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A context aware handheld wayfinding system for individuals with cognitive impairments

Published: 13 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

A challenge to individuals with cognitive impairments in wayfinding is how to remain oriented, recall routines, and travel in unfamiliar areas in a way relying on limited cognitive capacity. According to psychological model of spatial navigation and the requirements of rehabilitation professionals, a novel wayfinding system is presented with an aim to increase workplace and life independence for people suffering from diseases such as traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, schizophrenia, Down syndromes, and Alzheimer's disease. This paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of travel guidance for persons with cognitive disabilities. The unique strength of the system is the ability to provide unique-to-the-user prompts that are triggered by context. As this population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons) and presents the designer with the need to tailor prompts to a 'universe-of-one' the use of images specific to each user and context is implemented. The key to the approach is to spread the context awareness across the system, with the context being flagged by the QR-code tags and the appropriate response being evoked by displaying the appropriate path guidance images indexed by the intersection of specific end-user and context ID embedded in the tags. By separating the context trigger from the pictorial response, responses can be updated independently of the rest of the installed system, and a single QR-code tag can trigger multiple responses in the PDA depending on the end-user and their specific path. A prototype is built and tested in field experiments with real patients. The experimental results show the human-computer interface is friendly and the capabilities of wayfinding are reliable.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '08: Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2008
332 pages
ISBN:9781595939760
DOI:10.1145/1414471
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. cognitive disability
  2. qr code
  3. ubiquitous computing
  4. user interface

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  • (2023)A Systematic Review of Navigation Assistance Systems for People With DementiaIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2022.314138329:4(2146-2165)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
  • (2023)A comprehensive systematic review on mobile applications to support dementia patientsPervasive and Mobile Computing10.1016/j.pmcj.2023.10175790:COnline publication date: 1-Mar-2023
  • (2022)Mobile Phone Use by People with Mild to Moderate Dementia: Uncovering Challenges and Identifying OpportunitiesProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3544809(1-16)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Visual-auditory substitution device for indoor navigation based on fast visual marker detection2022 16th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS)10.1109/SITIS57111.2022.00029(259-266)Online publication date: Oct-2022
  • (2022)Design of Navigation Applications for People with Disabilities: A Review of Literature and Guideline FormulationInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2022.208888339:14(2942-2964)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
  • (2021)I-CARE-An Interaction System for the Individual Activation of People with DementiaGeriatrics10.3390/geriatrics60200516:2(51)Online publication date: 13-May-2021
  • (2020)mHealth for schizophrenia spectrum disorders management: A systematic reviewInternational Journal of Social Psychiatry10.1177/002076402093328766:7(642-665)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Sight-to-Sound Human-Machine Interface for Guiding and Navigating Visually Impaired PeopleIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30294268(185416-185428)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2020)An insight into smartphone-based assistive solutions for visually impaired and blind people: issues, challenges and opportunitiesUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-020-00733-8Online publication date: 4-Jul-2020
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