NDLI: Socio-technical environments supporting people with cognitive disabilities using public transportation

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Kintsch, Anja Fischer, Gerhard Dawe, Melissa Sullivan, James F. Carmien, Stefan Gorman, Andrew
Copyright Year	2005
Abstract	Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities.An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing “how things are” for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project.This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an “in-the-world” research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling techniques; and the design of universally accessible interfaces for complex systems through participatory design processes.This article provides both a near-term vision and an architecture for transportation systems that are socially inclusive, technologically appealing, and easier for everyone to use.
Starting Page	233
Ending Page	262
Page Count	30
File Format	PDF
ISSN	10730516
e-ISSN	15577325
DOI	10.1145/1067860.1067865
Volume Number	12
Issue Number	2
Journal	ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2005-06-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Cognitive disabilities Active distributed support systems Assessment Complex Context-aware computing Distributed cognition Dual use technologies Human-centered transportation Mobility agents Participatory design Prototyping Public transportation system Socio-technical systems Ubiquitous and pervasive computing Universal design User models
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Human-Computer Interaction

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