Adaptive software architecture based on confident HCI for the deployment of sensitive services in smart homes

Smart spaces foster the development of natural and appropriate forms of human-computer interaction by taking advantage of home customization. The interaction potential of the Smart Home, which is a special type of smart space, is of particular interest in fields in which the acceptance of new technologies is limited and restrictive. The integration of smart home design patterns with sensitive solutions can increase user acceptance. In this paper, we present the main challenges that have been identified in the literature for the successful deployment of sensitive services (e.g., telemedicine and assistive services) in smart spaces and a software architecture that models the functionalities of a Smart Home platform that are required to maintain and support such sensitive services. This architecture emphasizes user interaction as a key concept to facilitate the acceptance of sensitive services by end-users and utilizes activity theory to support its innovative design. The application of activity theory to the architecture eases the handling of novel concepts, such as understanding of the system by patients at home or the affordability of assistive services. Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of the architecture and compare the results with other architectures from the literature

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Adaptive dashboard for IoT environments: application for senior residences

Les tableaux de bord sont de puissants outils électroniques qui peuvent fournir des informations exploitables et utiles pour une intervention rapide et une prise de décision éclairée. Ils peuvent être particulièrement bénéfiques pour favoriser un vieillissement en bonne santé en fournissant aux professionnels de la santé un aperçu en un coup d'œil des conditions du patient (par exemple, les personnes âgées). Alors que la population des personnes âgées augmente dans plusieurs pays, dont le Canada, un grand nombre d'entre eux seront forcés de déménager dans des résidences pour personnes âgées pour des raisons telles que la fragilité, la démence ou le sentiment de solitude. Cette population importante de personnes âgées augmentera la charge de travail des infirmières et des professionnels de la santé travaillant dans ces lieux, en raison du fait que les personnes âgées ont besoin de visites fréquentes et d'une surveillance en raison de leur état de santé. Ce problème a le potentiel de mettre plus de pression sur le système de santé déjà tendu dans les prochaines années. La pénurie d'infirmières et de main-d'œuvre rend la situation plus grave, en particulier dans les pays développés. Il faudrait donc prendre des initiatives pour soutenir les soignants de ces résidences. Le tableau de bord peut jouer un rôle clé pour aider les professionnels de la santé dans leurs tâches car il peut fournir des informations en un coup d'œil et en temps réel sur la situation actuelle. De nos jours, avec les progrès technologiques dans les dispositifs de détection et l'infrastructure IoT ainsi qu'un accès Internet élargi, la surveillance des patients à distance est devenue une option réalisable. Par ailleurs, en utilisant un tableau de bord, les professionnels de la santé peuvent visualiser les informations collectées à distance pour surveiller les personnes âgées vivant dans des résidences, ce qui fera gagner un temps considérable aux professionnels de la santé et les aidera à servir plus de patients. Cependant, il est important de considérer que les résidences pour personnes âgées accueillent généralement un grand nombre de résidents et les professionnels de la santé qui les desservent. Chaque professionnel de la santé est motivé par certains objectifs et exécute des tâches précises selon des priorités différentes. Cette différence change la façon dont chaque fournisseur de soins de santé utilisera le tableau de bord, car ils ont besoin d'informations qui les aident dans leurs tâches principales. Les informations qu'un groupe de professionnels de la santé trouve bénéfiques peuvent ne pas être utiles pour un autre groupe. Ainsi, la méthode de visualisation utilisée pour un individu peut ne pas être significative pour un autre. Par conséquence, les informations doivent être présentées de manière personnalisée et adaptée à un utilisateur ciblé. Il est important de souligner que la visualisation appropriée des informations dans les tableaux de bord est un facteur clé pour offrir une valeur réelle aux utilisateurs. Cette diversité de besoins, de préférences et de priorités doit être prise en compte tout au long de l'élaboration du tableau de bord. En raison de la diversité des rôles et des intérêts existant dans les résidences pour personnes âgées, et compte tenu du coût élevé du développement du tableau de bord, il est très difficile de développer des tableaux de bord séparés pour chaque partie. Cependant, les solutions existantes dans la littérature sont développées à l'aide de méthodes statiques et se concentrent