Empowerment of Assistive Technologies with Mobile Devices in a DUI Ecosystem

AbstractEven though mobile devices already play an important role in assisting people with disabilities in their daily and professional lives, there are opportunities to further advances by developing assistive technology with Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs). DUIs empower not only the individual but also the environment. In order to support exploration of this concept, we present a mobile application developed with DUI characteristics in an educational context. We discuss achieved results in the light of the empowerment objective

Mobile Distributed User Interfaces

The success of a mobile application is due to the usability that the graphical user interface provides. A feature of mobile devices is the limited space for the interaction and the deployment of the graphical user interface. For this reason, user interfaces can have different interaction modalities. However, to work with information that can be complex to display, the use of modalities may not solve this problem. A possible alternative to provide more workspace to the users is through a distributed user interface (DUI). A mobile DUI allows the mobile applications to use two or more devices to execute the user interface. These devices can be Smart TVs or wearable such as smart watches. In this work the concepts of mobile DUI design are discussed, some use cases are presented and it is shown that its development in mobile devices is feasible