in turn makes the decision on how we respond to spatial orientation. This is particularly useful in helping with balance and determining direction of movement. Our posture and visual stability rely heavily on an efficient and processing of visual, vestibular, and proprioception afferent input. Erroneous sensory information from defective sensory organs may cause a person to experience feelings of lightheadedness, spinning and whirling sensations, and difficulty in maintaining straight posture. Few studies have examined the synergy between cervical spine proprioception and the vestibular ocular reflex (VOR) and as such, their impact on human VOR is less understood. The purpose of this study therefore was to investigate how motion sensitivity is impacted by neck muscle fatigue in normal healthy participants. The overall aim of the present work was to investigate whether impaired somatosensory information from the cervical spine, caused by neck muscle fatigue, would negatively impact postural stability in healthy young participants. Results indicated that healthy young participants who were fatigued had significantly poorer postural stability than those who were not fatigued (p\u3c 0.001). In Conclusion, our research suggests that when assessing motion sensitivity in patients complaining of dizziness with a history of neck trauma, one may consider that VOR dysfunction could have a cervical origin due to somatosensory disturbance, which may lead to poor postural stability

Using Hidden-Markov Model in Speech-based Education System for the Visually Impaired Learner

Speech-based e-Education technology allows users to access learning content on the web by dialing a telephone number. Speech-enabled applications, particularly in the domain of education are primarily implemented to cater for the plight of the visually impaired towards addressing the shortcomings of user interface (UI) design of a mobile learner. However, with the increase in learning resources on the web, using telephone to find suitable content has become a painstaking task for speech-based online users to achieve improved performance. The problem of finding suitable content with speech e- learning applications is more difficult when the sight impaired learner is involved. It is convenient to use existing mobile speech-enabled e-learning applications, but it can be exceptionally time-consuming when the user is forced to navigate through several levels of options before finding exact content. The adoption of Hidden markov model (HMM) for interface and interaction design is required to provide easy navigation and adaptation in speech-enabled learning towards solving the problem of finding suitable content. The objective of this study is to provide a design and implementation of a HMM- based speech interactive education. The system will be useful especially for the physically challenged students such as the visually impaired. It also offers an alternative platform of learning for the able- bodied learners