Nick Hine

Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of Computing

We present Twasebook, a web application aimed at learners of foreign languages. Based on a learner's search terms, Twasebook identifies relevant status updates from Twitter in the learner's target language(s) as examples of everyday vocabulary. Twasebook therefore represents a proof of concept application designed to explore the feasibility of util...

The chapter describes work done in MATCH on using forum theatre to facilitate the process of eliciting requirements from users and stakeholders concerning care technology for the domestic environment. Interactive theatre has been developed previously for requirements gathering purposes and this chapter describes how an interactive theatre exercise...

Research in MATCH led to interest in developing ways of enhancing the Dialogue of Care between stakeholders, in particular between carers and those in their care. In order to inform this dialogue, different stakeholders require different information according to their different perspectives on care. This information then needs to be presented to th...

Persuasion has played an important role in human life since it began. In the early 1990s a new approach called persuasive design was introduced into the HCI field. Persuasive design recognised that persuasion knowledge could be applied to the design and development of a variety interactive applications for changing people's attitudes and behaviours...

Despite more and more people adopting Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, adults over 65 years of age still make up a relatively small percentage of those numbers. A perceived lack of purpose is suggested as one of the key issues surrounding the lack of interest of older adults, yet with health benefits associated with usage, such as i...

Toilets and toilet habits are perceived as a taboo subject that people may be reluctant or embarrassed to talk openly about. In the past, appropriately designed Computer Based Interviews have been shown to encourage more honest answers to sensitive questions than other forms of interview, and can be more interesting and engaging that filling out a...

The UK population is ageing. At the time of the 2001 census there were 8.1 million people aged over 65 living in the UK, 3.1 million of them living alone. By 2011 the number of over 65s is projected to reach just under 12 million, and by 2026 over 13 million [1]. The extra workload this will place on health and care services will be compounded by p...

For widespread adoption of eHealth, and to achieve eInclusion and eAccessibility, eHealth systems must be tailored to each individual user's needs and preferences. Many eHealth products and services contain adjustable parameter settings, but they are specific to each product and unrelated to each other. This paper describes ongoing work to establis...

An interactive theatre piece has been designed to facilitate requirements gathering with a diverse range of user groups and stakeholders within the conceptual stage of telecare equipment for the home environment. The piece has been devised and produced by theatre professionals in consultation with computer engineers as part of a major research prog...

Background: It is estimated that there are about 9.8 million people in the UK with some form of disability. There have been estimates of non-use or abandonment of assistive technology (AT) exceeding 80%. It has been argued that the lack of understanding of individual needs produces static and inappropriate designs. Objective: To determine factors...

Six people with multiple health problems living in an extra care housing scheme for older people with vision impairment agreed to take part in a telecare trial. An average of 14.8 sensors was installed in each of the flats. The monitoring period began in January 2006 and lasted for 10 months. The data acquired by the sensors installed in each flat...

Remote labs offer many unique advantages to students as they provide opportunities to access experiments and learning scenarios that would be otherwise unavailable. Atthe same time, however, these opportunities introduce real challenges to the institutions hosting the remote labs. This paper draws on the experiences of the REXNET project consortium...

The overall purpose of the research discussed here is the enhancement of home-based care by revealing individual patterns in the life of a person, through modelling of the "busyness" of activity in their dwelling, so that care can be better tailored to their needs and changing circumstances. The use of data mining and on-line analytical processing...

This article examines the use of pervasive computing for the provision of care in the community for frail older people living alone in their own homes. The concept of well-being is explored using a conceptual framework that incorporates person, context, everyday activities, personal meanings, and well-being outcomes. The article reviews the implica...

The size of the ageing population is growing fast because people are living longer and environmental and social conditions are changing. This paper will report a study to design and develop a technological solution that helps to improve the independence and well-being of the elderly. We initially read some literature about tele- care, lifestyle mon...

The goal of this paper is to discuss the benefits and challenges of yielding an inter-continental network of remote laboratories supported and used by both European and Latin American Institutions of Higher Education. Since remote experimentation, understood as the ability to carry out real-world experiments through a simple Web browser, is already...

The care of elderly people in their own homes is being promoted throughout the world. The proportion of older people within western societies is rising, and it is anticipated that the already stretched resources of both the informal and formal care sectors will be unable to meet demand for home based care in the near future. This paper reports on w...

Lifestyle-monitoring systems are being researched to determine if they can predict long-term deterioration in well-being and allow carers to anticipate and address emerging problems. The Single Assessment Process (SAP) aims to make sure that older people's care needs are assessed thoroughly and accurately. In the traditional assessment process, tec...

The principal output of the research undertaken within the NWTM (Next Wave Technologies & Markets) Care in the Community Centre is a well-being demonstrator designed to explore compelling new methodologies for the delivery of health and social care services. That demonstrator is described in detail elsewhere in these proceedings (Brown, et al. (1))...

This paper considers the application of pervasive computing to the provision of care in the community, specifically older frail people living alone in their own homes. The concept of well-being is introduced and developed through the explanation of a conceptual framework that incorporates person, context and experiential factors. The paper reviews...

