In this paper, we analyze the needs of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to have a pervasive, feasible and non-stigmatizing form of assistance in their emotional self-regulation, in order to ease certain behavioral issues that undermine their mental health throughout their life. We argue the potential of recent widespread wearables, and more specifically smartwatches, to achieve this goal. Then, a smartwatch system that implements a wide range of self-regulation strategies and infers outburst patterns from physiological signals and movement is presented, along with an authoring tool for smartphones that is to be used by caregivers or family members to create and edit these strategies, in an adaptive way. We conducted an intensive experiment with two individuals with ASD who showed varied, representative behavioral responses to their emotional dysregulation. Both users were able to employ effective, customized emotional self-regulation strategies by means of the system, recovering from the majority of mild stress episodes and temper tantrums experienced in the nine days of experiment in their classroom.

This article describes a proposal and case study based on mobile phones and QR Codes to assist individuals with cognitive disabilities in their labour training and integration. This proposal, named AssisT-Task, is a full functional mobile application for Android smartphones and offers step-by-step guidance, establishing a learning method through task sequencing. It has been tested with a group of 10 users and 2 types of labour tasks. Through 7 recorded sessions, we compared the performance and the learning progress with the tool against the traditional assisting method, based on paper instructions. The results show that people with cognitive disabilities learnt and performed better and faster when using AssisT-Task than the traditional method, particularly on tasks that require cognitive effort rather than manual skills. This learning has proved to be essential to obtain an adequate degree of personal autonomy for people with cognitive impairment.

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This paper presents a novel wayfinding system adapted to people with cognitive disabilities. It adapts to the user in terms of route calculation, instructions delivery, and interface design. To do so, the system divides the calculated route into atomic instructions and uses street-level photographs at the decision points. To evaluate this approach, we compared it with a commercial navigation application on a field trial with a sample of users (N= 18). From the evaluation, we concluded that our system improves users’ performance in terms of the number who reached the destination and were able to identify it correctly.

Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription Abstract Assistive Technologies and Ubiquitous Computing can be related since both try to help people in their lives. This common objective motivated us to develop and evaluate a system that puts ubiquitous computing technologies into the rehabilitation process of people with acquired brain injury. Thus, in this paper we present and evaluate a system that shows adaptive manuals for daily life activities for people with acquired brain injury. This first evaluation allowed us to validate our approach and also to extract valuable information about these systems as well as environmental factors that may affect the patients.