GIVE-ME: Gamification In Virtual Environments for Multimodal Evaluation - A Framework

In the last few decades, a variety of assistive technologies (AT) have been developed to improve the quality of life of visually impaired people. These include providing an independent means of travel and thus better access to education and places of work. There is, however, no metric for comparing and benchmarking these technologies, especially multimodal systems. In this dissertation, we propose GIVE-ME: Gamification In Virtual Environments for Multimodal Evaluation, a framework which allows for developers and consumers to assess their technologies in a functional and objective manner. This framework is based on three foundations: multimodality, gamification, and virtual reality. It facilitates fuller and more controlled data collection, rapid prototyping and testing of multimodal ATs, benchmarking heterogeneous ATs, and conversion of these evaluation tools into simulation or training tools. Our contributions include: (1) a unified evaluation framework: via developing an evaluative approach for multimodal visual ATs; (2) a sustainable evaluation: by employing virtual environments and gamification techniques to create engaging games for users, while collecting experimental data for analysis; (3) a novel psychophysics evaluation: enabling researchers to conduct psychophysics evaluation despite the experiment being a navigational task; and (4) a novel collaborative environment: enabling developers to rapid prototype and test their ATs with users in an early stakeholder involvement that fosters communication between developers and users. This dissertation first provides a background in assistive technologies and motivation for the framework. This is followed by detailed description of the GIVE-ME Framework, with particular attention to its user interfaces, foundations, and components. Then four applications are presented that describe how the framework is applied. Results and discussions are also presented for each application. Finally, both conclusions and a few directions for future work are presented in the last chapter

Exploring asymmetric roles in mixed-ability gaming

Tese de mestrado, Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2020Noticeably, the majority of mainstreamgames — digitalgames and tabletopgames — are still designed for players with a standard set of abilities. As such, people with someformof disability, oftenface insurmountable challengestoplay mainstreamgames or are limited to playgames specifcally designed for them. By conducting an initial study, we share multiplayer gaming experiences of people with visual impairments collected from interviews with 10 adults and 10 minors, and 140 responses to an online survey. We include the perspectives of 17 sighted people who play with someone who has a visual impairment, collected in a second online survey. We found that people with visual impairments are playingdiversegames,butface limitationsin playing with others who have different visual abilities. What stood out is the lack of intersection ingaming opportunities, and consequently, in habits and interests of people with different visual abilities. In this study, we highlight barriers associated with these experiences beyond inaccessibility issues and discuss implications and opportunities for the design of mixed-abilitygaming.Asexpected,we foundaworrying absenceofgames that caterto different abilities. In this context, we explored ability-based asymmetric roles as a design approach to create engaging and challenging mixed-ability play. We designed and developed two collaborative testbedgamesexploring asymmetric interdependent roles. In a remote study with 13 mixed-visual-ability pairs we assessed how roles affected perceptions of engagement, competence, and autonomy, using a mixed-methods approach. The games provided an engaging and challenging experience, in which differences in visual ability were not limiting. Our results underline how experiences unequal by design can give rise to an equitable joint experience

Design and evaluation of auditory spatial cues for decision making within a game environment for persons with visual impairments

An audio platform game was created and evaluated in order to answer the question of whether or not an audio game could be designed that effectively conveys the spatial information necessary for persons with visual impairments to successfully navigate the game levels and respond to audio cues in time to avoid obstacles. The game used several types of audio cues (sounds and speech) to convey the spatial setup (map) of the game world. Most audio-only players seemed to be able to create a workable mental map from the game\u27s sound cues alone, pointing to potential for the further development of similar audio games for persons with visual impairments. The research also investigated the navigational strategies used by persons with visual impairments and the accuracy of the participants\u27 mental maps as a consequence of their navigational strategy. A comparisons of the maps created by visually impaired participants with those created by sighted participants playing the game with and without graphics, showed no statistically significant difference in map accuracy between groups. However, there was a marked difference between the number of invented objects when we compared this value between the sighted audio-only group and the other groups, which could serve as an area for future research

Oceanus.

