Assistive technology (AT) aims at compensating for motor, sensory or cognitive functional limitations of its users. Severely disabled users typically need to rely on family and caregivers to setup and manage the technology they need to use on a daily basis. We propose a conceptual blueprint for an assistive technology micro-groupware platform for users with severe motor limitations. Stakeholders can address the definition of roles and forms of participation for a small group of people with situation-dependent configuration tasks at different levels and dimensions.
AT configuration. We are currently investigating the territory of AT configuration
needs and opportunities to support the design of this kind of technology. One of the
reasons AT is hard to design, produce and be used is the variability of kinds and degrees
of disabilities and individual characteristics among users (physical, psychological,
cultural, and environmental, etc.). Even when we look at a single type of disability, there
is a great variability in the levels of limitations (a continuum between “some difficulty”
and “cannot in any way”), causes (genetics, accidents, aging) and personal
characteristics (physical, such as height and weight, their social and psychological condition, etc.).
This has been referred to as a “universe-of-one” problem, where a solution for one
person will rarely work for another [
In a related work, we studied implicit and explicit configuration needs and
opportunities of AT configuration suggesting that we must address both hardware and software
configuration, some to be done by the end user, some by assistants [
Cultures of participation. Cultures of participation promotes systems in which
everybody is provided with the means to participate and to contribute actively in personally
meaningful problems. Cultures of participation strive to increase social creativity, put
domain professionals in charge of exploring ill-defined problems, and make owners of
problems independent of high-tech scribes [
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
applications that leverage socio-technical systems to support personalized needs in the healthcare domain, but how to support all users’ needs and participation in such a context needs further investigation.
Collaboration. Kintsch & DePaula propose a framework for the adoption of AT
which identifies the following participants in the adoption process: the users, those
involved with the user on a daily bases (caregivers), designers and assistive technology
experts. Each of these parties must bring certain attributes to the process in order for
adoption to occur. Together, a complex and often difficult collaborative process of
designing, selecting, personalizing, learning and integrating must be accomplished [
The design and deployment of configurable AT systems was investigated by
Carmien & Fischer applying the meta-design framework in systems for helping people with
cognitive disabilities [
A different approach in a different domain has been researched by Bigham & Ladner
who propose a collaborative scripting framework that web users, web developers and
web researchers can use to improve collaboratively web accessibility for blind users
[
Both works suggest a common requirement in the AT domain: usually, some collaboration will take place around the technology being proposed or used to the benefit of a main user – the disabled one. However, how does this collaborative process happens Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
and how to support it is usually considered apart from the AT itself, or not considered at all. 3
We are currently working with a single tetraplegic participant who is male, 33 years
old and injured due to an accident he suffered more than ten years ago. We are
conducting an action research in a typical spiral of plan-act-observe-reflect cycles [
The platform is described elsewhere [
Micro-meta-groupware
Even though we are currently working with a single tetraplegic user, our research had to deal with much more than one person from the very beginning: as a severely impaired user, he depends on his caregivers and family members to support him in most of the things he wants or needs to do, including the interaction with any surrounding devices. He usually counts on one professional nurse who takes daily care of him during the day and family members who can occasionally support him out of this period. His condition enforces a situation where he needs assistance for performing all physical manipulation on the objects around him, that includes common tasks like moving himself and moving things around, preparing to a specific work, study or leisure activity, turning on a computer or any other device and changing their setup. This also holds to those devices that are assisting him – that is, the AT devices as is the case of the platform prototype. The immediate consequence of that is that even though the AT targets a (disabled) main user, many other people with different roles, functions and responsibilities will interact with it in order to fulfill the main user daily needs. In such context, AT is a component of a collaborative system. This will be true in most cases where the end-user depends on other person’s help due to his or her functional limitation, which is true especially when dealing with severe cases, where the degree of assistance needed by the end-user is presumably higher. Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Micro groupware. If a single disabled user can be seen as a “universe-of-one” problem, all the people around him or her represent a “micro universe” which include him or her at the center. This group of people is small and cohesive: relationships are highly based on confidence and trust, including the professional relationships, developed over time and on which depends, most of all, the survival of the main user. Somehow, everybody inside the group seems to be very conscientious about it, in a positive and not deluded way. We can identify seven different profiles involved in this collaborative interaction: 1. The main user, the disabled subject to be supported; 2. Family members, who are emotionally (in “good” and “bad” ways) involved and concerned with his welfare; 3. Caregivers, both formal, such as professionals nurses, and informal ones, such as home employees; 4. People with similar needs, such as others tetraplegic friends, with whom he can talk about problems and concerns at a deeper level of empathy and mutual understanding; 5. Friends and colleagues, who occasionally and unwittingly become helpers and supporters in daily social situations such us group meetings and group work; 6. Therapists and doctors, whose opinions from the clinical and medical perspectives poses a distinct level of importance; and 7. Technical specialists who may have knowledge of tools and facilitate many decision making processes regarding technology, such us the developers/specialized manufacturers, retailers and assistive tools service suppliers.
Each person is a potential user, many times unwittingly, and brings certain requirements to the process of configuring AT, and to the design thereof. But more than that, each person is potentially a designer too that can input changes that shapes the system, each one having different motivations and levels of engagement, generating changes and change requests to be addressed with different levels of priorities.
Meta groupware. The collaboration process will take place around the assistive technology, but it is also a collaboration about the technology itself, since there would not be any collaboration if there were not an AT to configure. It puts such AT in a position where it is, at the same time, the target and the support of a collaborative system. The former because it triggers a series of new activities that simply will not exist without it being there, such as wearing, fitting and adjusting a wearable device, like the electronic cap. The later because any configuration can only happen in features previously provided by the technology itself, like its hardware and software adjustments. Once that is understood, we may think about how to better support these activities. For example, this would include the appropriate mechanisms for allowing individuals inside the group to be able to configure different parts of the AT, both locally and remotely (from one’s personal mobile phone or a web system, for example). At the same time, the main user must have the appropriate means to be in control for allowing and disallowing individuals’ actions, asking for changes and blocking undesired interventions in the system. Finally, some of the configurations may change the system in more significant ways (e.g. a new software release or upgrade by the manufacturer), implying significant Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
changes not only to the main user, but also to the other individuals in the group that will have to deal with new demands to learn the new system features at some level.
Groupware systems are already known to be evolutionary because the composition
and the characteristics of workgroups change with time, as well as the tasks that need
to be executed [
In this paper, we present an initial conceptual scheme of an assistive technology groupware platform for users with severe motor limitations. The AT platform is under continuous design and evaluation in an action research process with a single tetraplegic participant and the people around him. Our first evaluation raised collaboration as an important aspect to be considered that we now start to investigate by means of this proposed framework. Our framework takes into account that such a technology demands and promotes a collaborative process around and about its configuration. Cultures of participation put domain professionals in charge of exploring the technological solutions that may work better for them independently of high-tech scribes. In our research, we are investigating how it can be done in such a way that: (1) the system effectively and safely support the main user in his final goals and needs; and (2), the system support the participation of all stakeholders at the desired level of engagement. Our contribution is to propose a conceptual structure of a collaborative system around and about itself, which we call micro-meta-groupware. Such scheme hasn’t been proposed to date and we believe it can be a starting point for the incorporation of collaborative features into the design and deployment of AT systems and devices. We plan to implement and evaluate this framework into a concrete instance of groupware platform in subsequent research cycles to check for its applicability and validity.
The authors thank the volunteers that participated in this study, as well as CNPq and FAPERJ for supporting them with research grants and scholarships. Proc. of Third International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2015 Madrid (Spain), May 26th, 2015 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.