Lessons Learned from Older Adults Fusing of an Augmented Reality, Assisted Living and Social Interaction Platform.

The aging population and the subsequent changing societal structures are foreseen to bring both opportunities and challenges for the economy, services and society at large. Digital exclusion among older people may become less of an issue in the future, as those who have used the Internet in their working and social lives continue to do so as they reach old age. However, given the rapid pace of technological advances, older adults, may still experience some degree of digital exclusion. Technological advances may offer benefits for older adults, such as maintaining their independence and connection to society. Nevertheless, adopting new technologies like augmented reality (AR) may be difficult for older adults commonly due to the decline of cognitive and physical abilities and/or their lack of familiarity, apprehension and understanding on these new technologies. In this study, the GUIDed system is presented, an AR-operated app developed in this work, aiming to support the independence and quality of life of older people. Finally, the paper discusses lessons learned from the co-creation process, including the evaluation methods, paper prototypes, focus groups and living labs, and the results on the acceptance of the AR functionality and for improving the GUIDed system.

eSticky: An Advanced Remote Reminder System for People with Early Dementia.

While the European population is ageing, the number of people with dementia is dramatically rising. With this comes an increased need for products that help affected people to be more independent and able to live in their own home for as long as possible. eSticky addresses this need by providing a sophisticated reminder system that replaces the old-fashioned sticky notes by electronic versions thereof, which can be programmed from near and far in a device-independent manner via the internet and using a standard web browser. For this purpose, a set of low-cost ePaper displays are used, accompanied by a small and unobtrusive base station situated at the user's home, and supported by a web platform for user management and the authoring and scheduling of the message reminders. The displays can be placed at several strategically useful places in a user's home, to enable users and/or care persons to place reminders that will, based on the user's daily routines, most probably be read. A sub-set of displays, named active displays, even enable the user to press a confirmation button to show that he or she has actually read the reminder. The confirmation is then made available to the authors of the particular reminder through the web platform. The system is developed using a user-centred design approach, to take all stakeholders' wishes and needs into account, in order to come up with a system that is easy to use and provides good service to many people. In this extended version of the paper, besides a detailed description of the technological advancements of the project, both in terms of software and hardware, we provide an insight of the eSticky device design methodology and results from the design user evaluation.

The WebACS - An Accessible Graphical Editor.

This paper is about the solution to accessibility problems met when implementing a graphical editor, a major challenge being the comprehension of the relationships between graphical components, which needs to be guaranteed for blind and vision impaired users. In the concrete case the HTML5 canvas and Javascript were used. Accessibility was reached by implementing a list view of elements, which also enhances the usability of the editor.

Contrast enhancements to petawatt lasers using short pulse optical parametric amplifiers and frequency doubling.

This paper describes the integration of a short pulse optical parametric amplifier into the chirped pulse amplification beam lines of the Orion laser facility. This enables Orion to generate petawatt laser pulses at 1054 nm with a nanosecond contrast of >10(10). By combining this with frequency-doubling post compression, we can generate 100 J, 500 fs laser pulses with a nanosecond contrast calculated to be ∼10(18).

Ultrahigh contrast from a frequency-doubled chirped-pulse-amplification beamline.

This paper describes frequency-doubled operation of a high-energy chirped-pulse-amplification beamline. Efficient type-I second-harmonic generation was achieved using a 3 mm thick 320 mm aperture KDP crystal. Shots were fired at a range of energies achieving more than 100 J in a subpicosecond, 527 nm laser pulse with a power contrast of 10(14).

Overview of laser systems for the Orion facility at the AWE.

The commissioning of the Orion laser facility at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the UK has recently been completed. The facility is a twelve beam Nd:glass-based system for studying high energy density physics. It consists of ten frequency-tripled beam-lines operating with nanosecond pulses, synchronized with two beam-lines with subpicosecond pulses, each capable of delivering 500 J to target. One of the short pulse beams has the option of frequency doubling, at reduced aperture, to yield up to 100 J at 527 nm in a subpicosecond pulse with high temporal contrast. An extensive array of target diagnostics is provided. This article describes the laser design and commissioning and presents key performance data of the facility's laser systems.