GoCC4All a pervasive technology to provide access to TV to the deafblind community.

Considering the importance of communication and independence for the deafblind community, this work presents findings of the use of technology to address the lack of information due to communication challenges among the deafblind community. Over time, many investigations have been carried out regarding this matter, but very few providing solution, which is why this study emerged, looking to making all the information broadcasted through television accessible for this community. The work team designed a technology (GoCC4All) to address the needs of the deafblind community. GoCC4All provides access to captions available on TV through braille displays and mobile devices. Our research process and results outline the path for creating, adapting, and adopting new technologies for people with disabilities who have the right to access the information just as their peers without disabilities. The information in this paper is based on two surveys, an initial beta testing (BT) and a final survey among a group of 14 users (UT) who tested the GoCC4All application. Our findings support the positive impact of the iterative creation of assistive technology based on users' experience and users' recommendations to better serve the needs of the deafblind community.

TV Interaction as a Non-Invasive Sensor for Monitoring Elderly Well-Being at Home.

The number of technical solutions to remotely monitoring elderly citizens and detecting hazard situations has been increasing in the last few years. These solutions have dual purposes: to provide a feeling of safety to the elderly and to inform their relatives about potential risky situations, such as falls, forgotten medication, and other unexpected deviations from daily routine. Most of these solutions are based on IoT (Internet of Things) and dedicated sensors that need to be installed at the elderly's houses, hampering mass adoption. This justifies the search for non-invasive technical alternatives with smooth integration that relying only on existent devices, without the need for any additional installations. Therefore, this paper presents the SecurHome TV ecosystem, a technical solution based on the elderly's interactions with their TV sets-one of the most used devices in their daily lives-acting as a non-invasive sensor enabling one to detect potential hazardous situations through an elaborated warning algorithm. Thus, this paper describes in detail the SecurHome TV ecosystem, with special emphasis on the warning algorithm, and reports on its validation process. We conclude that notwithstanding some constraints while setting the user's pattern, either upon the cold start of the application or after an innocuous change in the user's TV routine, the algorithm detects most hazardous situations contributing to monitor elderly well-being at home.

Development of an Anomaly Alert System Triggered by Unusual Behaviors at Home.

In many countries, the number of elderly people has grown due to the increase in the life expectancy of the population, many of whom currently live alone and are prone to having accidents that they cannot report, especially if they are immobilized. For this reason, we have developed a non-intrusive IoT device, which, through multiple integrated sensors, collects information on habitual user behavior patterns and uses it to generate unusual behavior rules. These rules are used by our SecurHome system to send alert messages to the dependent person's family members or caregivers if their behavior changes abruptly over the course of their daily life. This document describes in detail the design and development of the SecurHome system.

Development and feasibility analysis of an assistance system for high school students with dyslexia.

BACKGROUND: Students with dyslexia may be at a disadvantage on timed assessments that require reading skills compared to their non-dyslexic peers, even though they are not necessarily less intelligent or less prepared than these students. AIMS: The study aims to analyze the possible benefits in reading comprehension and reading fluency of students with Dyslexia when using an assistance tool in an evaluation that requires reading skills. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Each participant with dyslexia did a reading comprehension assessment in two different reading interfaces: on a white paper and in our previously developed tool, in order to assess and compare their reading comprehension and reading fluency. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: The results obtained show that students with dyslexia could benefit from the point of view of fluency and reading comprehension by using compensation software that helps them read in situations of anxiety. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Properly designed assistive tools can enhance the reading skills of young people with dyslexia. The developed tool should be improved considering the improvements proposed in the present studies, in the same way it is suggested to carry out a study with a larger number of participants and evaluate them individually.

Increasing the autonomy of deafblind individuals through direct access to content broadcasted on digital terrestrial television.

Digital terrestrial television currently incorporates accessibility elements for the deaf (closed captions, CCs) and for the blind (audio description and audio navigation), however the deafblind population has particular accessibility needs that to date have not been met. This work presents a technical aid (a mobile application called GoAll) developed to increase the autonomy of deafblind individuals, allowing direct access to content broadcast on digital TV through the reading of CCs either with a mobile device or a Braille display. The information in this study is based on the data generated by the application server during the 5 months it was in operation in Spain as well as data from a usability survey conducted on nine deafblind individuals. The results show that 55% of the people used the application between 5 and 7 days a week and did so in the most popular time slots; those surveyed watch news, movies, documentaries, reality shows, and entertainment shows. Noteworthy is fact that all survey respondents said they felt they had greater autonomy with this application. The limitations of the proposed solution involve two elements: Braille reading (knowledge and speed of reading) and the constraints of CCs, since they are used as an input for technical assistance.

SeDeLo: using semantics and description logics to support aided clinical diagnosis.

Automated medical diagnosis systems based on knowledge-oriented descriptions have gained momentum with the emergence of semantic descriptions. The objective of this paper is to propose a normalized design that solves some of the problems which have been detected by authors in previous tools. The authors bring together two different technologies to develop a new clinical decision support system: description logics aimed at developing inference systems to improve decision support for the prevention, treatment and management of illness and semantic technologies. Because of its new design, the system is capable of obtaining improved diagnostics compared with previous efforts. However, this evaluation is more focused in the computational performance, giving as result that description logics is a good solution with small data sets. In this paper, we provide a well-structured ontology for automated diagnosis in the medical field and a three-fold formalization based on Description Logics with the use of Semantic Web technologies.