Browsing by Subject "assistive technology"
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Item AUDIO FOR A MULTIMODAL ASSISTIVE INTERFACE(2005-07) Murphy, Emma; McAllister, Graham; Strain, Philip; Kuber, Ravi; Yu, WaiItem Exploring Older Adults' Attitudes Towards Privacy of Adaptive Assistive Technologies(2018-01-01) Gable Poneres, Kellie Nicole; Massey, Aaron K; Information Systems; Human Centered ComputingAdaptive assistive technologies can support the accessibility needs of individuals whose abilities vary due to a diagnosis, medication, or other external factors by monitoring and adapting to their fluctuating performance. As these systems offer many compelling benefits to users, the privacy threats posed by these systems have been largely overlooked in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature. This work identifies potential privacy threats posed by adaptive assistive technologies, and investigates the privacy-related perspectives and concerns of older adults who experience varied pointing abilities, in the context of these systems. In our first study, we conducted eight interviews with older adults diagnosed with Essential Tremors. Six months later, six of our participants partook in novel participatory privacy elicitation activities in the second study. We found that participants had positive attitudes towards assistive technologies that gather their personal data, but also had strong preferences for how their data should be used and who should have access to it. We identify a need to factor in privacy threats when designing assistive technologies to avoid exposing users to these hazards. We conclude with design recommendations to offer users more agency over their collected data from these systems.Item Towards a Social Justice Aligned Makerspace: Co-designing Custom Assistive Technology within a University Ecosystem(ACM, 2023-10-22) Higgins, Erin; Oliver, Zaria; Hamidi, FoadDigital fabrication methods offer exciting opportunities for producing customized assistive technology (AT). However, utilizing these tools currently requires a high level of technical expertise as well as time and money investments. Furthermore, facilitating collaboration between end users and makers needs effective and inclusive approaches with shared language and support for asynchronous, dispersed communication of design requirements. While these Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approaches are shown to support end-user agency and furthering technology democratization, research has to yet explore how they can further align with social justice values and practices. We explored these possibilities by facilitating DIY-AT design with students with disabilities within a university makerspace. By explicitly encouraging participants to consider social justice issues important to them as they engaged in DIY-AT design, we studied the considerations and supports needed for facilitating flexible co-design activities and broader conversations about accessibility barriers at the university. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, we offer lessons learned about the potential of co-designing DIY-ATs as a way to investigate questions of social justice, inclusion, and access in academic contexts.Item Universal Design: An Intercultural Perspective(ASSOCIATION ON HIGHER EDUCATION AND DISABILITY (AHEAD), 2017-11-17) Hamidi, FoadUniversal Design (UD) is an effective approach for creating inclusive and accessible systems and services for individuals with diverse abilities. In this presentation, we describe how we used UD in an intercultural context. We co-designed an open-source Do-It-Yourself (DIY) prototyping platform, TalkBox, to develop customizable communication devices for non-verbal individuals. We then conducted a series of workshops in Western Kenya, where we trained university students from computer science and social work programs, as well as special education teachers from urban and rural schools in how to use TalkBox to design customized systems. These participants then formed teams and worked together to develop new assistive technology solutions for non-verbal children in local schools. This talk will be of interest to researchers, educators and practitioners who work with individuals in different cultural contexts and are interested in questions of intersectionality and intercultural collaboration. We describe how the task of designing customized assistive technology can be used as a tool to connect university students with real-world scenarios in their communities. We also share lessons learned about the potential of using DIY assistive technology in developing contexts and in transnational projects.Item Using a participatory activities toolkit to elicit privacy expectations of adaptive assistive technologies(ACM, 2020-04-20) Hamidi, Foad; Poneres, Kellie; Massey, Aaron; Hurst, AmyIndividuals whose abilities change over time can benefit from assistive technologies that can detect and adapt to their current needs. While these Adaptive Assistive Technologies (AATs) offer exciting opportunities, their use presents an often-overlooked privacy tradeoff between usability and disclosing ability data. To explore this tradeoff from end-user perspectives, we developed a participatory activities toolkit comprised of tangible low-fidelity physical cards, charts, and two software AAT prototypes. We used the kit in interviews with six older adults who experience pointing and typing difficulties when accessing the Internet. Participants had conflicting views about AATs collecting their data, and strong preferences about what data should be collected, how should it be used, and who should have access to it. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) we describe a novel approach to elicit detailed end-user privacy preferences and expectations, and (2) we provide insights from representative users of AATs towards their privacy.