Contemporary themes in the design of AT for the ageing population: materiality, co-design and cultural influences

Products we purchase are much more than artefacts that fulfil functional needs in our life. We have grown to enact our consumer choices, even those regarding fast moving consumable goods, with careful considerations informed by numerous trials, recommendations and, growingly, environmental concerns in mind. Advanced manufacturing and progress in research and development are providing more choices for consumers even in quite specific and complex product markets. An exemption to this market trend is represented by assistive technologies (ATs). This is a relatively underdeveloped context despite the growing demands for assistive devices by those in later life who need either support in accomplishing everyday life to stay independent or have complex co-occurring conditions. In this chapter, we explore why ATs, especially for older adults, are underdeveloped by exploring issues related to design approaches and cultural and social perceptions that have contributed to making consumers more or less sensitive and demanding towards the role of ATs in their lives. The chapter will conclude with recommendations that may be able to shift the perception of assistive devices so as to facilitate the user’s emotional investment in the devices, attachment to them, which, in return, may lead to better adherence and faster adoption

Indoor Localization for Personalized Ambient Assisted Living of Multiple Users in Multi-Floor Smart Environments

This paper presents a multifunctional interdisciplinary framework that makes four scientific contributions towards the development of personalized ambient assisted living, with a specific focus to address the different and dynamic needs of the diverse aging population in the future of smart living environments. First, it presents a probabilistic reasoning-based mathematical approach to model all possible forms of user interactions for any activity arising from the user diversity of multiple users in such environments. Second, it presents a system that uses this approach with a machine learning method to model individual user profiles and user-specific user interactions for detecting the dynamic indoor location of each specific user. Third, to address the need to develop highly accurate indoor localization systems for increased trust, reliance, and seamless user acceptance, the framework introduces a novel methodology where two boosting approaches Gradient Boosting and the AdaBoost algorithm are integrated and used on a decision tree-based learning model to perform indoor localization. Fourth, the framework introduces two novel functionalities to provide semantic context to indoor localization in terms of detecting each user's floor-specific location as well as tracking whether a specific user was located inside or outside a given spatial region in a multi-floor-based indoor setting. These novel functionalities of the proposed framework were tested on a dataset of localization-related Big Data collected from 18 different users who navigated in 3 buildings consisting of 5 floors and 254 indoor spatial regions. The results show that this approach of indoor localization for personalized AAL that models each specific user always achieves higher accuracy as compared to the traditional approach of modeling an average user

The PISHI Concept: A Technique for Increasing Inclusion in the Design of Open-Source Assistive Technologies

This thesis addresses how to make Open-Source (OS) Assistive Technology (AT) more inclusive. The thesis employs a Research Through Design (RtD) methodology on a particular case study: the Switch Activated Writing System (SAWS) that is in transition to an Open-Source project (OSSAWS). Analysis of the literature reveals the potential to leverage persona representations into OS AT. This thesis includes three RtD iterations which focus on successive modifications of persona representations and markdown templating, converging on a final design concept called Persona Inclusion for open Source assistive tecHnology Innovation (PISHI). The PISHI concept centers on the representation of family-level dynamics, crucial in the AT domain and design innovation. The thesis develops persona representations for the users of OSSAWS following the PISHI Concept. This thesis presents a rationale for the generalizability of the PISHI concept, which will provide a crucial means for increasing inclusion in Open-Source (OS) Assistive Technology (AT)

The PISHI Concept: A Technique for Increasing Inclusion in the Design of Open-Source Assistive Technologies

This thesis addresses how to make Open-Source (OS) Assistive Technology (AT) more inclusive. The thesis employs a Research Through Design (RtD) methodology on a particular case study: the Switch Activated Writing System (SAWS) that is in transition to an Open-Source project (OSSAWS). Analysis of the literature reveals the potential to leverage persona representations into OS AT. This thesis includes three RtD iterations which focus on successive modifications of persona representations and markdown templating, converging on a final design concept called Persona Inclusion for open Source assistive tecHnology Innovation (PISHI). The PISHI concept centers on the representation of family-level dynamics, crucial in the AT domain and design innovation. The thesis develops persona representations for the users of OSSAWS following the PISHI Concept. This thesis presents a rationale for the generalizability of the PISHI concept, which will provide a crucial means for increasing inclusion in Open-Source (OS) Assistive Technology (AT)