=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-495/paper-6
|storemode=property
|title=Empowering Disabled People: e-Learning Challenges for Independent Life
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-495/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-495
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aied/BarreraSRBMRC09
}}
==Empowering Disabled People: e-Learning Challenges for Independent Life==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-495/paper6.pdf
38
Empowering disabled people:
e-learning challenges for independent life
Carmen Barrera a, Olga C. Santos a, Emmanuelle Gutiérrez a, Jesús G. Boticario a,
Javier Moranchel b, Jose R. Roldánc and Roberto Casasb
a
aDeNu Research Group. Artificial Intelligence Department
Computer Science School, Spanish National University of Distance Education - UNED
{carmen.barrera, ocsantos, egutierrez, jgb}@dia.uned.es, http://adenu.ia.uned.es
b
University of Zaragoza
c
ATADES Association
Abstract. This paper presents a solution to address the technological challenges to
support the needs of people with intellectual disabilities towards an independent
life, in the scope of the CISVI research project, which proposes a new research
methodology to deal with the needs of disabled and social communities.
Keywords. CISVI, ESdI, independent living, inclusive learning
Introduction
Research in Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT) could have a direct impact on the
improvement of the quality of life (QoL) of disabled and non-disabled people. QoL
represents the degree to which an individual can establish and sustain a viable self in
the social world [1]. However, technology is very often not ready to support the final
user in this way.
In this context, at the aDeNu group we are doing advanced research on the
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to foster the inclusion into the
society of people with cognitive and physical disabilities. At present, we are involved
in the CISVI project (TSI-020301-2008-21), which faces different issues related to the
inclusion of the disabled people using the ICTs.
This paper addresses the challenges to help people with intellectual disabilities
(PID) in easily learning the activities of daily living (ADL).
Research Communities for Health and Independent Living
The main goal of the Research Communities for Health and Independent Living
(CISVI) project is to identify, test and validate a new methodological research
framework named Social Spaces for Research (ESdI) in three scenarios: i) labour
integration of people with cognitive disabilities (ESdI1), ii) home healthcare for elderly
people (ESdI2), and iii) living independently (ESdI3).
39
The research activity carried out within the scope of these three ESdIs pose
important contributions in the following areas of technology and its adaptation for
elderly or to people with some kind of physical or intellectual disabilities:
� Intelligence Environmental Technologies: RFID, mobile sensors, etc.
� Mobile devices for accessing ICT suitable for meeting the needs of people
with disabilities and dependence
� Accessibility, usability and user modelling technologies
� e-learning and e-mentoring ubiquitous technologies, adapted to people with
disabilities and dependence
� Tracking and geographic information technologies
� IT security and identity
The primary objective of ESdIs research framework is to encourage the
involvement -from the very beginning of the research activities- of the end user as co-
creator of the services [2].
In this paper, we are focusing on discussing how Esdl3 is addressing independent
life improvements of PID. Elsewhere it is described the Esdl1 approach, where
adaptive e-learning and e-mentoring to support people’s work integration is provided in
terms of recommendations [3].
EsdI3 Scenario: living independently
The educational scenario is located at the ATADES-Santo Angel4 occupational centre
for adults in Zaragoza, Spain. This centre has a long experience, and takes in people
with heterogeneous intellectual disabilities for their long life learning. It offers training
on general and social abilities, workshops, therapeutic activities, physical exercises and
handcraft works for commercial companies. The goal is to facilitate the integration of
PID into the community. Currently, about 200 people, ages ranging from 21 to 65 years
old, with an average of 40, are in the centre. The professional team includes educators,
psycho-pedagogues and managers.
The investigation on key technologies aims to promote independent living for
elderly and disabled people with the least possible assistance. According to the law of
dependence [4], different technological supports need to be provided:
� Educational support for learning basic daily life activities (health and hygiene,
autonomy in food, dress)
� Educational support for learning instrumental daily living activities (cooking
autonomy, home order and cleanliness, using the telephone)
� Educational support for learning advanced daily living activities (eating habits,
food choices, make a shopping list, communication, leisure, tasks
management, orientation, mobility)
� Personal Safety support:
o Detection of risk situations focusing on the individual person: fall
detection, abnormal behavior (for example, a long time without
getting out of bed), etc.
o Risk detection focusing on the setting: cold / heat (for example,
because of a window which has been left opened) fire, smoke, etc.
