Studies in Health Technology and Informatics最新文献

Access to digital health and care solutions and services that promote healthy ageing, independent living, and ageing in place is limited due to significant market barriers and challenges. The SHAPES project addresses the challenge of ageing populations by developing a sociotechnical ecosystem comprising a variety of health and care digital solutions, tools and services to enable and facilitate active, independent, and healthy ageing at home. Within the SHAPES project, the SHAPES Marketplace serves as a one-stop-shop for digital solutions and services designed for the Silver Economy that target the smart and healthy ageing and independent living markets. Delivering a dynamic catalogue of health and care digital solutions and services, the Marketplace promotes a transparent expansion of a trusted market offer on digital solutions and services for healthy ageing and independent living on a pan-European scale, thereby preventing vendor lock-in and enhancing the agile and fair competitiveness of the health and care industry, particularly in Europe. This paper introduces the SHAPES Marketplace and considers its function as a market driver to raise awareness on the benefits and impact of health and care digital solutions and services, as well as to shape the healthy ageing market, upholding the Systems-Market for Assistive and Related Technologies (SMART) Thinking Matrix to stimulate transparency, trust and fair competition.

This paper presents elements of user-centered design and prototyping of a serious game. Produced within the framework of the SG-HANDI project, the serious game aims to raise awareness about integration, prevention of professional displacement and job retention of people with disabilities. This serious game is developed on an interactive RFID tabletop with tangible objects. It is intended to be used in a collective context involving one or more facilitators specialized in employment and disability, as well as the company's stakeholders to be made aware of the issue.

The Easy Reading Framework is a digital tool that can be used to make existing web pages accessible to the individual needs of a wide range of people. The core of this Framework is a toolbar, which currently includes 13 different functions. The potential for multiple applications of the Easy Reading Framework is being investigated and promoted in the recent Easy Reading follow-up project "EVE4all". In this project, Personas play an important role in the first project phase to raise end-user acceptance. Personas represent specific target groups and share the same characteristics, traits, social environments, and circumstances as the intended target group. Working with this method enables developers and project participants to identify with the users of their products and their lifeworld. Our project shows that this method can be used to reflect on and use the introduction of any technology in institutions in a theoretically well-founded way. Thus, this paper aims to illustrate how this method can be successfully transferred into the pedagogical context and show how this method's usage can contribute increasing user acceptance.

According to the Global Report on Assistive Technology (2023) [1] more than 2.5 billion people require one or more assistive products - a number that is expected to grow to over 3.5 billion by 2050 due to the aging of our societies. Over the past decade, the design of products that empower people with a disability has shifted from specialized and dedicated products designed only for those with a disability to features and functions integrated into cost-effective consumer technologies for the benefit of all. The opportunity to expand the availability of such technologies is at risk of being ignored due to models of AT delivery that are founded in medical devices, and which have failed to reflect trends in our understanding of technology and the choices and preferences expressed by persons with a disability. This research suggests that such expansion offers significant benefits to people with a disability and better both economic and social return on investment for authorities.

This paper deals with the personality perception of a humanoid robot when talking to it in a natural manner, using the wizard of Oz. An experiment involving 20 subjects was performed, to compare two heteroevaluation characteristics: identity perception of human vs. humanoid, and identity perception differences when interacting with a human directly or with the same human through the robot mediation. The experiment was organized in three interactions: with a woman, with a man, and with a humanoid robot. The evaluation uses the OCEAN inventory. The results show that the subjects create for the teleoperated robot an identity of its own, which differs from the one attributed to the teleoperator. The robot was generally perceived as having less interest in art, lacking more imagination or ingenuity, being less open-minded than the human controlling it. The perception of emotional stability is greater: the absence of the human envelope allows a person to appear more stable. We identified two statistical groups in the robot evaluation, depending on the consideration of the robotic technology by the subjects: their perception of the robot conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness varies according to the subjects, unlike the personality of the teleoperator.

