HCC: Small: Understanding, Sensing, and Accommodating Situational Impairments in Mobile Computing

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A "computer user" can no longer be thought of only as a person sitting at a desk in a consistent and comfortable working environment. Today's typical computer user is now holding a mobile device smaller than his or her hand, is outdoors, under the sun or in the rain, and perhaps even in motion, such as walking or riding. However, mobile devices have no deep awareness of the environments in which they are being used, or how those environments will affect their users' abilities to act. Addressing this challenge is the central idea of this project. The approach is to better understand, through scientific means, and better accommodate, through clever sensing and design, the "situational impairments" that affect the new-typical computer user for our age, the mobile user. Although situational impairments have been noted in the past, few research efforts have looked at how to sense impairing effects and what to do about them. Innovations in sensors, inference, and user interfaces have the potential to improve mobile interaction in the presence of situational impairments, showing that accessibility is "for everyone." The intellectual merits of this work include: (a) scientific studies of some situationally-impairing factors on human performance; (b) the invention and evaluation of ten projects designed to address and reduce the negative effects of certain situational impairments; (c) the development of clever reusable sensing techniques to enable the creation of those projects and advance the capabilities of mobile devices; and (d) the study of the "crossover potential" of projects to people with physical or health-induced impairments and disabilities. The broader impacts of this work include: (a) pushing the capabilities of mobile devices and sensing technologies to become more useful and usable, especially in varied contexts, which may have relevance to mobile field workers; (b) concretely demonstrating that accessibility research benefits everyone, and that all people incur impairments of one form or another in their lives; (c) contributing to public health and safety by reducing the dangers situational impairments cause, particularly to and from people driving automobiles, and (d) creating a graduate course, an undergraduate workshop, and a grades 6-12 science unit on ability-based design for mobile computing.