Accessible Ubiquitous Services for Supporting Daily Activities: A Case Study with Young Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

Ubiquitous environments have considerable potential to provide services supporting daily activities (using public transportation to and from workplace, using ATM machines, selecting and purchasing goods in ticketing or vending machines, etc.) in order to assist people with disabilities. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous service providers generally supply generic user interfaces which are not usually accessible for all potential end users. In this article, a case study to verify the adequacy of the user interfaces automatically generated by the Egoki system for two supporting ubiquitous services adapted to young adults with moderate intellectual disabilities was presented. The task completion times and the level of assistance required by participants when using the interfaces were analyzed. Participants were able to access services through a tablet and successfully complete the tasks, regardless of their level of expertise and familiarity with the service. Moreover, results indicate that their performance and confidence improved with practice, as they required fewer direct verbal and pointer cues to accomplish tasks. By applying observational methods during the experimental sessions, several potential improvements for the automated interface generation process were also detected.This research work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and by the European Regional Development Fund [projects TIN2014-52665-C2-1-R and TIN2017-85409-P], and by the Basque Government, Department of Education, Universities and Research under grant [IT980-16]

Design and development of a gait training system for Parkinson’s disease

Background. Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) is an effective technique to improve gait and reduce freezing episodes for Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (PwPD). The BeatHealth system, which comprises a mobile application, gait sensors, and a website, exploits the potential of the RAS technique. This paper describes the tools used for co-designing and evaluating the system and discusses the results and conclusions. Methods. Personas, interviews, use cases, and ethnographic observations were used to define the functional requirements of the system. Low fidelity prototypes were created for iterative and incremental evaluation with end-users. Field trials were also performed with the final system. The process followed a user centered design methodology defined for this project with the aim of building a useful, usable, and easy-to-use system. Results. Functional requirements of the system were produced as a result of the initial exploration phase. Building upon these, mock-ups for the BeatHealth system were created. The mobile application was iterated twice, with the second version of it achieving a rating of 75 when assessed by participants through the System Usability Scale (SUS). After another iteration field trials were performed and the mobile application was rated with an average 78.6 using SUS. Participants rated two website mock-ups, one for health professionals and another for end-users, as good except from minor issues related to visual design (e.g. font size), which were resolved in the final version. Conclusion. The high ratings obtained in the evaluation of the BeatHealth system demonstrate the benefit of applying a user centered design methodology which involves stakeholders from the very beginning. Other important lessons were learned through the process of design and development of the system, such as the importance of motivational aspects, the techniques which work best, and the extra care that has to be taken when evaluating non-functional mock-ups with end users.This work was supported by the BeatHealth project within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union – Personalised health, active ageing, and independent living, contract Number FP7-610633. See also: http://www.euromov.eu/beathealth/homepage. This work has been also partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and by the European Regional Development Fund (projects TIN2014-52665-C2-1-R and TIN2017-85409-P), and by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government under grant IT980-16

Ethical and legal implications for technological devices in clinical research in Europe: Flowchart design for ethical and legal decisions in clinical research

In recent years engineers developing new technologies with assistive or medical purposes have become aware that to create acceptable and usable solutions they need to involve final users, patients and stakeholders in the design, development and evaluation of systems as well as in the device certification processes. Involving stakeholders in such processes has several ethical and legal implications. It has become evident that it is still difficult for engineers in Europe to know which ethical and legal processes should be carried out as they have not been previously trained in these issues during their studies. This article is a review of the laws, standards and recommendations applicable in Europe concerning human involvement in new technologies research, with the aim of helping researchers in the region in question to identify the ethical and legal issues that could arise during those tasks. This review has been carried out in response to the identified need on the part of technological researchers. The design of a flowchart is presented as a summary of the interpretation of the documentation reviewed with the aim of helping the researchers to take the ethical and legal decisions that apply to research involving humans. The flowchart presented has been validated with various research projects in which the authors have participated. The proposed conceptual design can be used for taking decisions, but it is suggested that a tool based on this design be built with the aim of making decision taking easier for researchers in this area

Modelling multimodal context-aware affective interaction

Abstract. In this paper a generic approach to modelling context-aware emotions taking different theoretical models into account is presented. Developing generic computational models for modelling emotions has become necessary due to the great variety of theoretical models of emotions and implementation technologies which can be used in the design and implementation of affective systems. The main component in this approach is a domain ontology of context-aware emotions. Concepts in ontology are grouped into several global modules, representing different aspects related to emotion modelling. Proposed ontology enables description of emotions at different levels of abstraction while serving as a guide for flexible design of affective context-aware applications (such as affective synthesizers and recognizers) independently of the starting model and the final way of implementation

DAFIESKU: A System for Acquiring Mobile Physiological Data

Gathering physiological data when they are performing experiments requires a great effort from researchers. Very often, a considerable time is required to prepare the signal acquisition equipment, conduct the experiments, and properly label the data of each participant. Nevertheless this data is valuable for the analysis of personal characteristics, such as behavior, health conditions, and preferences. With the aim of assisting researchers with such tedious tasks, we have developed the DAFIESKU system. This system serves to acquire several types of physiological data. DAFIESKU facilitates the creation of new datasets with physiological data by means of mobile and wearable devices. The usability of the system was evaluated in two case studies in a two-step iterative process. Before conducting the second case study, the whole system was improved using the feedback obtained from the first case study. The results achieved show that usability was enhanced in the second version of DAFIESKU

Classifier Subset Selection for the Stacked Generalization Method Applied to Emotion Recognition in Speech

In this paper, a new supervised classification paradigm, called classifier subset selection for stacked generalization (CSS stacking), is presented to deal with speech emotion recognition. The new approach consists of an improvement of a bi-level multi-classifier system known as stacking generalization by means of an integration of an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) in the first layer to select the optimal subset from the standard base classifiers. The good performance of the proposed new paradigm was demonstrated over different configurations and datasets. First, several CSS stacking classifiers were constructed on the RekEmozio dataset, using some specific standard base classifiers and a total of 123 spectral, quality and prosodic features computed using in-house feature extraction algorithms. These initial CSS stacking classifiers were compared to other multi-classifier systems and the employed standard classifiers built on the same set of speech features. Then, new CSS stacking classifiers were built on RekEmozio using a different set of both acoustic parameters (extended version of the Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (eGeMAPS)) and standard classifiers and employing the best meta-classifier of the initial experiments. The performance of these two CSS stacking classifiers was evaluated and compared. Finally, the new paradigm was tested on the well-known Berlin Emotional Speech database. We compared the performance of single, standard stacking and CSS stacking systems using the same parametrization of the second phase. All of the classifications were performed at the categorical level, including the six primary emotions plus the neutral one