WHO implemented the Rapid Assistive Technology Assessment in 2021. This is a household survey on self-reported use, need and barriers for accessing AT in 35 countries globally. In order to obtain comparable data, all surveys followed guidelines developed by WHO, including national two-stage random sampling of households. The 2021 rATA survey included 32 of a total of 140 LMICs globally. Around 40 % of the total respondents (all countries) estimated travel distance to be <5 km, varying from less than 10 % to almost 60 % among the countries. Around 15 % had to travel more than 50 km, varying from 1.3 % to 37.5 %. More individuals living in rural as compared to urban areas had to travel more than 25 km to get their main assistive product. Gender differences were marginal. By far the most prevalent barrier to access assistive products was "Cannot afford", amounting to 39.9% and varying from 6.7 % to 79.1 % among countries. This was followed by "No support" with 14.3 %, varying from 2.3 % to 36.9 %, and "Not available" with 8.1 %, varying from 1 % to 21.5 %. More barriers were reported in rural than urban areas and women report more barriers than men. Variation between countries in both travel time and barriers is substantial and country-specific service development is needed to guide service development.

Many online educational materials for sighted students such as presentation slides, PDF materials, MP4 videos, etc. are produced with Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT). In terms of non-technical contents, accessible PPT contents can be produced in a certain level; however, as far as STEM contents are concerned, there is still a serious difficulty. Our new add-on for PPT allows users to make efficiently/easily PPT STEM contents accessible. By making use of it, alt text/aloud reading by a TTS voice can be added to any technical part such as mathematical expressions included in PPT slides. An accessible MP4 video for STEM education also can be produced efficiently. By making use of multilingual support in Infty software, this add-on has been recently improved so that users can use it for PPT contents in various local languages other than Japanese or English.

In line with the progressive development of digital technologies, this theoretical article is about the conception of a digital twin - based assistant to increase the serenity of the journey of the occupants of a connected car, automated or not. Its main functions are (i) to manage the Human (driver and/or passenger) - Machine (vehicle) Interaction, (ii) to inform the occupants and support decision-making by avoiding stressful situations. This is done by appropriate prevention and remediation. We advocate that the virtual assistant functions for being empathetic can be done by taking the user's point of view. Thanks to the knowledge about tasks, practices, needs and constraints, we describe how car-user's individual features can be used to get her digital twin description. Based on ontologies, this features model, providing assistance is then to simulate online the next steps of the task realization, informing about conditions, prerequisites, post-requites and subtasks to be fulfilled. Expected effects of this cognitive technology dedicated to personalized assistance are a decrease in stress, in frequency of incident and accident situations, according to a monitoring, as complete as possible, of the car-driver's conditions and situations dedicated to a serene driving.

The demand for homecare services is on the rise, while simultaneously there is a shortage of homecare nurses who are burdened with increasingly heavier workloads. The introduction of assistive technologies has the potential to assist elderly individuals as well as (informal) caregivers. This study aims to facilitate nursing care with technology, within the framework of a proper daily structure for elderly people. Initially, a needs assessment was performed with homecare nurses to identify the most relevant daily structure patterns. Subsequently, a prototype comprising of a test setup and a mobile application was developed, followed by a case study involving participation from homecare nurses, informal caregivers, and patients. Both subjective experiences and standardized outcome measures (System Usability Scale, Usefulness Satisfaction and Ease of Use Scale and User Experience Questionnaire) revealed highly positive attitudes towards the test setup and application. Future research endeavours should focus on scaling up the technology and expanding its availability to other caregivers.

The promise of digital health interventions is tempered by the realities of digital capabilities and infrastructure, especially for older persons. This paper critically examines learnings from a rapid evidence review of digital information tools along with a study evaluating the uptake of a digitally-based healthy ageing intervention by 53 older Australians. Findings suggest that digital literacy is an important precursor to engagement with digital information tools, and that digital information tools must be designed with digital literacy in mind. To achieve digital health equity and realise the potential outcomes that digital tools offer, it may well be necessary to support consumers with the basics of mastering digital platforms.