Evaluating technology for elders : towards a measure of attitudes

Technology is ubiquitous in modern day society and has the potential to enhance one's quality of life. Numerous innovative assistive technologies are designed to aid elderly people in every day activities and enable them to maintain a measure of independence longer. One such assistive technology was the PAM-AID walking aid: a robotic walking aid designed to provide frail, visually impaired elders with the physical support of a rollator, coupled with the navigational assistance necessary for safe, independent mobility. A user-centred design approach was integral to the design and development of PAM-AID and the first part of this thesis, details the research undertaken to ensure that, as far as possible, PAM-AID met the needs of potential users. Studies were conducted with carers and elders to establish elders' requirements for PAM-AID. The results of these studies directly influenced the functional specification of the first PAM-AID prototype. Following an iterative design life cycle, further studies were conducted to evaluate the usability of the first and second prototypes and the results of these studies enabled informed design decisions could be made. Therefore, elders were involved at every stage of the design process, to ensure that PAM-AID was an efficient and acceptable technology to this user group. However, throughout this preliminary work, an interesting discrepancy in elders' attitudes began to emerge. It became evident that although elders thought that PAM-AID was a useful walking aid for other frail elderly people, they did not think that PAM-AID was beneficial for them personally. In other words, elders' attitudes indicated that they might not use or accept PAM-AID, even though they would clearly benefit from this innovative technology. Indeed, other research has shown that many assistive technologies are often under utilised or discarded by elders, even when the potential benefits of the technology are clearly evident. This was a pivotal point in the research programme, as it highlighted the importance of monitoring elders' attitudes to predict future use of and acceptance of assistive technology. Since no applicable tool exists for measuring individuals' attitudes to technologies such as PAM-AID, the main empirical work of this research programme involved the development of a psychometric scale: the Attitudes to Technology Scale (ATS). The inductive approach to development of this scale involved: the generation of items, the reduction of the items into meaningful subscales, as well as the demonstration of the scale's reliability and validity. Throughout its development, the scale was applied to a number of different types of technology such as ATMs, computers, microwaves, mobile phones, VCRs and the Internet. The scale has been used to investigate the effect of age and sex differences in terms of attitudes to technology. Thus, the ATS is unique in that it has been developed for use with ID1 types of technology and with individuals of ~ ages. The limitations of the scale have been noted and further work is needed to address these limitations. It is hoped that this scale will have both academic and commercial research applications, but above all, the ATS could be applied to continually monitor users' attitudes during the design and development of new technologies. It is proposed that the measurement of users' attitudes should be an integral part of the design life cycle, resulting in more useable and acceptable technology

Creating a transportation app for visually impaired people

Client for this thesis was Bernmobil. Bernmobil provides public transportation services in the Bern area by busses and trams. The idea for this assignment came from the interest to provide services for a specific target group, visually impaired people. The goal of this thesis was to develop a concept of an assistive mobile application for visually impaired users to help them use public transportation by themselves. Literature research was used as the research method, which was based on the previous projects and reports on this field, including guidelines of the assistive application development and documentations about existing public transportation applications for visually impaired. The analysis and research for this project started by defining the problems, which visually impaired face when using public transportation. From a list of existing problems, four were picked which were found to be the most relevant. Guidelines for assistive application development define what is to be taken into consideration when developing an application for visually impaired users. Research of existing applications were used to define which features this kind of application includes, where they are used, and how the application for the visually impaired works. The conceptual design and interface of this application was based on the literature research. The four major features of the conceptual application (planning the route, information about arriving vehicle, information while on board and information about abnormalities on the route) solve the problems defined by the literature research. Interaction between user and the application works by screen reader and touch-based gestures. The interface is designed to be simple, only including features that are relevant and necessary. As a conclusion, companies and developers have made big efforts to design assistive applications for visually impaired. There is a lot of research concerning this matter on the general level. On the field of public transportation, there is still work to do. There are some public transportation applications that work locally in different parts of the world. World-wide there are only a few public transportation applications but they are not designed specifically for visually impaired users. So there is a gap to fill for Bernmobil to provide more accessible public transportation for their customers

Studies on Inequalities in Information Society. Proceedings of the Conference, Well-Being in the Information Society

Siirretty Doriast

SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Using an essentiality and proficiency approach to improve the web browsing experience of visually impaired users

Increased volumes of content exacerbate the Web accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Essentiality & Proficiency is presented as one method of easing access to information in Websites by addressing the volume of content coupled with how it is presented. This research develops the concept of Essentiality for Web authors. A preliminary survey was conducted to understand the accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Structured interviews were conducted with twelve participants and a further 26 participants responded to online questionnaires. In total there were 38 participants (both sexes), aged 18 to 54 years. 68% had visual impairments, three had motor issues, one had a hearing impairment and two had cognitive impairments. The findings show that the overload of information on a page was the most prominent difficulty experienced when using the Web. The findings from the preliminary survey fed into an empirical study. Four participants aged 21 to 54 years (both sexes) from the preliminary survey were presented with a technology demonstrator to check the feasibility of Essentiality & Proficiency in the real environment. It was found that participants were able to identify and appreciate the reduced volume of information. This initiated the iterative development of the prototype tool. Microformatting is used in the development of the Essentiality & Proficiency prototype tool to allow the reformulated Web pages to remain standards compliant. There is a formative evaluation of the prototype tool using an experimental design methodology. A convenience sample of nine participants (both sexes) with a range of visual impairments, aged 18 to 52 performed tasks on a computer under three essentiality conditions. With an alpha level .05, the evaluation of the Essentiality & Proficiency tool has been shown to offer some improvement in accessing information

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

Interactivity Improves Usability of Geographic Maps for Visually Impaired People

International audienceTactile relief maps are used by visually impaired people to acquire mental representation of space, but they retain important limitations (limited amount of information, braille text, etc.). Interactive maps may overcome these limitations. However, usability of these two types of maps had never been compared. It is then unknown whether interactive maps are equivalent or even better solutions than traditional raised-line maps. This study presents a comparison of usability of a classical raised-line map vs. an interactive map composed by a multi-touch screen, a raised-line overlay and audio output. Both maps were tested by 24 blind participants. We measured usability as efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. Our results show that replacing braille with simple audio-tactile interaction significantly improved efficiency and user satisfaction. Effectiveness was not related to the map type but depended on users' characteristics as well as the category of assessed spatial knowledge. Long-term evaluation of acquired spatial information revealed that maps, whether interactive or not, are useful to build robust survey-type mental representations in blind users. Altogether, these results are encouraging as they show that interactive maps are a good solution for improving map exploration and cognitive mapping in visually impaired people