Co-designing smart home technology with people with dementia or Parkinson's disease

Involving users is crucial to designing technology successfully, especially for vulnerable users in health and social care, yet detailed descriptions and critical reflections on the co-design process, techniques and methods are rare. This paper introduces the PERCEPT (PERrsona-CEntred Participatory Technology) approach for the co-design process and we analyse and discuss the lessons learned for each step in this process. We applied PERCEPT in a project to develop a smart home toolset that will allow a person living with early stage dementia or Parkinson's to plan, monitor and self-manage his or her life and well-being more effectively. We present a set of personas which were co-created with people and applied throughout the project in the co-design process. The approach presented in this paper will enable researchers and designers to better engage with target user groups in co-design and point to considerations to be made at each step for vulnerable users

Late Quaternary Mediterranean Outflow Water: implications from radiogenic Nd, Sr, Pb isotopes and clay minerals

Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) is characterised by higher temperatures and salinities than other ambient water masses. MOW spreads at water depths between 500 and 1500 m into the eastern North Atlantic and has been a source of salinity for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We used high-resolution Nd and Pb isotope records of past ambient seawater obtained from authigenic ferromanganese coatings of sediments in three gravity cores at 577, 1745 and 1974 m water depths in the Gulf of Cadiz and along the Portuguese margin complemented by a selection of surface sediments to reconstruct the extent and pathways of MOW over the past 23 000 years. In addition, radiogenic Nd, Pb and Sr isotope ratios obtained from total digestion of the residual clay fraction of the leached samples were used to evaluate any changes in the endmember compositions. The surface and downcore seawater Nd isotope data from all water depths exhibit only a very small variability close to the present day composition of MOW but do not reflect the present day Nd isotopic stratification of the water column as determined from a nearby open ocean hydrographic station, which is most likely the consequence of downslope sediment transport in the nepheloid boundary layer as well as the small variations in the Nd endmember compositions. In contrast, the seawater Pb isotope records show significant and systematic variations, which provide evidence for a significantly different pattern of the MOW pathways between 20 000 and 12 000 years ago compared with the subsequent period of time. A deeper situated MOW during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) raised during the early deglaciation with its shallowest position around Heinrich event H1, followed by a moderate deepening and the establishment of present-day MOW hydrography. The radiogenic isotope signatures of the residual clay fractions document a pulse of sediment input from the north during Heinrich event H1 around 14.8 ka, but other than that exhibit little varibility over time suggesting surprisingly constant sedimentary endmember compositions and mixing ratios since the LGM

Surface circulation in the Great Lakes as observed by LANDSAT-1 August 1972 - December 1973: Southern Lake Michigan

The surface current circulation patterns of southern Lake Michigan were charted for all cardinal and subcardinal wind directions, employing LANDSAT-1 observations of the distribution of natural tracing material borne in the surface waters. These colorants consist chiefly of river discharges composed of suspended sediments, pollutants, and algae; extensive chemical precipitations proved valuable for areas farther from shore. Comparison of the satellite-derived surface current charts with previous theoretical and empirical studies shows good agreement

Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson’s disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also aforded additional benefts including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Refecting on the outcomes from the diferent user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly

Children with a cause: Training antebellum children for the abolition of slavery

This dissertation explores the efforts of abolitionists in the antebellum United States to recruit children to join in their battle against slavery. From the very beginnings of this movement, abolitionists understood that reaching adults would be virtually impossible and turned to children, whom they considered to be natural enemies of slavery, to become the catalyst which they believed would inspire people across the nation to combat slavery and successfully seek its end. Abolitionists constructed a new model of childhood which viewed children not as people who needed to be taught obedience, but people who needed to be instructed in ways that they could change their world for the good of the slaves. To this end, abolitionists taught children several ways to join the fight against slavery and proposed a childhood in which every area of life was devoted to the antislavery cause. Abolitionists provided a wealth of materials to train these children theologically to hate slavery and love the slaves, and also contrasted the steady expectations of middle-class children to the nightmares slaves lived out every day. “Children With a Cause” will show that children did indeed join the abolitionist movement, even as it changed over the years from 1831-1859. The dissertation will also make clear that children ultimately faced insurmountable obstacles that they could not overcome. This dissertation, then, provides a new look at a new form of childhood as well as an examination of abolitionist strategies over the years as the reformers encountered the changing social, political, and economic realities of antebellum America

