Tecnologías móviles y wearables para la autorregulación emocional de personas con Trastornos del Espectro Autista

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior , Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura: 22-06-201

Evaluación e implantación de herramienta móvil para la asistencia de personas con necesidades especiales en sus tareas de la vida diaria

En este Trabajo de Fin de Máster se describe la evaluación de una herramienta basada en smartphone para asistir a personas con discapacidad cognitiva en sus tareas de la vida diaria, llamada AssisT-Task, cuyo diseño inicial fue objeto de Trabajo de Fin de Grado. Esta aplicación proporciona manuales interactivos paso a paso con instrucciones para completar tareas cotidianas en su entorno o centro de empleo, utilizando como apoyo códigos QR y una herramienta de autor para que los educadores o familiares editen el contenido de estos manuales. En este trabajo se describen los cambios de funcionalidad que se han implementado, así como las necesidades que los justifican. La evaluación se realiza a través de un experimento con usuarios en el centro de preparacién laboral Fundación Síndrome de Down de Madrid. Se describe la planificación de dicho experimento, las bases teóricas y metodologías que lo apoyan, así como la muestra de población con discapacidad cognitiva que vamos a representar. Posteriormente, se analiza de forma cuantitativa y cualitativa la acción de los usuarios a partir del visionado de los vídeos pertenecientes a las sesiones del experimento. Los resultados obtenidos evidencian que AssisT-Task mejora el rendimiento de los usuarios en cuanto a tiempo de completado de las tareas, precisión y tasa de error.This Master's Thesis is a description of the evaluation process for a smartphone tool developed to assist people with cognitive disabilities in their daily-life activities. It is called AssisT-Task, and its initial design was the main theme of an Undergraduate Thesis. This application provides step-by-step interactive manuals, a prompting system that allows to complete dalily-life tasks in their environment or job, using QR codes as support and an authoring tool, so that caregivers and family can modify and create the content of these manuals. In this document are also described the new features developed because of new necessities discovered. The evaluation is carried out through a user experiment with people from the center Fundación de Síndrome de Down de Madrid. Plani cation of the experiment, theoretical bases and methodologies and cognitive disabled population sample are also described. Then, the performance of the users is analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively from the viewing of the recorded videos during the experiment. The obtained results shows that AssisT-Task improves the performance of the users in terms of time, accuracy and error rate

Emotional self-regulation of individuals with autism spectrum disorders: smartwatches for monitoring and interaction

In this paper, we analyze the needs of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to have a pervasive, feasible and non-stigmatizing form of assistance in their emotional self-regulation, in order to ease certain behavioral issues that undermine their mental health throughout their life. We argue the potential of recent widespread wearables, and more specifically smartwatches, to achieve this goal. Then, a smartwatch system that implements a wide range of self-regulation strategies and infers outburst patterns from physiological signals and movement is presented, along with an authoring tool for smartphones that is to be used by caregivers or family members to create and edit these strategies, in an adaptive way. We conducted an intensive experiment with two individuals with ASD who showed varied, representative behavioral responses to their emotional dysregulation. Both users were able to employ effective, customized emotional self-regulation strategies by means of the system, recovering from the majority of mild stress episodes and temper tantrums experienced in the nine days of experiment in their classroomThis work has been partially funded by the projects “e-Training y e-Coaching para la integración socio—laboral” (TIN2013-44586-R) and “eMadrid-CM: Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2013/ICE-2715). It has been also funded by Fundación Orange during the early stages of the project “Tic-Tac-TEA: Sistema de asistencia para la autorregulación emocional en momentos de crisis para personas con TEA mediante smartwatches

The potential of smartwatches for emotional self-regulation of people with autism spectrum disorder

This paper focuses on the potential of smartwatchers as interventors in the process of emotional self-regulation on individuals with ASD. Parting from a model of assistance in their self-regulation tasks, we review the main advantages of smartwatches in terms of sensors and pervasive interaction potential. We argue the suitability of smartwatches for this kind of assistance, including studies that had used them for related purposes, and the relation of this idea with the affective computing area. Finally, we propose a technological approach for emotional self-regulation assistance that uses smartwatches and applies to the mentioned intervention model.This work has been partially funded by the projects “e-Training y e-Coaching para la integración socio—laboral” (TIN2013--44586--R) and “eMadrid-CM: Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2013/ICE-2715). It has been also funded by Fundación Orange during the early stages of the project “Tic-Tac-TEA: Sistema de asistencia para la autorregulación emocional en momentos de crisis para personas con TEA mediante smartwatches”

An Adapted Wayfinding System for Pedestrians with Cognitive Disabilities

This paper presents a novel wayfinding system adapted to people with cognitive disabilities. It adapts to the user in terms of route calculation, instructions delivery, and interface design. To do so, the system divides the calculated route into atomic instructions and uses street-level photographs at the decision points. To evaluate this approach, we compared it with a commercial navigation application on a field trial with a sample of users (N = 18). From the evaluation, we concluded that our system improves users' performance in terms of the number who reached the destination and were able to identify it correctly.This work has been partially funded by Projects "e-Training y e-Coaching para la Integracion Socio-Laboral" (TIN2013-44586--R) and "eMadrid-CM: Investigacion y Desarrollo de Tecnologias Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid" (S2013/ICE-2715)

