Guest editorial

Citation

Manduchi, R., Coughlan, J. and Miesenberger, K. (2013), "Guest editorial", Journal of Assistive Technologies, Vol. 7 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jat.2013.55107baa.001

Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Assistive Technologies, Volume 7, Issue 2.

I am very pleased to say that this issue is co-edited by Roberto Manduchi (University of California Santa Cruz, USA), James Coughlan (Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, USA) and Klaus Miesenberger (University of Linz, Austria and ICCHP Publishing and Organising Chair), and contains a selection of the best papers from one of the thematic areas at ICCHP 2012. The ICCHP conference and the selected papers are introduced by the co-editors below. We are pleased to bring our readers special issues from time to time – and we are planning a special issue on assistive technologies (AT) and dementia in 2014 – but this is the first time we have had an international team of co-editors. This is very much to be welcomed, especially as the journal becomes ever more international; we have now published papers from not just the UK and Ireland but also from France, Iran, USA, Germany, Cyprus, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Italy, Norway, Finland, and Saudi Arabia.

Chris Abbot, Editor

The International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP, www.icchp.org) was started in the late 1980s with the goal to support research and development in AT, a field that also includes eAccessibility and eInclusion. ICCHP has been one of the first conferences in this area. Its focus has been consistently on scientific quality, which quickly made this conference an important reference point for researchers and practitioners in the field. The conference proceedings reflect the evolution of research in AT through the past three decades: beginning with the hand-crafted prototypes of a few pioneers, AT grew into a discipline well respected by the engineering research community at large. The last edition of ICCHP in 2012 attracted more than 900 participants from more than 50 countries. In total, 186 papers were selected out of 362 submissions through a peer review process, with each paper reviewed by at least three experts (Miesenberger et al., 2012).

ICCHP is proud of the role it plays in supporting the global movement towards inclusion and participation, as outlined in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2013). Research and development in AT are key to inclusion and participation; it is through progress in AT that eAccessibility and eInclusion are becoming a reality in today's information society.

In recent years, ICCHP has pioneered the model of “Special thematic sessions” (STS). These are focussed sessions chaired by experts in different fields of AT, who solicit timely and high-quality contributions, and work to ensure the highest quality of the presentations and of the papers published in the proceedings. In order to increase the impact of relevant scientific work presented at STS, ICCHP has teamed up with the Journal of Assistive Technologies (JAT). This cooperation provides a follow-up opportunity for work of outstanding quality.

Following an in-depth analysis of the ICCHP 2012 proceedings by the JAT editor and the ICCHP proceedings editor, the STS “Portable and mobile systems in assistive technology” was selected for a special JAT issue. This choice was guided by the increasing popularity of this topic and the quality of the session papers. The call for papers in this STS (www.icchp.org/node/359) attracted more than 40 submissions; the review process selected 18 contributions to be included into the program and the proceedings (www.icchp.org/programme2012/wednesday#track2_d1_1), five of which have been expanded for inclusion in this issue of JAT.

The first of the five papers in this JAT issue is by Artoni, Buzzi, Buzzi, Fenili, Leporini, Mencarini, and Senette, “A portable application supporting ABA intervention.” It addresses the need for tools to help caregivers apply techniques from applied behavior analysis (ABA), which is a scientific method for modeling human behaviour, successfully applied in the context of autism. The ABA approach to autism uses procedures such as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and discrete trial training to treat learning disabilities and neurological pathologies. While ABA tutors traditionally record data on student performance of these procedures on paper, the authors have developed a portable mobile device (i.e. tablet or smartphone) application to support the acquisition and review of this data. The application was developed and tested in a participatory design process involving all stakeholders (the members of an ABA team), making it simple and efficient to gather data from ABA sessions, which can then be easily accessed by tutors. The application's user interface provides efficient data entry allowing natural interaction with touch screen interfaces, and using drag-and-drop taps and gestures. Rather than developing proprietary software that may be out of reach of many prospective users, the authors have released the application as free and open source software to maximize both the likelihood of widespread adoption and the ease of further development and customization.