4
ATADES - http://www.atades.org/
40
o Detection of risks which may come from an external situation such as
burglary; abnormal presence detection.
The first experience supports the ADL of washing-up the hands. A touch screen
hanged on the bathroom wall displays the sequence of steps to follow the activity.
Figure 1. The “how to wash your hands, step by step” lesson
The use of the ALT has a twofold impact, i) as a complement to empowering
personal capabilities (abilities) and ii) as a tool for professionals that facilitates the
follow-up of the global process. The goal of the training is the acquisition of abilities
for daily independent living, but, depending on each person and the nature of their
disability, ALT can contribute to:
� Recalling in a continuous life-long learning process
� Reinforcement for achieving trust in one self
� Support for reducing their dependency level
� Independent living, with the acquisition of the learned ability
Supported Technology
Educational supports are based on educational units in which different contents are
presented, such as:
� Videos of different daily activities in which different disabled people are
performing daily tasks. These videos help to reinforce activity learning.
� Audio with tasks carried out in the different stages of daily activity.
� Images with pictures of disabled people executing these tasks. These images
are complemented by iconography, based on augmentative language,
according to the user-centered design principles.
Devices which contain this interface consist of tactile screens with Wi-Fi
connection, adapted interfaces such as: a switch adapted mouse, a virtual mouse, etc
It should be noted that all the contents are shown according to the location of the
user, by using location systems.
On the other hand, personal safety support is based on ICTs, such as: location
systems, movement and presence sensors, flood and smoke detectors, actuators, etc.
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Activities during the project life cycle
Within the project there are several phases in which successive iterations of short-term
working periods evaluate the results within its phase, in order to improve the
technological solutions and find new sustainable ways to perform the solution.
As a result of the sustainable development of the ESdI, results will be shared
within an open community of users and will be extended to other associations and
related foundations.
The project is in the first 6 months of its development, and has achieved:
� The development of a technological support for teaching and learning basic
daily activities such as “how to wash your hands, step by step”. ATADES
Association, UNED 5 , FZCC 6 Foundation and University of Zaragoza 7 have
taken part in this interface development
� A survey and evaluation of accessibility and usability of the interface with the
assistance of the ATADES multidisciplinary team, which suggested
improvements.
Currently, the evaluation of the interface with real users is being conducted at
ATADES-Santo Ángel Occupational-Centre.
It is planned that the ESdI evolves as follows until 2011:
� Continued development of the interface in ATADES-Santo Ángel
Occupational Centre, extending it to other activities (educational support for
learning basic and instrumental daily living activities).
� Support for independent living in the residential centres of the ATADES
association.
� Support for independent living in private homes and supervised apartments.
� Support for independent living in flats of Valdespartera.
Figure 2. The ESdI-3 life cycle
5
Spanish National University of Distance Education - http://www.uned.es/
6
FZCC - Foundation Zaragoza City of Knowledge - http://www.fundacionzcc.org/
7
University of Zaragoza - http://www.unizar.es/
42
Needs and Challenges
In order to understand the needs of PID and provide some technological solutions to
address them, we have carried out observational sessions at the occupational centre and
had interviews with the professional team.
After this process, the main conclusions we have gathered are:
� Once PID are given some guidelines for working, they follow them without
exception.
� PID require additional effort to modify a learnt guideline (i.e. their capability
to adapt to the environment is limited)
� PID require alerts and reminders of the activities at each time.
� Professionals look after the tasks and check if they have been carried out
successfully.