sur la satisfaction des besoins d'un groupe particulier. Ces approches limitent les capacités des tableaux de bord existants à s'adapter aux besoins des différentes personnes. Dans cette étude, nous présentons AMI-Dash comme une tentative de réalisation d'une solution de tableau de bord qui permet une conception dynamique et une visualisation appropriée des informations pour plusieurs groupes. Notre solution vise à fournir les bonnes informations aux bonnes personnes en minimisant le temps nécessaire pour fournir un tableau de bord aux professionnels la santé, afin de les aider dans l'exercice de leurs fonctions en accédant à des informations exploitables. Nous avons également évalué notre solution sous deux aspects : l'évaluation de l'interaction homme-machine et l'évaluation technique. Le résultat de notre évaluation montre que la solution proposée peut satisfaire à la fois les exigences de l'utilisateur final et les exigences techniques tout en maintenant un haut niveau de satisfaction.Abstract: Dashboards are powerful electronic tools that can provide actionable insights for timely intervention and wise decision-making. They can be particularly beneficial to support healthy aging by providing healthcare professionals with at-a-glance overview of health conditions of patients (e.g., older adults). As the population of older adults is increasing in several countries including Canada, a large number of them will be forced to move to Senior Residences due to reasons like frailty, dementia or loneliness. This swelled senior population will increase the workload of nurses and health professionals working in these places, due to the fact that older adults need frequent visits and monitoring because of their health condition. This issue has the potential to put more pressure on the already stretched healthcare system in the next years. The situation is aggravated when it is coincided with the shortage of nurses and workforce especially in developed countries. Therefore, initiative should be taken to support healthcare professionals in these residences. Dashboard can play a key role to support healthcare professionals in their tasks as it can provide real-time information about the current situation in more helpful visualization form. Nowadays, with technological advancements in sensing devices and IoT infrastructure along with broadened internet access, remote patient monitoring has become a feasible option. By utilizing a dashboard, healthcare professionals can visualize information collected remotely to monitor patients/ older adults living in senior residences, which will save a considerable time of healthcare professionals and support them to serve more patients. However, it is important to consider that senior residences usually host a large number of older adults and healthcare professionals that serve them. Each healthcare professional is driven with certain goals, and they have different tasks and priorities. This difference, change how each healthcare professional will utilize the dashboard, as they need information that helps them in their main tasks. The information that a group of healthcare professionals find beneficial might not be useful for another group, and the visualization method used for an individual might not be meaningful for another. Therefore, information should be presented in a personalized way to the targeted user. It is important to emphasize that appropriate visualization of interesting information, in dashboards is a key factor to deliver real value to dashboard users. Due to the variety of roles and interests that exists in senior residences, and considering high development cost of a dashboard, developing separate dashboards for each party is not only difficult but also time consuming. Still, existing solutions in the literature are developed using static methods and they focused on satisfying the needs of a particular group in their domain. These approaches limited the capabilities of existing dashboards to adapt to the needs of different people. We argue that dashboard has to be tailored in order to address the diversity in needs, preferences and priorities of healthcare professionals. In this study we introduce AMI-Dash as an attempt to achieve a dashboard solution that allows dynamic design and information visualization. Our solution focused on providing the right information to the right people while minimizing the time required to deliver a dashboard to health professionals, so that supporting them in performing their duties by accessing timely and actionable information. We also evaluated our proposed solution from two aspects: Human-Computer Interaction Evaluation and Technical Evaluation. The result of our evaluation shows that proposed solution can satisfy both end-user and technical requirements while maintaining a high-level of satisfaction among users

Holistic System Design for Distributed National eHealth Services

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Human-Centred Smart Buildings: Reframing Smartness Through the Lens of Human-Building Interaction

