AAL User-Centred Co-Design Experimentoria, Supporting
Integrated Usability Relationships Modelling and Evaluation
th
AMI09 Conference Workshop, 18 November 2009, Salzburg
The CompanionAble Consortium calls for participation, and, if possible contributions, by way of
short papers and presentations, particularly from the EU-funded AAL Cluster projects, for its next
annual workshop series, this year co-located with the 3rd European Conference on Ambient
Intelligence (AMI09) in Salzburg, Austria, 18th-21st of November 2009.
This workshop will be focused on the theme of:
"Graceful Integration of Acceptable Assistive ICT, including
Companion Robotics, within Smart Homes:
Challenges and Opportunities for AAL"
Motivation
The European Research in Ambient Assisted Living has become increasingly cognisant of the
potential benefits of user-acceptable integration of ICT support, including service and/or companion
robotics, within the smart home environments; to provide support for the elderly or disabled living
at home independently.
The research in this area needs to address both extensive user involvement and technical advances
in semantic and graceful integration of the assistive sub-systems as well as a coherently integrated
framework for requirements prioritisation and evaluation of the most usability-sensitive features of
the system. Accordingly the workshop will also include a tutorial and comparative analysis of
relevant user-centred co-design usability evaluation methods (e.g. UI-REF).
The Confluence of Research Themes of Interest
We are also seeking contributions which may address any of the following themes relevant to the
domain of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL):
1. Elicitation and formalisation of ontologies for the AAL domain
2. Methodologies and inclusive design principles to develop personal and community capacity
for co-design of gracefully supportive services for the AAL domain
3. Integrated methodologies for establishing the prioritisation of (virtual)-user-specified
requirements, usability-relationship evaluation; technology acceptance-appropriation paths
4. Demonstration environments for ‘Inclusive AAL Design', flexibility, affordability, diffusion,
semantic interoperability with existing and future eCare and eHealth systems
5. Identification of the variety and continuum of needs of people as they age; to remain
sensitive to the dynamic patterns of each user's needs; including those arising from situated
family circumstances, idiosyncratic preferences, life course events and pathologies
6. Developing dynamic systems and applied technologies for rich social interactions, including
positive psychology mentoring, socio-cognitive stimulation and evaluation
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Integrated Cognitive Assistive & Domotic
Companion Robotic Systems for Ability & Security
7. Supporting the ageing/impaired users to self-identity their deeply-valued needs
8. Technology models and components for multi-modal home gateways, communications
architectures, mobility support, non-intrusive monitoring, emotion recognition and falls
detection and classification
9. Dexterous emotionally intelligent Service-Companion Robots integrated with Smart Homes
10. Mainstreaming incremental assistive appliances integration within legacy homes
11. Rehabilitative support services orchestration for autonomous living for the neuro-motor-
impaired users, augmented appliances/furniture empowered by service-and/or-companion
robot teams
12. Vertical and horizontal training of care-recipients, care-givers and other e-care workers
13. Business models for scalable provision of ICT-enabled AAL support
14. Evaluation and Certification Practice Models for efficient usability evaluation and safety-
assurance of personalised ICT-enabled support for AAL user's priority needs
Accordingly, we invite all researchers involved in work on the innovation challenges relating to
Ambient Assisted Living or Cognitive Robotics and generally those focused on research and
innovation in Ambient Intelligence Technologies to participate in this workshop to exchange
insights on various aspects of User-Centred Co-Design and Dynamic Adaptation of systems for
users; for example:
1. Establishing generalisation ontologies to represent the semantics relating to prototypical
AAL applications and the whole evolving spectrum of situated classes of intimate assistive
systems represented as usage-context sets; including periodic audit of ethical compliance
management, and, user-triggered ontologies revision for different situations of use
2. Semantic-cooperative modelling of interacting agents that constitute the implicated group of
stakeholders; including semantic workflow, interaction-scenario modelling and dialogue
management
3. ICT-augmented multi-modal environments for user/proxies engagement through
visualisation, dynamic-interactive simulation (possibly supported by a computer-aided
virtual environment), and, role play; including biofeedback for prototype validation;
integrated with Living Labs, EAR set-ups etc.
4. Conflict resolution and consensual prioritisation of stakeholder's needs; to personalise the
"intimate systems" to particular user-classes and individual user personas
5. Online self-report or other bio-feedback (e.g. augmented through intelligent clothing,
emotion recognition) to capture and integrate dynamic usability relationship evaluation data
intelligence
6. Mining the usability relationship data intelligence to discover emerging user's needs and
priorities to inform user model updates and dynamic personalisation
7. Sensing technology, multimodal interaction design, user acceptance trajectories for users
with special needs
Participation Process and Timeline
Those wishing to contribute to the workshop as either presenters or discussants can contact the
Workshop Programme Chairs as listed below to indicate their intention to participate and/or send a
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Integrated Cognitive Assistive & Domotic
Companion Robotic Systems for Ability & Security
position paper including an outline of the issues that they wish to discuss and clarify whether they
intend to make a presentation, lead a break-out group or act as a Panellist or Discussant.
The Deadline are as follows:
Submission of position papers: 18th September 2009 Notification of Authors: 30th September 2009 Submission of Camera-Ready Papers: 19th of October 2009
Papers should not exceed 8 pages in the LNCS format and are subjected to a reviewing process.
Information about the registration procedure will be published shortly on:
www.CompanionAble.net/WorkshopAmI09
.
Workshop Programme Co-Chairs:
Atta Badii (University of Reading, UK, atta.badii@reading.ac.uk)
Carmen Pastor (TECNALIA-Robotiker, Spain, carmenp@robotiker.es)
Daniel Thiemert (University of Reading, UK, d.thiemert@reading.ac.uk)
Workshop Programme Committee members:
Igone Etxeberria (Ingema, Spain), Claire Huijnen (Smart Homes Netherlands), Sandra Dittenberger
(CURE, Austria), Ana Maseda (University of A Coruna, Spain), Anne-Sophie Rigaud (Broca
Hospital, France), Andreas Hochgatterer (ARC, Austria), Jerome Boudy (Institute Telecom, France),
Horst-Michael Gross (Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany), Gerard Chollet (Institut
Telecom, France)
Atta Badii
Director
Intelligent Media Systems Services Research Laboratory (IMSS)
School of Systems Engineering
University of Reading
Whiteknights
RG6 6AY, UK
Phone: 00 44 118 378 7842
Fax: 00 44 118 975 1994
http://www.imss.reading.ac.uk
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