One paper accepted at ASSETS'15 - The 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
A Unifying Notification System To Scale Up Assistive Services
Charles Consel, Lucile Dupuy, Hélène Sauzéon
Abstract: Aging creates needs for assistive technology to support all activities of daily living (meal preparation, dressing, social participation, stove monitoring, etc.). These needs are mostly addressed by a silo-based approach that requires a new assistive
service (e.g., a reminder system, a pill prompter) to be acquired for every activity to be supported. In practice, these
services manifest their silo-based nature in their user interactions, and more specifically, in the heterogeneity of their
notification system. This heterogeneity incurs a cognitive cost that prevents scaling up assistive services and compromises
adoption by older adults.
This paper presents an approach to scaling up the combination of technology-based, assistive services by proposing a unifying notification system. To do so, (1) we propose a decomposition of assistive services to expose their needs in notification;
(2) we introduce a notification framework, allowing heterogeneous assistive services to homogeneously notify users; (3)
we present how this notification framework is carried out in practice for an assisted living platform.
We successfully applied our approach to a range of existing and new assistive services. We used our notification framework
to implement an assistive platform that combines a variety of assistive services. This platform has been deployed and
used 24/7 at the home of 15 older adults for up to 6 months. This study provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness
and learnability of the notification system of our platform, irrespective of the cognitive and sensory resources of the user. Additional
results show that our assisted living platform achieved high user acceptance and satisfaction.
A Unifying Notification System To Scale Up Assistive Services
Charles Consel, Lucile Dupuy, Hélène Sauzéon
ACM ASSETS'15, 26-28 Oct 2015, Lisboa, Portugal
The conference will take place at Lisboa (Portugal) from 26th to 28th of October.