Next, in their paper “RHYME: musicking for all,” Holone and Herstad address the creation and evaluation of platforms facilitating musical performance and interactions by children with multiple disabilities, with the long-term goal of improving the health and well-being of the participants. The term “musicking” refers to any kind of music-related activity, including the relations formed and enhanced between participants in these activities, and is not limited to traditional performance with a conventional musical instrument. The key technology behind this paper's approach to musicking is the co-creative tangible, which is a physical object (e.g. in the form of a soft pillow or carpet) that embeds computing capabilities and electronic sensors and actuators to enable users to participate in music-related activities. A child can hold, stroke, lie down on, record sounds with, throw and arrange multiple tangibles to elicit a range of sounds, graphics, and light effects. The RHYME project was conceived and developed in a fully participatory design process with the ideal of making all stakeholders, including children, their families and caregivers, co-designers of this process.

The remaining papers in this special issue focus on research into novel AT for blind and visually impaired persons. First, the paper of Khoo, Knapp, Palmer, Ro, and Zhu, “Designing and testing wearable range-vibrotactile devices,” describes work in progress on a mobility system consisting of a portable camera range sensor (which is a camera that estimates scene depth in addition to intensity and color at each pixel) and several vibrotactile actuators placed in multiple locations on the user's arms to communicate depth information to the user. In effect, the system allows a visually impaired person to “feel” the environment without touching it, which has the potential to help the person safely navigate the environment. In the current phase of the research, a prototype of the system has been tested in a virtual 3D environment, which allows the experimenters to test the system extensively and improve it before deploying it for real-world use. The experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of the prototype system in enabling users to navigate virtual environments, and have also shown that the system is effective for stationary obstacle avoidance.

Next, Molina, Diallo, and Zhu tackle the related problem of navigation assistance for blind and visually impaired persons in their paper, “Visual noun navigation framework for the blind.” They propose a system that combines a wearable camera range sensor with computer vision algorithms to reconstruct the 3D geometry of the environment and to detect and recognize “visual noun” features to determine the user's current location in the environment. These visual noun features include signage, text, and visual icons (such as the standard symbols used to depict men's and women's toilets) – the same features used by normally sighted persons to navigate unfamiliar environments, which are useful in this approach because they label important landmarks in a clear and highly visible way. The ultimate goal of the research is to produce a system that not only informs the user of his or her current location but provides accurate directions to a desired destination, given a map of an environment. Such a system could be particularly valuable in indoor settings, where existing localization technologies used by blind and visually impaired persons such as GPS do not function.

The last paper in the special issue, by Coughlan and Shen, “Crosswatch: a system for providing guidance to visually impaired travelers at traffic intersections,” tackles the specific problems faced by visually impaired travelers as they negotiate traffic intersections. While travelers can use standard orientation and mobility techniques to determine some information about the intersection (such as listening for traffic sound patterns to infer when it is time to cross the intersection), some very important information is often unavailable, such as the overall layout of the intersection, the precise alignment of the traveller with respect to the desired crosswalk (for which GPS lacks sufficient resolution) and the current status of the walk or traffic lights. This paper describes ongoing work on the Crosswatch project, which is a smartphone-based system designed to provide a range of “what,” “where,” and “when” information about the intersection a traveler is standing at. Experiments are described in which blind travellers use the Crosswatch system to acquire panoramic imagery of the intersection, which is crucial for enabling the system to estimate the traveller's precise location and orientation in the intersection, and thereby prepare him or her to enter a desired crosswalk from the proper location and direction.

All five papers in this special issue of JAT demonstrate exciting new applications of portable or mobile technology that enables AT for a range of disabilities. These applications were conceived to address significant problems faced by persons with disabilities, and are being tested and refined by involving these persons in all aspects of the development process. The applications are all the more compelling because the portable/mobile technology they are based on is mostly mainstream technology, mass marketed to the general consumer population, which is inexpensive and cosmetically acceptable – thereby greatly improving the chances that such technology will enjoy widespread adoption if it matures. As the papers show, this kind of AT has enormous potential to improve the independence of persons with disabilities and support their full participation in society, including activities related to education, health, employment, recreation, social life, and civic engagement.

Roberto Manduchi, James Coughlan and Klaus Miesenberger