imhotep

A user-centric approach to adaptable mobile interfaces

Aitor Almeida, Pablo Orduña, Eduardo Castillejo, Diego López-de-IpiñaDeustoTech –Deusto Institute of Technology

Avenida de las Universidades 24,48007 Bilbao (Spain)

{aitor.almeida, pablo.orduna, eduardo.castillejo, dipina}@deusto.es

Marcos SacristánTreelogic

Parque Tecnológico de Asturias · Parcela 30E33428 Llanera · ASTURIAS (Spain)[email protected]

1. Need for adaptative interfaces2. Framework architecture3. Preprocessor directives4. Fuzzy Knowledge-Eliciting Reasoner5. Conclusions and future work

Need for adaptative interfaces

• Less technology users among elderly and people with disabilities

Kaye, H.S., Computer and Internet Use among People with Disabilities, in Disability Statistics Report 2000, Department of Education, National Institute of: Washington D.C.


• This user base is going to grow even more with the increasing of average age in Europe.

Andrew Arch. A Review of Literature Relating to Web Accessibility and Ageing.


• Developers traditionally tend to ignore or neglect this user base– The individual user groups (each disability have

different requirements) may not be big enough to justify the additional development costs

– Developing accessible applications can be difficult.


• Our hypothesis: “Providing tools that ease the development of adaptative, user-centric applications will encourage the creation of accessible AAL applications”

Framework architecture

• To this end we have created the Imhotep framework

• Design objectives:– Make the framework platform independent– Reduce the adoption costs– Help AAL programmers without expertise in

accessible applications – Practical down-to-earth approach


• Composed by three main elements:– The preprocessor directives– The adaptation server– The fuzzy knowledge-eliciting reasoner (integrated

in the adaptation server)

User capabilities

• Initially divided the user capabilities into four groups: Sensorial, Cognitive, Physical and Communicational.– Later we added the Combined group to represent the

synergies generated by the accumulation of various disabilities.

Device capabilities

• We have used WURFL 2.9.5 to identify the device capabilities.– An open source XML database containing the data

about the features and capabilities of a large number of mobile devices.

Preprocessor Directives

• Used to annotate the code to state which part should be executed.

• Based on the J2MEPolish approach to preprocessor directives.• Identified by:– //# in languages such as Java, C# or C++,– #// in languages such as Python or Perl– ‘// in VB.NET.

• Three types of directives:– Conditionals– Error handling– Code parameterization


• Conditional directives can be used to avoid the compilation of fragments of code if certain conditions are matched. These conditions can include calls to functions provided by the framework.


• Error handling directives can be used to report an error in order to manage unhandled situations.


• With the code parameterization developers can directly store in code variables the system ones.

FUZZY KNOWLEDGE-ELICITING REASONER

• Objetives– To infer new user and device capabilities from

those specified in the profiles.– To enable the AAL developers to abstract from the

crisp values (the user has less than 3 dioptres) in favor of more natural concepts (the user can see without a significant problem).


• The developer might only want to establish high level asserts such as "is the screen big?" or "is the processor fast?“– Problem some of these asserts depend on the global market of

mobile devices at a particular moment in a particular place– Solution use popularity metrics (Google Trends) to estimate the

market share of the devices.


1. First we apply a decay mechanism to the trend data to take into account the “age” of the values (data from 2005 is not as relevant as data from the previous month).

2. We establish the distribution of the relevance of each technical detail (for example, the screen resolution)

3. We divide the universe into different linguistic terms defined by the user ("big screen", "normal screen" and "small screen”)

4. With this division the membership function for the screen resolution for each term is defined.


• An example of popularity calculation for all the screen resolutions of all the mobile devices in the WURLF database


• Membership functions for the terms small, normal and big


• Results can be localized

Spain Japan


• Higher level terms can be built by the developer on top of others terms.

IF screensize IS big AND resolution IS normal THEN videoCapabilty IS high; IF screensize IS big AND resolution IS big THEN videoCapabilty IS very_high;


• To ease the development of the rules and the membership functions we have created a wizard (http://www.morelab.deusto.es/imhotep/) that assists the developers in this task

FUTURE WORK

• Make the framework more developer friendly.• Use additional device databases to improve

the devices’ data.• Improve the creation process of the

membership functions.• Make the framework available as an Open

Source project by the end of the year.• Evaluate the framework with the AAL projects

we are involved.

Thanks for your attention

Questions?

This work has been supported by project grant TSI-020301-2008-2 (PIRAmIDE), funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio

http://piramidepse.com/

imhotep

Technology

user big screen

screen big

new user

user capabilitiesinitially

usercentric applications

usercentric approach

normal screen

development of adaptative