Designing assisted living technologies 'in the wild' : preliminary experiences with cultural probe methodology

Background There is growing interest in assisted living technologies to support independence at home. Such technologies should ideally be designed ‘in the wild’ i.e. taking account of how real people live in real homes and communities. The ATHENE (Assistive Technologies for Healthy Living in Elders: Needs Assessment by Ethnography) project seeks to illuminate the living needs of older people and facilitate the co-production with older people of technologies and services. This paper describes the development of a cultural probe tool produced as part of the ATHENE project and how it was used to support home visit interviews with elders with a range of ethnic and social backgrounds, family circumstances, health conditions and assisted living needs. Method Thirty one people aged 60 to 98 were visited in their homes on three occasions. Following an initial interview, participants were given a set of cultural probe materials, including a digital camera and the ‘Home and Life Scrapbook’ to complete in their own time for one week. Activities within the Home and Life Scrapbook included maps (indicating their relationships to people, places and objects), lists (e.g. likes, dislikes, things they were concerned about, things they were comfortable with), wishes (things they wanted to change or improve), body outline (indicating symptoms or impairments), home plan (room layouts of their homes to indicate spaces and objects used) and a diary. After one week, the researcher and participant reviewed any digital photos taken and the content of the Home and Life Scrapbook as part of the home visit interview. Findings The cultural probe facilitated collection of visual, narrative and material data by older people, and appeared to generate high levels of engagement from some participants. However, others used the probe minimally or not at all for various reasons including limited literacy, physical problems (e.g. holding a pen), lack of time or energy, limited emotional or psychological resources, life events, and acute illness. Discussions between researchers and participants about the materials collected (and sometimes about what had prevented them completing the tasks) helped elicit further information relevant to assisted living technology design. The probe materials were particularly helpful when having conversations with non-English speaking participants through an interpreter. Conclusions Cultural probe methods can help build a rich picture of the lives and experiences of older people to facilitate the co-production of assisted living technologies. But their application may be constrained by the participant’s physical, mental and emotional capacity. They are most effective when used as a tool to facilitate communication and development of a deeper understanding of older people’s needs

Enriching companion robots with enhanced reminiscence abilities

In this document I will go on discussing a project conceived by Professor Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese and Alessandro Russo, both researchers and developers of some of the main aspects of project Mario at CNR Rome. MARIO is a robot, part of a robotics company called KOMPAÏ Robotics that deals with the production and management of Robots who take care of elderly people who suffer from dementia or who still need an aid; more generally speaking, there is talk of weak and lonely people within an organization and / or institutions (nursing homes ...) or in their own homes. There are numerous characteristics of MARIO, which ultimately contribute to all those which are the manufacturing objectives of KOMPAÏ Robotics. My project, or rather my contribution to MARIO, is to look for a specific method which let the robot show a specific set of photos to the user according to the expressions, feelings and emotions, the user will reveal. Example: the robot randomly chooses a marriage photo and the user suddenly start to laugh and to express positive feelings with positive words; the robot will try to understand if it’s a good photo for the user or not, and in the first case will continue to show the same kind of pictures while in the second case, will change completely set of photos to be shown. The pleasure of the subject expressed in relation to a photo must be subject to an index of interest between predefined and specified values that may be to show a certain interest in a picture or the subjects within the image or the situation that surrounds them

Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learnin

Fuzzy Case-Based Reasoning in Product Style Acquisition Incorporating Valence-Arousal-Based Emotional Cellular Model

Emotional cellular (EC), proposed in our previous works, is a kind of semantic cell that contains kernel and shell and the kernel is formalized by a triple- L = <P, d, δ>, where P denotes a typical set of positive examples relative to word-L, d is a pseudodistance measure on emotional two-dimensional space: valence-arousal, and δ is a probability density function on positive real number field. The basic idea of EC model is to assume that the neighborhood radius of each semantic concept is uncertain, and this uncertainty will be measured by one-dimensional density function δ. In this paper, product form features were evaluated by using ECs and to establish the product style database, fuzzy case based reasoning (FCBR) model under a defined similarity measurement based on fuzzy nearest neighbors (FNN) incorporating EC was applied to extract product styles. A mathematical formalized inference system for product style was also proposed, and it also includes uncertainty measurement tool emotional cellular. A case study of style acquisition of mobile phones illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed methodology

