-Smart care technology is any sensor based technology used to aid and support human independent living. Such technologies offer new potential and can give rise to new problems for making the technology accessible to users. In this work we focus on integrated services for people with visual impairment. Web based information services have already been adapted for people with varying degrees of disability. What is needed now is a service oriented architecture that integrates information services with smart care technology such as sensor devices that generate data for input, processing, storage and query. The main new challenge we identified here is that users may be living in a perplexing contexture -a chain of barriers affecting their ability to live independently. Contexts such as mobility dependencies must therefore be recorded and used, indoors and outside. Users should be monitored during their interactions with services, and the meaning of their behaviour inferred in order to refine the services. Moreover, by giving a set of user scenarios, we present a higher level view of users' needs than single service invocation; alternatives and follow-on services might be suggested and previous interactions built upon. Management of the architecture must allow for incorporation of new technology and upgrade of services. Technology for smart care is developing rapidly; its usefulness, and acceptance, requires a dynamic and flexible architecture to support ease of management and use.
Purpose
This paper aims to offer practical suggestions as to factors needing consideration when meeting, interacting with or assessing the needs of an older person living with acquired deafblindness.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper’s author draws on his personal experience of living with acquired deafblindness to offer practical suggestions.
Findings
This paper offers an experiential definition of acquired deafblindness, before providing practical suggestions related to engaging with deafblind people, distinguishing between acquired deafblindness and cognitive decline, and assessing hearing and sight levels.
Originality/value
There is a paucity of literature on the lived experience of older people living with acquired deafblindness. This paper offers both a unique insight into this experience combined with practical suggestions for those in contact with older deafblind people.
We present a metaphor showing that blind people (users) often are living in a perplexing contexture -a chain of barriers affecting their ability to live independently. In such a context to support users' tasks in real time, current technologies may not be intuitive enough to be used for this kind of real world application. The increasingly specialised devices and rapidly advanced assistive technologies require a composite architecture of scalable non-textual reading services. We illustrate this requirement by three user scenarios at a scale of a device, an object-awareness and a real-time situated meaningful response.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.