Mobile Technology for People with Cognitive Disabilities and Their Caregivers - HCI Issues

Smart phone technology is evolving to become more open to application developers. This trend is opening the way to development of personalized assistive technologies, location-aware services, and enhanced person-to-person communications. This paper presents findings from an international workshop, with participants from industry, policy, education, and private organizations. Participants mapped future directions for exploiting technical opportunities, with a focus on people with cognitive disabilities. HCI issues that emerged as critical include profile-based configuration of user interfaces and functionality, support for spoken presentation of text content, Support for viewing web content on devices with small screens, and Support for remote assistance, so that users can get help when they get stuck. In addition to technical issues, key process and methodology issues were identified, including more inclusion of self-advocates in design development and user testing, and increased recognition of and Support for the overall "value chain" throughout system deployment and use.