User modeling in a social network for cognitively disabled people

Online communities are becoming an important tool in the communication and participation processes in our society. However, the most widespread applications are difficult to use for people with disabilities, or may involve some risks if no previous training has been undertaken. This work describes a novel social network for cognitively disabled people along with a clustering-based method for modeling activity and socialization processes of its users in a noninvasive way. This closed social network is specifically designed for people with cognitive disabilities, called Guremintza, that provides the network administrators (e.g., social workers) with two types of reports: summary statistics of the network usage and behavior patterns discovered by a data mining process. Experiments made in an initial stage of the network show that the discovered patterns are meaningful to the social workers and they find them useful in monitoring the progress of the users.