A Case Study of Co-Teaching Practices in Minnesota

The education of children with disabilities in the general education classroom has evolved over many years. The popularity of inclusive education became widespread in the 1980s (Friend, Cook, Hurley-Chamberlain, & Shamberger, 2010). It began as a civil rights movement, based on the rationale that all children–disabled and non-disabled–should have access to the same academic and social opportunities within the school (Sailor, 2002). In 2006, 95% of the special education students aged six to 21 years old were educated in regular classrooms for at least 50% or more of their school day (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). To serve special education students in the general education classroom, schools began implementing several different inclusion models. One of those models was cooperative teaching, also called co-teaching. Co-teaching is characterized as a general education teacher and a special education teacher or another specialist collaborating for the purpose of delivering instruction together to students, including students with disabilities, in the general education setting (Friend et al., 2010). Co-teaching was designed to address the needs of students in an inclusive classroom by having a general education and special education teacher in the same classroom to meet the needs of individual students (Murawski & Dieker, 2008). Co-teaching has become an increasingly common option for educating students with disabilities in order to comply with the federal mandates (Friend & Cook, 2014). In 1994, the National Center on Educational Restructuring and Inclusion reported that co-teaching was the most frequently employed special education service delivery model for inclusive classrooms. The European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education in 2003 stated that co-teaching was one of the five educational approaches that appeared to be effective within the inclusive education model (Saloviita & Takala, 2010). Now, more than a decade after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the popularity of co-teachings has only increased (Kloo & Zigmond, 2008). Murawski and Swanson (2001) completed a meta-analysis of co-teaching studies to determine the impact of co-teaching on students. They reviewed six studies and found the overall mean impact of co-teaching to be 0.40, suggesting that it is a moderately effective procedure for influencing student outcomes. Quantitative and qualitative research over the past 20 years has consistently established that students in co-taught classrooms learn more and perform better on academic assessments than do special education students in more restrictive services delivery models (Walsh, 2012). In order for students and teachers to achieve maximum benefit from co-teaching, certain elements, including the components, methods, benefits, and barriers need to be addressed. The purpose of this study was to examine co-teaching in a select sample of school districts to determine the presence or absence of those elements in their co-teaching models that lead to successful co-teaching. This study employed a case study research methodology. Further, the study incorporates qualitative and quantitative research methods, creating a mixed-methods study. Three school districts in Minnesota were selected to participate in the study. The districts were required to have a co-teaching program district wide. Data were collected through an online survey and an interview of select co-teachers who responded to the survey. Analysis of the data was done using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). The results of this study provide recommendation for further practice and research that may benefit the field of educational leadership. A number of limitations of the study were also presented

Investigating the Intelligibility of a Computer Vision System for Blind Users

Computer vision systems to help blind usersare becoming increasingly common yet often these systems are not intelligible. Our work investigates the intelligibility of a wearable computer vision system to help blind users locate and identify people in their vicinity. Providing a continuous stream of information, this system allows us to explore intelligibility through interaction and instructions, going beyond studies of intelligibility that focus on explaining a decision a computer vision system might make. In a study with 13 blind users, we explored whether varying instructions (either basic or enhanced) about how the system worked would change blind users’ experience of the system. We found offering a more detailed set of instructions did not affect how successful users were using the system nor their perceived workload. We did, however, find evidence of significant differences in what they knew about the system, and they employed different, and potentially more effective, use strategies. Our findings have important implications for researchers and designers of computer vision systemsfor blind users, as well more general implications for understanding what it means to make interactive computer vision systems intelligible