v. 28, no. 1 (1985

Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions

Welcome to ROBOTICA 2009. This is the 9th edition of the conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions, the third time with IEEE‐Robotics and Automation Society Technical Co‐Sponsorship. Previous editions were held since 2001 in Guimarães, Aveiro, Porto, Lisboa, Coimbra and Algarve. ROBOTICA 2009 is held on the 7th May, 2009, in Castelo Branco , Portugal. ROBOTICA has received 32 paper submissions, from 10 countries, in South America, Asia and Europe. To evaluate each submission, three reviews by paper were performed by the international program committee. 23 papers were published in the proceedings and presented at the conference. Of these, 14 papers were selected for oral presentation and 9 papers were selected for poster presentation. The global acceptance ratio was 72%. After the conference, eighth papers will be published in the Portuguese journal Robótica, and the best student paper will be published in IEEE Multidisciplinary Engineering Education Magazine. Three prizes will be awarded in the conference for: the best conference paper, the best student paper and the best presentation. The last two, sponsored by the IEEE Education Society ‐ Student Activities Committee. We would like to express our thanks to all participants. First of all to the authors, whose quality work is the essence of this conference. Next, to all the members of the international program committee and reviewers, who helped us with their expertise and valuable time. We would also like to deeply thank the invited speaker, Jean Paul Laumond, LAAS‐CNRS France, for their excellent contribution in the field of humanoid robots. Finally, a word of appreciation for the hard work of the secretariat and volunteers. Our deep gratitude goes to the Scientific Organisations that kindly agreed to sponsor the Conference, and made it come true. We look forward to seeing more results of R&D work on Robotics at ROBOTICA 2010, somewhere in Portugal

The Missouri Miner, April 23, 1997

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/missouri_miner/3755/thumbnail.jp

Shared Control for Wheelchair Interfaces

Independent mobility is fundamental to the quality of life of people with impairment. Most people with severe mobility impairments, whether congenital, e.g., from cerebral palsy, or acquired, e.g., from spinal cord injury, are prescribed a wheelchair. A small yet significant number of people are unable to use a typical powered wheelchair controlled with a joystick. Instead, some of these people require alternative interfaces such as a head- array or Sip/Puff switch to drive their powered wheelchairs. However, these alternative interfaces do not work for everyone and often cause frustration, fatigue and collisions. This thesis develops a novel technique to help improve the usability of some of these alternative interfaces, in particular, the head-array and Sip/Puff switch. Control is shared between a powered wheelchair user, using an alternative interface and a pow- ered wheelchair fitted with sensors. This shared control then produces a resulting motion that is close to what the user desires to do but a motion that is also safe. A path planning algorithm on the wheelchair is implemented using techniques in mo- bile robotics. Afterwards, the output of the path planning algorithm and the user’s com- mand are both modelled as random variables. These random variables are then blended in a joint probability distribution where the final velocity to the wheelchair is the one that maximises the joint probability distribution. The performance of the probabilistic approach to blending the user’s inputs with the output of a path planner, is benchmarked against the most common form of shared control called linear blending. The benchmarking consists of several experiments with end users both in a simulated world and in the real-world. The thesis concludes that probabilistic shared control provides safer motion compared with the traditional shared control for difficult tasks and hard-to-use interfaces

Information technology for active ageing: A review of theory and practice

Active Ageing aims to foster a physically, mentally and socially active lifestyle as a person ages. It is a complex, multi-faceted problem that involves a variety of different actors, such as policy makers, doctors, care givers, family members, friends and, of course, older adults. This review aims to understand the role of a new actor, which increasingly plays the role of enabler and facilitator, i.e., that of the technology provider. The review specifically focuses on Information Technology (IT), with a particular emphasis on software applications, and on how IT can prevent decline, compensate for lost capabilities, aid care, and enhance existing capabilities. The analysis confirms the crucial role of IT in Active Ageing, shows that Active Ageing requires a multidisciplinary approach, and identifies the need for better integration of hardware, software, the environment and the involved actors

Famtile: An Algorithm For Learning High-level Tactical Behavior From Observation

This research focuses on the learning of a class of behaviors defined as high-level behaviors. High-level behaviors are defined here as behaviors that can be executed using a sequence of identifiable behaviors. Represented by low-level contexts, these behaviors are known a priori to learning and can be modeled separately by a knowledge engineer. The learning task, which is achieved by observing an expert within simulation, then becomes the identification and representation of the low-level context sequence executed by the expert. To learn this sequence, this research proposes FAMTILE - the Fuzzy ARTMAP / Template-Based Interpretation Learning Engine. This algorithm attempts to achieve this learning task by constructing rules that govern the low-level context transitions made by the expert. By combining these rules with models for these low-level context behaviors, it is hypothesized that an intelligent model for the expert can be created that can adequately model his behavior. To evaluate FAMTILE, four testing scenarios were developed that attempt to achieve three distinct evaluation goals: assessing the learning capabilities of Fuzzy ARTMAP, evaluating the ability of FAMTILE to correctly predict expert actions and context choices given an observation, and creating a model of the expert\u27s behavior that can perform the high-level task at a comparable level of proficiency