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The patient room of the future would be able to sense the needs and preferences of the patients and nurses and adapt itself accordingly by combining all the heterogeneous data offered by the different technologies. This goal can be achieved by developing a context-aware framework, which exploits and integrates the heterogeneous data by utilizing a continuous care ontology. The existing ontology engineering methodologies are rather extreme in their choices to include domain experts. On the one hand, there are methodologies that only discuss the scope, use and requirements of the ontology with the domain experts. On the other hand, there are approaches in which the ontology is completely constructed by the domain experts by providing them with user-friendly and collaborative tools. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering methodology is presented that finds a middle ground between these two extremes. The methodology actively involves social scientists, ontology engineers and stakeholders. The stakeholders participate in each step of the ontology life cycle without having to construct the ontology themselves or attribute a large amount of their time. The applicability of the methodology is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology.

The relatively high percentage of people with disabilities in Europe combined with its aging population, the strong relation of impairment to age, and people with disabilities‘ dissatisfaction with or even unawareness of available assistive technology, reveal the necessity to incorporate a user-centric approach that, beyond second-generation practices, will provide embedded and built-in accessibility solutions, as well as toolkits for developers, for 'engraving' accessibility in existing and emerging mass-market ICT-based products, aiming to make accessibility open, plug and play, personalized and configurable, realistic and applicable in various contexts, always keeping the user in the loop. The ÆGIS IP project seeks to determine whether third-generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT. This paper presents the holistic User Centred Design implementation plan, upon which ÆGIS has been based, in order to achieve its targets, starting from modelling its target users, in the most efficient way possible. ispartof: pages:67-77 ispartof: Proceedings of the first International ÆGIS Conference - 7-8 October 2010 vol:1 issue:1 pages:67-77 ispartof: International AEGIS Conference location:Sevilla, Spain status: published