Posts tagged: Accessibility

A grounded approach for applying behavior change techniques in mobile cardiac tele-rehabilitation

In mobile tele-rehabilitation applications for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) patients, behavior change plays a central role in influencing better therapy adherence and prevention of disease recurrence. However, creating sustainab le behavior chan ge that holds a beneficial impact over a prolonged period of time remains an important challenge. In this paper we discuss various models and frameworks related to persuas ion and behav ior chan ge, and investigate how to incorporate these with a multidisciplinary user-centered design approach for creating a mobile tele-rehabilitation application. By implementing different concepts that contribute to behavior change and applying a set of distinct persuasive design patterns, we were able to translate the high-level goals of behavior theory into a mobile application that explicitly incorporates behavior change techniques and also offers a good overall user experience. We evaluated our system, HeartHab, in a lab setting and show that our approach leads to a high user acceptance and willingness to use the system in daily activities.

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Suit up!: Enabling eyes-free interactions on jacket buttons

We present a new interaction space for wearables by integrating interactive elements, in the form of buttons, into outdoor clothing, specifically jackets and coats. Interactive buttons, or "iButtons", allow users to perform specific tasks using subtle, inconspicuous gestures. They are intended for outdoor settings, where reaching for a mobile phone or an other device may not be convenient or appropriate. Different types of buttons serve dedicated functions, and appropriate placement of these buttons make them easily accessible, without requiring visual contact. By adding context sensitivity, these buttons can also be repurposed to fit other functions. By linking multiple buttons, it is possible to create workflows for specific tasks. We provide a description of an initial iButton design space and highlight some scenarios to illustrate the envisioned usage of interactive buttons.

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Putting dementia into context - A selective literature review of assistive applications for users with dementia and their caregivers

People with dementia face a decline of their cognitive functions, including memory impairment and difficulty to orient in time and space. Assistive applications can ease the effects of dementia by assuming and supporting impaired functions. Context-awareness is an accepted paradigm for assistive applications. It enables interactive systems to react appropriately to situations that occur during daily routines of people with dementia. However, there currently is no recommended framework to view symptoms of dementia in terms of context and context-awareness. The aim of this paper is to inform designers in the early design stage of assistive applications how requirements and needs of people with dementia can be represented in a context-aware application. Based on a systematic literature review, we elicit which context types are linked to the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers and how they are used in existing assistive applications in dementia care. Our focus is on applications evaluated and assessed with people with dementia. We also classify these assistive applications by the offered context-aware services. We observe that these should not be limited within the realm of the local residence; context types that are valuable in-house can, to a certain extent, also be leveraged outside a local residence. We believe the proposed framework is a tool for application builders and interface designers to accomplish an informed design of systems for people with dementia.

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On stories, models and notations: Storyboard creation as an entry point for model-based interface development with UsiXML

Storyboards are excellent tools to create a high level specification of an interactive system. Because of the emphasis on graphical depiction they are both an accessible means for communicating the requirements and properties of an interactive system and allow the specification of complex context-aware systems while avoiding the need for technical details. We present a storyboard meta-model that captures the high level information from a storyboard and al- lows relating this information with other models that are common for engineering interactive systems. We show that a storyboard can be used as an entry point for using UsiXML models. Finally, this approach is accompanied by a tool set to make the connection between the storyboard model, UsiXML models and the program code required for maintaining these connections throughout the engineering process.

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Draw me a storyboard: Incorporating principles and techniques of comics to ease communication and artefact creation in user-centred design.

Storyboards are used in user-centred design (UCD) to clarify a scenario that describes the future use of a system. Although there are many styles of storyboarding, the graphical notation and language are very accessible for all team members of a multidisciplinary team. This papers describes how principles and techniques from comics can facilitate storyboarding in our COMuICSer approach and tool. COMuICSer formalises the way that storyboards are created, while preserving creative aspects of storyboarding. In combination with tool support for COMuICSer, this simplifies the relation of storyboards with other artefacts created in UCD such as structured models and UI designs and supports communication in multidisciplinary teams.

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Dazed and confused considered normal: An approach to create interactive systems for people with dementia

In Western society, the elderly represent a rapidly growing demographic group. For this group, dementia has become an important cause of dependencies on others and causes difficulties with independent living. Typical symptoms of the dementia syndrome are decreased location awareness and difficulties in situating ones activities in time, thus hindering long term plans and activities. We present our approach in creating an interactive system tailored for the needs of the early phases of the dementia syndrome. Given the increasing literacy with mobile technologies in this group, we propose an approach that exploits mobile technology in combination with the physical and social context to support prolonged independent living. Our system strengthens the involvement of caregivers through the patient's social network. We show that applications for people suffering from dementia can be created by explicitly taking into account context in the design process. Context dependencies that are defined in an early stage in the development process are propagated as part of the runtime behavior of the interactive system.

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ReWiRe: Designing reactive systems for pervasive environments

The design of interactive software that populates an ambient space is a complex and ad-hoc process with traditional software development approaches. In an ambient space, important building blocks can be both physical objects within the user's reach and software objects accessible from within that space. However, putting many heterogeneous resources together to create a single system mostly requires writing a large amount of glue code before such a system is operational. Besides, users all have their own needs and preferences to interact with various kinds of environments which often means that the system behavior should be adapted to a specific context of use while the system is being used. In this paper we present a methodology to orchestrate resources on an abstract level and hence configure a pervasive computing environment. We use a semantic layer to model behavior and illustrate its use in an application.

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