AmICog - Tecnologías móviles para la asistencia global a personas con discapacidad cognitiva en el entorno laboral

Versión electrónica de la ponencia presentada en IV Congreso Español de Informática, celebrado en Madrid en 2013En este artículo se presenta el sistema AmICog, diseñado específicamente para asistir a personas con discapacidad cognitiva en el entorno laboral. Para ello se emplean teléfonos móviles para mostrar guías interactivas adaptadas al usuario, tarea y contexto, así como un mecanismo de localización y guiado en entornos interiores.Este proyecto se ha desarrollado bajo la Cátedra UAM-Indra de Inteligencia Ambiental para la Discapacidad Cognitiva

Digital phenotyping by wearable-driven artificial intelligence in older adults and people with Parkinson's disease: Protocol of the mixed method, cyclic ActiveAgeing study

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background: Active ageing is described as the process of optimizing health, empowerment, and security to enhance the quality of life in the rapidly growing population of older adults. Meanwhile, multimorbidity and neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), lead to global public health and resource limitations. We introduce a novel user-centered paradigm of ageing based on wearable-driven artificial intelligence (AI) that may harness the autonomy and independence that accompany functional limitation or disability, and possibly elevate life expectancy in older adults and people with PD. Methods: ActiveAgeing is a 4-year, multicentre, mixed method, cyclic study that combines digital phenotyping via commercial devices (Empatica E4, Fitbit Sense, and Oura Ring) with traditional evaluation (clinical assessment scales, in-depth interviews, and clinical consultations) and includes four types of participants: (1) people with PD and (2) their informal caregiver; (3) healthy older adults from the Helgetun living environment in Norway, and (4) people on the Helgetun waiting list. For the first study, each group will be represented by N = 15 participants to test the data acquisition and to determine the sample size for the second study. To suggest lifestyle changes, modules for human expert-based advice, machine-generated advice, and self-generated advice from accessible data visualization will be designed. Quantitative analysis of physiological data will rely on digital signal processing (DSP) and AI techniques. The clinical assessment scales are the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), Geriatric Anxiety Inventory (GAI), Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES), and the REM Sleep Behaviour Disorder Screening Questionnaire (RBDSQ). A qualitative inquiry will be carried out with individual and focus group interviews and analysed using a hermeneutic approach including narrative and thematic analysis techniques. Discussion: We hypothesise that digital phenotyping is feasible to explore the ageing process from clinical and lifestyle perspectives including older adults and people with PD. Data is used for clinical decision-making by symptom tracking, predicting symptom evolution, and discovering new outcome measures for clinical trials.publishedVersio

Sorterius - An augmented reality app for encouraging outdoor physical activity for people with intellectual disabilities

Many with intellectual disabilities (ID) have difficulties adhering to current physical activity guidelines. The goal of this study was to develop a mobile app for assisting people with ID to be more physically active. We implemented a solution that combines the digital and real world using augmented reality (AR). Eight people working with people with ID (special education teachers, social workers, psychologists, and researchers) tested the app and completed a usability test. Results indicate that a mobile app focusing on everyday life scenarios can have a potential value for the targeted user group, but AR solutions can be challenging.publishedVersionPaid open acces

Using smartwatches for behavioral issues in ASD

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ACM International Conference Proceeding Series.13 September 2016, Article number a28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2998626.2998646Este artículo se centra en el potencial que ofrecen los relojes inteligentes o smartwatches como interventores en el proceso de auto-regulación emocional de personas con Trastorno del Espectro Autista (TEA). Partiendo de un modelo de asistencia en sus tareas de auto-regulación, el artículo revisa las principales ventajas de estos dispositivos en cuanto a: ubicuidad, sensores y posibilidades de interacción. Por otro lado, se discute la idoneidad de éstos para este tipo de asistencia, incluyendo estudios que han hecho uso de estos dispositivos con fines similares y la relación de esta idea con el área de computación afectiva. Finalmente, se propone una aproximación tecnológica la para auto-regulación emocional que usa smartwatches y aplica el modelo de intervención mencionadoThis article adresses the potential of smartwatchers as interventors in the self-regulation process of individuals with ASD. We study an assistance model from the literature, and then we state some of the main features that lead us to this proposal: ubiquity, sensing and interaction possibilities. Also, we study the suitability of these devices, including previous work that have used them for assistive purposes. Finally, we propose a technologic approach for the emotional self-regulation that uses smartwatches and applies the mentioned modelEste trabajo ha sido financiado parcialmente por los proyectos: “e-Training y e-Coaching para la integración socio-laboral” (TIN2013-44586-R), “eMadrid-CM: Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2013/ICE-2715) y la Fundación Orange, mediante el proyecto “Tic-Tac-TEA: Sistema de asistencia para la autorregulación emocional de momentos de crisis para personas con TEA mediante smartwatches