In this context, a set of challenges for the ALT appear to address functional
diversity of PID:
� Differences in user-agents (e.g. browsers) should be transparent to the users
� Multi-media resources should be offered
� Multi-modal interaction should be provided
� Heterogeneous learners’ cognitive levels should be taken into account
� Contents and presentation should be adapted for each learner according to the
learner’s features (i.e. learner profiles managed by user modeling techniques)
� Contents have to be frequently and continuously updated to cope with the
changes in the environment and the processes
� To facilitate the continuous updating, educators need to have a repository of
learning objects conveniently marked with the metadata for the user profile of
each student.
� Educators also need an editor accessible and usable to provide a quick update.
Solutions at the CISVI project for Esdl3
The solution offered during the first stage of the project consist of: i) elaborating the
template with the sequence of steps corresponding to a particular activity, ii)
developing the learner profile, which includes the personal features that constrain the
learning process, iii) selecting 6 PID from the occupational centre and describing their
profiles, iv) specifying the most adequate tutorial for each one, v) developing each
tutorial and vi) documenting the whole process for adapting contents and their
presentation to the learner’s needs.
The elaboration of the template was a process shared between the technological
and educational partners, following a process of creation and revision.
Each step of the template is a web page that incorporates multiple resources in
different media (text, image, audio, video and iconography for augmentative
communication). Moreover, the template includes different options for presenting the
information, regarding colours, position of items in the screen, or navigation icons.
Figure 1 shows the first slide for the washing-up hands activity. The navigation
between the steps can be done by multiple modalities: mouse, keyboard, voice, tactile
interaction, physical button or a time deadline.
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This scenario requires a level of extreme personalisation to facilitate the complete
adaptation of the resources to the individual: each user interacts with their own images
and videos performing the activity; the time deadline for the automatic navigation is
adjusted to the user pace on each step of the activity; the audio is the known voice of
the educator; images identifying locations are from the real scenarios.
This extreme personalisation of the solution poses the following challenges:
� ALT need to include a repository of media resources with metadata that
relates each media to the user or group of users, and from the template and the
search on this repository generate the lesson for each user.
� Facilities to support adaptations provided by the educator, thus the system
needs to be flexible, configurable; it needs to provide the tools that facilitates
the educator the easily modication of the application objects.
� Tracking user’s interaction and providing recommendations from the
recommender system. Several recommendations can be provided. For instance,
advising the educator for configuring some parameters (e.g. the adjustement of
deadline times for each step of each people).
� The cost of building and deploying all media resources is very high.
To date, experiences have been performed with 6 people. First, the activity was
performed in a natural way; next the activity was repeated using the guide of the
educator, and finaly with the use of the deployed technology. The experiences were
recorded and analysed, so that conclusions can be drawn to improve the process. The
experience proves the importance of the user-driven approach. Some of the developed
enhancements are as follows:
� New steps included in the process.
� Detection of lack of recognition for some pictures (i.e. image with the name of
a location replaced by the location itself)
� Different deadline times for each user
� The attention is centred on the audio more than on the image
Conclusions and future works
From our experience in the CISVI project, we have come to the following conclusions:
� The individual differences of each user have to be taken into account from the
ouset.
� Combining design for all approaches with personalization features provide
solutions that are able both to comform different types of needs from the
design viewpoint and support their adaptation to the specific needs of the user
while the interaction takes place.
Future works deal with several cycles of experimentation and refinement,
extension to other ADL, introduction of mobile devices, and dynamic support through
recommendations.
44
Acknowledgements
Authors would like to thank the Spanish government for funding the CISVI project
(TSI-020301-2008-21).
References
[1] Brown I., Brown R., Quality of Life and Disability. An Approach for Community Practitioners, Jessica
Kingsley Publishers, ISBN 1843100058, Jun 2003.
[2] Tansey M., Stembridge B. The challenge of sustaining the research and innovation process, World Patent
Information, 27 (3), p.212-226, Sep 2005
[3] Santos, O.C., Couchet, J., Boticario, J.G. 2009. Personalized e-learning and e-mentoring through user
modelling and dynamic recommendations for the inclusion of disabled at work and education. ICALT
2009 (in press).
[4] Spanish Dependency Law 39/2006 of December 14, Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Care for
people in a situation of dependency.