Search

Many with intellectual disabilities (ID) have difficulties adhering to current physical activity guidelines. The goal of this study was to develop a mobile app for assisting people with ID to be more physically active. We implemented a solution that combines the digital and real world using augmented reality (AR). Eight people working with people with ID (special education teachers, social workers, psychologists, and researchers) tested the app and completed a usability test. Results indicate that a mobile app focusing on everyday life scenarios can have a potential value for the targeted user group, but AR solutions can be challenging. publishedVersion

Workshop at the 31st Medical Informatics Europe virtual conference, 29.05.21 - 31.05.21: https://efmi.org/2020/12/10/31st-medical-informatics-europe-conference-mie2021-athens-greece/. The increasing use of mobile health (mHealth) tools for self-management is considered to be important to improve health effects for patients with chronic NCDs (noncommunicable diseases). This development is supported by an increasing number of available mHealth apps. The apps range from disease management apps (e.g., diabetes diary) to health and fitness apps (e.g., dietary apps and workout apps). However, there seems to be a lack of motivation from most users to keep using these health apps over a long period of time [1]. This may be because of the way these apps were designed and developed, i.e. lack of co-participatory design techniques and lack of a tested developer guideline for creating mHealth solutions. The motivation behind this workshop is to identify motivational factors which will increase adoption and usage of mHealth apps. Since 2001, several of the presenters have been working on self-management tools for people with diabetes [2, 3]. The main tool is a diabetes diary – the “Few Touch Application” (Norwegian, “Diabetesdagboka”), available for free from Google Play, and used by several thousands of users [4-8].

People with intellectual disabilities often have a sedentary lifestyle that can lead to long-term issues like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity and depression. Although literature shows that the main reason for this is the lack of motivation to do physical activity, scarce research has been done in accessible apps to track and foster physical activities that address motivation. This paper presents HikePal, a game-inspired app to motivate individuals with intellectual disabilities to do physical activity outdoors. We have followed a design and creation research strategy using 1) semi-structured interviews with five experts (health care workers, special education experts and software engineers); 2) a focus group with an occupational therapist, a physical therapist and four software engineers; 3) a pilot user test with three individuals with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers. Having social interaction during the physical activity turned out to be a major motivational aspect of the system, whereas reward systems did not attract much of the users’ attention. Regarding the adapted navigational assistance, we found out that easy-to-read text, visual communication and street-level pictures were the key features to achieve successful and understandable guidance outdoors for people with intellectual disabilities. It proved useful to perform a test on the field and to refine the design guidelines in view of a forthcoming large-scale experimental test involving a larger number of persons with intellectual, sensory and motor disabilities.

INTRODUCTION Offering dental health to children with autism is challenging because it provides various visual/aural stimulations rarely experienced in any other setting. Their different perception of the surrounding world and difficulty accepting unknown social contexts can generate anxiety and fear, which if not adequately addressed, might trigger problem behaviors. This often forces dentists to use potentially dangerous chemical sedation in order to perform dental work on the child. Since digital tools are natural motivators for children, our study aims to expand previous research investigating the full potential of ICT to deliver the awareness and predictability of all dental clinic environment components (settings, tools, noise, procedures). METHODS A multidisciplinary team applied co-design to selecting and creating digital resources and tools organized in a web application, MyDentist. A clinical protocol was defined and tested with a group of children with autism to implement desensitization and anxiety control in a real dental care setting using the kit of digital resources as assistive technology. Periodic visits (45 min) were scheduled for each child over a 3-month period in the same clinical room to ease familiarization. During dental care, structured training was delivered: 1) familiarization with medical procedures (control visits, dental hygiene, tooth decay treatment, dental sealant), and 2) educational activities (in the clinic) and homework using personalized digital resources. RESULTS Results appear to confirm the positive role of supportive technology in anxiety control: (i) Most children showed a positive response, modeling their behavior and becoming increasingly collaborative (ii) Caregivers strongly committed to the protocol were satisfied with their active involvement. (iii) Children who respected the weekly schedule successfully completed the dental protocol in the scheduled time, and their caregivers felt the child-parent relationship was reinforced. DISCUSSION This study confirms the importance of ICT tools for reducing anxiety during dental care sessions as well as for active parent involvement in the care of their children. Involving children in content creation during the clinical meeting helps them accept the dental care protocols. A few guidelines for creating accessible digital tools for anxiety reduction can be shared to benefit designers.

International audience; Writing parallel programs is not easy, and debugging them is usually a nightmare. To cope with these diiculties, a structured approach to parallel programs using skeletons and template based compiler techniques has been developed over the past years by several researchers, including the P3L group in Pisa. This approach is based on the use of a set of primitive forms that are just functionals implemented via templates exploiting the underlying parallelism, so it is natural to ask whether marrying a real functional language like Ocaml with the P3L skeletons can be the basis of a powerful parallel programming environment. We show that this is the case: our prototype, written entirely in Ocaml using a limited form of closure passing, allows a very simple and clean programming style, shows real speed-up over a network of workstations and, as an added fundamental bonus, allows logical debug-ging of parallel programs in a sequential framework without changing the user code.