An ontology co-design method for the co-creation of a continuous care ontology

Ontology engineering methodologies tend to emphasize the role of the knowledge engineer or require a very active role of domain experts. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering method is described that holds the middle ground between these two 'extremes'. After thorough ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary group of domain experts closely interacted with ontology engineers and social scientists in a series of workshops. Once a preliminary ontology was developed, a dynamic care request system was built using the ontology. Additional workshops were organized involving a broader group of domain experts to ensure the applicability of the ontology across continuous care settings. The proposed method successfully actively engaged domain experts in constructing the ontology, without overburdening them. Its applicability is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology. The lessons learned during the design and execution of the approach are also presented

Participatory design of a continuous care ontology : towards a user-driven ontology engineering methodology

The patient room of the future would be able to sense the needs and preferences of the patients and nurses and adapt itself accordingly by combining all the heterogeneous data offered by the different technologies. This goal can be achieved by developing a context-aware framework, which exploits and integrates the heterogeneous data by utilizing a continuous care ontology. The existing ontology engineering methodologies are rather extreme in their choices to include domain experts. On the one hand, there are methodologies that only discuss the scope, use and requirements of the ontology with the domain experts. On the other hand, there are approaches in which the ontology is completely constructed by the domain experts by providing them with user-friendly and collaborative tools. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering methodology is presented that finds a middle ground between these two extremes. The methodology actively involves social scientists, ontology engineers and stakeholders. The stakeholders participate in each step of the ontology life cycle without having to construct the ontology themselves or attribute a large amount of their time. The applicability of the methodology is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology

The OCareCloudS project: toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers

Status of ICT usage in Europe

Since people with disabilities are main beneficiaries of ICT-based AT (assistive technology), to having consolidated figures on their usage of it, and an understanding of their satisfaction, is a core element in understanding AT. This paper aims to offer an insight into these end-users' (non-) usage of and satisfaction with their AT through extensive surveys conducted in the context of the EC-supported ÆGIS project in various European countries. Additionally, the paper also looks in more detail to the structure of the European AT industry which already causes, in its very origin, some barriers to end-users.status: publishe

Threshold things that think: usable authorization for resharing

People start carrying around more and more mobile devices that can contain sensitive data. To protect these devices, Desmedt et al. [1] proposed a threshold security architecture for Things That Think. In this architecture, security is the result of the cooperation of at least the threshold number of personal devices. Personal devices are devices that are frequently in the user’s proximity and able to interact with each other. For threshold security each personal device possesses a share of the key material. When at least the threshold number of these devices cooperate, this key material can be used to, for instance place signatures or decrypt encrypted information. The advantages of deploying a threshold cryptography scheme are : a user does not need all his personal devices (e.g. dead battery, device left at home) to access the necessary key material; an adversary does not gain any knowledge of the key material when he does not compromise the threshold number of devices. For a threshold security architecture on Things That Think to be practical, a mechanism allowing the user to add or remove devices from the set of personal devices is essential. Refreshing key material enhances security. Adding a device, removing a device and refreshing key material are essentially the same in terms of the underlying protocol, resharing. One example of a protocol for resharing can be found in [6]. However, little attention has been paid to the problem of authorisation for resharing. Proper authorisation is necessary to prevent an adversary from altering the set of personal devices in such a way that he would be able to break the scheme. Moreover authorisation should not enable the adversary to succeed in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack and prevent the genuine user from signing and/or decrypting. The authors developed a protocol to manually authorise resharing in [4]. This paper focuses on the usability aspect of this protocol, which was an essential part of development. Although the proposed manual authorisation protocol is studied in the context of resharing, it could also be used to authorise signing and for bootstrapping. An overview of related work on usability and pairing of two devices is given by Saxena et al. [5].status: publishe

Creativity as a process: a participatory design approach to gather mobile language learning user requirements

This paper describes Participatory Design (PD) activities for the development of a mobile language learning environment. Several User-Centred Design (UCD) techniques were successively linked together into one combined method. This method was specifically designed to be accordant with the mental process model of creativity, and should be applicable in creative processes in other areas of research and expertise, as well. In addition to researchers and pedagogical experts, both language learners and teachers were involved in the PD activities. The objective of the study was to elicit general user requirements as well as to co-design paper prototypes of mobile language learning applications. Besides the handson design ideas from the prototypes, the study unveiled perceptions of learners and teachers on motivation, evaluation, course content and collaboration for mobile language learning. © 2011 IADIS.status: publishe

Evaluating Community Response to Content on Public Displays

This paper presents the results towards the evaluation of content on public displays, and in particular of the impact on its ‘users’. In an attempt to gather the reactions from local citizens on an existing urban display, we deployed four different research methods, i.e. contextual interviews, card ranking, interactive content demonstration and postcards. Our analysis has identified a wide range of methodological issues, including social barriers, time constraints, shallow responses and the difficulty in eliciting on-site creative thinking. As a potential solution to overcome these findings, we describe the initial results of a pilot case study involving a radically new approach, in which we allowed citizens to experience content creation and curation on a public display first-hand.status: publishe

Using Personas to capture Assistive Technology Needs of People with Disabilities

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