Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies

The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance

SmartPowerchair: characterisation and usability of a pervasive System of Systems

A characterisation of a pervasive System of Systems called the SmartPowerchair is presented, integrating pervasive technologies into a standard powered wheelchair (powerchair).The SmartPowerchair can be characterised as a System of Systems (SoS) due to focusing on selection of the correct combination of independent and interoperable systems that are networked for a period of time to achieve the specific overall goal of enhancing the quality of life for people with disability. A high-level two-dimensional SoS model for the SmartPowerchair is developed to illustrate the different SoS lifecycle stages and levels. The results from a requirements elicitation study consisting of a survey targeting powerchair users was the input to a Hierarchical Task Analysis defining the supported tasks of the SmartPowerchair. The system architecture of one constituent system (SmartATRS) is described as well as the results of a usability evaluation containing workload measurements. The establishment of the SmartAbility Framework was the outcome of the evaluation results that concluded Range of Movement (ROM) was the determinant of suitable technologies for people with disability. The framework illustrates how a SoS approach can be applied to disability to recommend interaction mediums, technologies and tasks depending on the disability,impairments and ROM of the user. The approach therefore, creates a‘recommender system’ by viewing Disability Type, Impairments, ROM, Interaction Medium, Technologies and Tasks as constituent systems that interact together in a SoS

Accessibility and Activity-Centered Design for ICT Users: ACCESIBILITIC Ontology

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are involved in daily human activities. Accessibility guarantees that individuals with different abilities can interact with ICTs. User pro le models are an explicit representation of the characteristics of an individual and are used to reason about what users need. They are implemented through ontologies. After identifying common and different aspects among important ontologies in the domain of accessibility and e-inclusion, we designed and implemented the ACCESIBILITIC ontology applying the NeOn methodology, speci cally by reusing and reengineering these ontologies. The strengths of our model include the user's ability to develop a high variety of activities despite his/her disabilities, support for inference processes, and providing answers to several competency questions. ACCESIBILITIC allows the representation of suitable technical support based on the user's capabilities when interacting with ICTs. To this end, we use an activity-centered design (ACD), which allows us to identify daily activities and to match these activities with a suitable technology to perform them.This research work is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness - Agencia Estatal de Investigación - with European Regional Development Funds (AEI/FEDER, UE) through the project ref. TIN2016-79484-R

SHELDON Smart habitat for the elderly.

An insightful document concerning active and assisted living under different perspectives: Furniture and habitat, ICT solutions and Healthcare

Accessible lifelong learning at higher education:outcomes and lessons Learned at two different PilotSites in the EU4ALL Project

[EN] The EU4ALL project (IST-FP6-034778) has developed a general framework to address the needs of accessible lifelong learning at Higher Education level consisting of several standards-based interoperable components integrated into an open web service architecture aimed at supporting adapted interaction to guarantee students' accessibility needs. Its flexibility has supported the project implementation at several sites with different settings and various learning management systems. Large-scale evaluations involving hundreds of users, considering diverse disability types, and key staff roles have allowed obtaining valuable lessons with respect to "how to adopt or enhance eLearning accessibility" at university. The project was evaluated at four higher education institutions, two of the largest in Europe and two mediumsized. In this paper, we focus on describing the implementation and main conclusions at the largest project evaluation site (UNED), which was involved in the project from the beginning, and thus, in the design process, and a medium-sized university that adopted the EU4ALL approach (UPV). This implies dealing with two well-known open source learning environments (i.e. dotLRN and Sakai), and considering a wide variety of stakeholders and requirements. Thus the results of this evaluation serve to illustrate the coverage of both the approach and developments.The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the financial support of the EU4ALL project (IST-2006-034478). The work at aDeNu is also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TIN2008-06862-C04-01/TSI “A2UN@”). Authors would also like to thank all the EU4ALL partners for their collaboration.Boticario, JG.; Rodriguez-Ascaso, A.; Santos, OC.; Raffenne, E.; Montandon, L.; Roldán Martínez, D.; Buendía García, F. (2012). Accessible lifelong learning at higher education:outcomes and lessons Learned at two different PilotSites in the EU4ALL Project. Journal of Universal Computer Science. 18(1):62-85. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/37117628518