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

A generic architecture for interactive intelligent tutoring systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 07/06/2001.This research is focused on developing a generic intelligent architecture for an interactive tutoring system. A review of the literature in the areas of instructional theories, cognitive and social views of learning, intelligent tutoring systems development methodologies, and knowledge representation methods was conducted. As a result, a generic ITS development architecture (GeNisa) has been proposed, which combines the features of knowledge base systems (KBS) with object-oriented methodology. The GeNisa architecture consists of the following components: a tutorial events communication module, which encapsulates the interactive processes and other independent computations between different components; a software design toolkit; and an autonomous knowledge acquisition from a probabilistic knowledge base. A graphical application development environment includes tools to support application development, and learning environments and which use a case scenario as a basis for instruction. The generic architecture is designed to support client-side execution in a Web browser environment, and further testing will show that it can disseminate applications over the World Wide Web. Such an architecture can be adapted to different teaching styles and domains, and reusing instructional materials automatically can reduce the effort of the courseware developer (hence cost and time) in authoring new materials. GeNisa was implemented using Java scripts, and subsequently evaluated at various commercial and academic organisations. Parameters chosen for the evaluation include quality of courseware, relevancy of case scenarios, portability to other platforms, ease of use, content, user-friendliness, screen display, clarity, topic interest, and overall satisfaction with GeNisa. In general, the evaluation focused on the novel characteristics and performances of the GeNisa architecture in comparison with other ITS and the results obtained are discussed and analysed. On the basis of the experience gained during the literature research and GeNisa development and evaluation. a generic methodology for ITS development is proposed as well as the requirements for the further development of ITS tools. Finally, conclusions are drawn and areas for further research are identified

Representing knowledge patterns in a conceptual database design aid : a dual-base knowledge model

The current status of the Knowledge-Based Database Design Systems (KBDDSs) is reviewed. It is shown that they do not resolve the problems of the identification of the relevant objects (relations) and the interpretation of the identified objects from the semantic-rich reality. Consequently, a theoretical architecture is developed to alleviate these problems by reusing the finished conceptual data schemata. By taking account of the essence of the reality and the problem-solving behaviour of experts, a new knowledge model called the Dual-Base Knowledge Model (DBKM), which involves two syngeristic knowledge structures, the concept and case bases, is constructed by the theories of conceptual knowledge in the psychological realm and the notions of relation and function from set theory. The aim is to provide rational and valid grounds for the support and interplay of these two bases in order to reuse the relevant old cases and facilitate the acquisition of new cases. Thus, the process model, which involves two process mechanisms, the case retrieval and knowledge accumulation mechanisms, is analysed according to the theory of the proposed DBKM. In this way, the feasibility of reusing the relevant schemata or part of them can be established in the DBKM architecture. The functionality of the DBKM architecture is tested by a simulated example to show how the relevant cases are recalled in the knowledge pool and the new knowledge is stored in the knowledge repository. The distinctions between the DBKM architecture and the frameworks of current KBDDSs and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems (from the knowledge-based system view), and between the DBKM and those knowledge models in current KBDDSs and rule-based data modelling approaches (from the knowledge-modelling view) are investigated to contrast the current levels of progress of the conceptual data modelling. This research establishes the feasibility of the DBKM architecture, although it demonstrates the need to accommodate the dynamic and functional aspects of the Universe of Discourse (UoD). The main contributions of the DBKM are (1) to provide a valid basis for complementing the environments supported by the current KBDDSs and a rational basis for creating the symbiosis of humans and computer; and (2) to moderate the beliefs underlying the fact-based school and provide a hermeneutic environment, so that the confusion of the current conceptualising work can be alleviated and the difficulty of the conceptualising task can be eased to some degree

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications