Ubiquitous Computing Systems & Methods for Supporting Activities of Daily Living

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In Canada, it is estimated that one in seven people has a physical, cognitive, or sensory disability that limits their daily activities. I proposed to explore how to develop ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) systems and methods specifically to help people with disabilities complete activities of daily living (ADLs) and function independently within a community as a research platform for investigating important computer science issues. In particular, I will develop and evaluate software tools, models, and methods to facilitate the future design and implementation of ubicomp systems specifically to support people with disabilities continue in the completion of important ADLs on their own. * *Many ADLs can be difficult for anyone who has lost some cognitive, motor and/or perceptual functions to perform. Thus, individuals with special needs often must rely on informal caregivers to help them complete their activities. I will develop models of how people complete ADLs with the help of caregivers in different contexts. I will create new technologies that seamlessly integrate into the users' environments and the artefacts that they use on a daily basis to sense their contexts and infer the activities that may need help completing. Additionally, I will explore how to model and store that information, and how to link and associate the context of the current user experience to other relevant experiences and information that may help the users complete ADLs. * *The research contributions described above will facilitate the development of novel class of ubicomp applications. The proposed work will depart from existing approaches for building ubicomp applications by focusing on continuously contextualizing and relating the current/live user experiences with other relevant experiences and information. Furthermore, the proposed work will explore how to include and use a variety of other types of context, such as social and historical ones. * *Although the proposed work will facilitate the development of ubicomp applications that can potentially help any users, those who might be able to benefit the most are individuals with impairments to particular functions that are needed to complete some ADLs (such as the ability to plan, communicate, remember, etc.). I will ground my research in the development and evaluation of assistive technologies for three specific groups of users: older adults with dementia, individuals with a motor-neuron disease (such as ALS), and children with autism. In using this approach, I will make contributions to both the ubiquitous computing area and human-computer interaction area. This approach will also allow me to validate the proposed research through studies investigating how the proposed methods and models work in authentic use. At the same time, the work will be applied towards real problems for real users.*