How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program

State-of-the Art Study in Citizen Observatories : Technological Trends, Development Challenges and Research Avenues

Citizen science has rapidly spread in the last decades around the world as a genuine interactive and inclusive opportunity for engaging citizens in the continuous collection of data relevant for science, governance, businesses, communal living and individual concerns. The present–day abundance of ICT technologies has caused the proliferation of two data collection methods in this field: participatory (user-centric) and opportunistic (device-centric). As a result, citizen observatories have become big data systems, with large scale volumes of data that come and go to millions of users.; about any social or environmental phenomenon (e.g. transit, air or weather) and comes in different formats (e.g. XML, Plain Text, CSV) and through different platforms (e.g. websites, mobile apps, sensor networks). This study reviewed the last 10 years of citizen science literature through a systematic literature review. This study identified 108 citizen observatories, which were deeply studied and clustered to identify global and European trends in environmental applications, practices, engagement techniques and technology uses. Challenges and recommendations from the literature in the field were classified to understand the common present and future path for the discipline. Furthermore, a survey and interviews were applied to stakeholders in Finland to gain broader understanding of the field country–wise. This study, provides the first comprehensive insight of the broad scale of contemporary ICT enabled citizen observatories in social and environmental dimensions

Designing technology to promote play between parents and their infant children

PhD ThesisParents’ interaction and engagement with young children is fundamental to their healthy development. Children whose parents interact and communicate more frequently exhibit greater school readiness, better language ability, higher grades, and the ability to make friends, guarding against negative outcomes across the lifespan, such as reduced employment prospects and lower mental health. While HCI research has recently begun to address important challenges in parent-child communication, these have focused predominantly on understanding how parents use technology while parenting. However, designing technologybased interventions to support communication practices in parenting young children is largely under-explored. The research presented in this thesis investigates how technology can promote positive interaction between parents and their infant children, specifically those younger than three years old. This time of childhood is fundamental to healthy development as children progressively construct their understanding and knowledge of the world through their coordination of physical interaction with objects and their sensory experiences during this time. Play is especially crucial in this regard, being the primary method of communication between parent and child. Using three case studies, the thesis describes how I worked collaboratively with play specialists and parents to gain a rich understanding of parents’ current play practices with their children, the challenges they face when seeking to engage with their children, and the barriers to this engagement; my approach to engaging parents in to a co-creative process to build an online resource to support their needs around play; and how the design of the technology builds on how parents currently play with their children, the frenetic nature of being a parent, and the need to leverage opportunities to play as they arise rather than pre-planned play experiences. This research makes four contributions. It argues for parent-infant play to be a potentially important and viable area of research in the nascent HCI literature on parenthood. It provides a rich and detailed account of how parents’ play with their children, highlighting novel uses of technology among numerous examples of communicative play. However, it also illustrates that many parents find it difficult to play with their children. Finally, it provides rich insights in to the complexities and challenges of conducting design research with parents of infant children and the importance of engaging organisations in such long-term design engagements

UrbanIxD: Exploring human interactions for the hybrid city

With the vision of ubiquitous computing becoming increasingly realised, a need is identified to create a better understanding of the relationship between person, place, and technology in the urban environment. The aim of this research in the field of Urban Interaction Design is to investigate how people’s emotional person-place relationships with personally meaningful places in their city of residence, can inform the design of technological devices and services that augment this urban lived experience in the hybrid city of the near future. Based on insights from social science studies of place attachment and research focusing on technology mediating the emotional experience of and in the urban environment, a holistic, human-centred bottom-up approach is taken. It investigates the full range of experiences-in-place and emotions from which emotional person-place relationships in the city develop. Using a three-staged, multimethod approach consisting of a Walking & Talking interview and two sedentary interviews with (speculative) evaluative map techniques, 45 emotional person-place relationships of eight residents of Edinburgh are investigated. This resulted in a taxonomy of 16 types of emotional experience-in-place, and identified potential for capturing, representing, consuming, and sharing emotional person-place relationship data based on different types of positive and negative emotional experience-in-place, different types of representations and sensorial experiences, the closeness of social relationships and shared interests, and to support the self-regulation of emotions. These main findings informed the design of a suite of three speculative design fictions in the form of two short films and a comic, to further explore this design space. These authentic, personally relevant, and provocative conversation pieces successfully engaged residents of Edinburgh in three focus groups on a human, personal level in an informed discussion, enabling critical reflection on current practices and interactions, and speculation about possible future scenarios for this unfamiliar design space. This contributed to a set of design guidelines for emotional experience-in-place. It serves as a framework for urban interaction designers to understand the context of, identify potential for, and inform the design of technological devices and services that leverage emotional person-place relationships in the hybrid city of the near future