Electronic devices such as personal digital assistants have been used successfully as aids for people with memory problems. However, limitations of currently available technology can create difficulties in the day-to-day use of such devices, particularly for memory impaired and older users. These limitations are discussed in terms of both the softw...

The research described in this paper is the investigation of interactivity between learners and system in the context of remote access to educational field explorations (field trips). The concept is described generically as remote access field trip (RAFT). The interactivity framework proposed for assessing RAFT considers it within the context of li...

There is growing interest in and use of virtual learning environments in the delivery of course material, given their claimed advantages of temporal and spatial independence. The UK Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (UK Government, 2001) both strengthens the right for students with special educational needs to be educated in mainstream s...

Memory problems are often associated with the ageing process and are one of the commonest effects of brain injury. Electronic memory aids have been successfully used as a compensatory approach to provide reminders to individuals with prospective memory problems. This paper describes the usability issues surrounding the development of a new memory a...

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems can be mounted on a range of different hardware platforms, from custom-designed units to desktop or laptop personal computers and hand-held and palmtop systems. Palmtop devices such as personal data assistants (PDAs) offer great advantages of portability. The small display size and limited st...

Information and communications technology has the potential to enhance the life of students with disability by facilitating their opportunities for growth, development and inclusion. However, the full potential of such technologies is unlikely to be achieved without concurrent changes in pedagogical practice. Pedagogical practices such as peer- ass...

The move from institution to community care has resulted in many people receiving care at home. For some, disability or frailty restricts their involvement in social activities outside the home, resulting in unacceptable social isolation. This problem is compounded if the person has a speech or language impairment. In this paper, we will describe a...

Web-based course management and delivery is regarded by many institutions as a key factor in an increasingly competitive education and training world, but the systems currently available are largely unsatisfactory in terms of supporting collaborative work and access to practical science facilities. These limitations are less important in areas wher...

The move from institution to community care has resulted in more disabled and elderly people receiving care at home. For some, their disability or frailty prevents them from being involved in social activities outside the home, resulting in unacceptable social isolation. This problem is compounded if the person has a speech or language impairment....

As human beings, more than two thirds of our conversation is spent in socialising, gossip and story telling (Dunbar, 1996, 1997). Transactional or functional conversation quickly moves on to social interaction, and we constantly recount anecdotes to reinforce a practical point we are making or to reinforce our validity to have an opinion on a subje...

This paper describes the experiences and results of the European Union funded RESORT project which has developed a prototype system for remote service provision for rehabilitation technology (RT) products. RESORT stands for Remote Service of Rehabilitation Technology. High-end Environmental Control Systems (ECS), Alternative and Augmentative Commun...

This paper describes the experiences and results of the RESORT project which has developed a state of the art prototype system for remote service provision for rehabilitation technology (RT) products. RESORT stands for Remote Service of Rehabilitation Technology and is a European Union funded R&D project in the Disabled and Elderly sector of the TA...

This paper describes the ongoing RESORT project which is developing a state of the art prototype system for remote service provision for RT (rehabilitation technology) products. RESORT stands for Remote Service of Rehabilitation Technology and is an EU funded R&D project in the TAP sector Disabled and Elderly (DE-4208).

This paper describes an innovative distance education service based on the World Wide Web (WWW) and an Internet based videophone service. The WWW is used to provide a slide display function similar to that provided by presentation systems such as PowerPoint^TM. By using the WWW, slides for presentation in a lecture are available to students located...

Explores a number of the communication advantages offered to nonspeaking disabled people by the advent of broadband telecommunications. The first section of the paper focuses on text messages created by the disabled person alone. Several different word-prediction techniques, employed by nonspeakers who find difficulty in typing at computer keyboard...

The emergence of multimedia telecommunications services is potentially particularly attractive for people who have reduced mobility and other disabilities. It is often the case, however, that a user will have a complex range of impairments that require specific and often individual attention. By using a computer as the telecommunications terminal a...

This paper discusses an investigation of text communication as an element of interaction mediated by a broadband telecommunication system. This study is part of a wider investigation being undertaken by the EEC RACE IPSNI II project. The focus of the study was to determine if the typing rate achieved by non-speaking people with additional severe mo...

The task of the IPSNI II project has been to investigate the accessibility of multimedia telecommunications services for people with disabilities. Where problems were found, the project was to develop and demonstrate examples of hardware, software and service adaptations solutions that show how accessibility could be improved. In doing so, the proj...

Computer-delivered educational material has great potential for customisation to meet the requirements of individual users, in particular students with disabilities. An adaptive learning environment (ALE) is a system which analyses the student's performance at each stage, using the results to generate the next section's content. This has always bee...

Technology-mediated home care is attractive for older people living at home and also for their carers. It provides the information necessary to give confidence and assurance to everyone interested in the wellbeing of the older person. From a care delivery perspective, however, widespread deployment of home care technologies presents system develope...