PhD ThesisSmart buildings backed by data and algorithms promise reduced energy use and increased value for businesses and occupants. Yet, this has typically been considered from an engineering and systems perspective. Given increasing integration of sensing and ubiquitous computing technologies in modern built environments, a growing HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Building Interaction (HBI) community has begun to advocate for the human-centred design of building technologies. This dissertation argues that there is a need for an inclusive, socially just and sustainable HBI agenda, to enable smarter buildings and facilities management. Deconstructing ‘smart’ rhetoric within HCI/HBI discourse and highlighting the values and ethics underpinning it, I argue that existing approaches to ‘smartness’ privilege automation and efficiency over the needs of human occupants. I undertake a qualitative inquiry into the roles of data and digital technologies in human-centred smart buildings through three case studies: i) How retrofitted environment sensors facilitate smarter energy auditing practices. I contribute a methodology for using sensor toolkits in auditing, technical design of the BuildAX sensing platform, and insights into sensoraugmented audits and how future standards might support these. ii) How data and digital technologies foster collective experiences of thermal comfort for office workers. I contribute a data elicitation interview method, design of the ThermoKiosk experience survey system, and considerations for integrating office tensions into workplace comfort management. iii) How HBI can support agency and participation in the everyday management and adaptation of a contemporary smart building. I contribute a ‘building walks’ method to elicit conversations on the future of building technologies, new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces, and how buildings of the future might better enable occupant agency. Through these, I contribute a re-framing of smartness to be more human-centred, including concerns for collaboration, inclusion, and human decision-making which does not consider occupants a ‘problem’ to be solved. The results of the case studies are synthesised into a set of six principles for the design of technology within human-centred smart buildings, re-grounding the field of HBI in the philosophy of environmental and social justice

Model-driven Personalisation of Human-Computer Interaction across Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Personalisation is essential to Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), which focuses on a human-centred paradigm aiming to provide interaction with adaptive content, services, and interfaces towards each one of its users, according to the context of the applications’ scenarios. However, the provision of that appropriated personalised interaction is a true challenge due to different reasons, such as the user interests, heterogeneous environments and devices, dynamic user behaviour and data capture. This dissertation focuses on a model-driven personalisation solution that has the main goal of facili-tating the implementation of a personalised human-computer interaction across different Ubicomp scenarios and applications. The research reported here investigates how a generic and interoperable model for personalisation can be used, shared and processed by different applications, among diverse devices, and across different scenarios, studying how it can enrich human-computer interaction. The research started by the definition of a consistent user model with the integration of context to end in a pervasive model for the definition of personalisations across different applications. Besides the model proposal, the other key contributions within the solution are the modelling frame-work, which encapsulates the model and integrates the user profiling module, and a cloud-based platform to pervasively support developers in the implementation of personalisation across different applications and scenarios. This platform provides tools to put end users in control of their data and to support developers through web services based operations implemented on top of a personalisa-tion API, which can also be used independently of the platform for testing purposes, for instance. Several Ubicomp applications prototypes were designed and used to evaluate, at different phases, both the solution as a whole and each one of its components. Some were specially created with the goal of evaluating specific research questions of this work. Others were being developed with a pur-pose other than for personalisation evaluation, but they ended up as personalised prototypes to better address their initial goals. The process of applying the personalisation model to the design of the latter should also work as a proof of concept on the developer side. On the one hand, developers have been probed with the implementation of personalised applications using the proposed solution, or a part of it, to assess how it works and can help them. The usage of our solution by developers was also important to assess how the model and the platform respond to the developers’ needs. On the other hand, some prototypes that implement our model-driven per-sonalisation solution have been selected for end user evaluation. Usually, user testing was conducted at two different stages of the development, using: (1) a non-personalised version; (2) the final per-sonalised version. This procedure allowed us to assess if personalisation improved the human-com-puter interaction. The first stage was also important to know who were the end users and gather interaction data to come up with personalisation proposals for each prototype. Globally, the results of both developers and end users tests were very positive. Finally, this dissertation proposes further work, which is already ongoing, related to the study of a methodology to the implementation and evaluation of personalised applications, supported by the development of three mobile health applications for rehabilitation

Engineering context-aware systems and applications: a survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; B) Context aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; C) Context aware systems conceptualization