A Context-Aware User Interface for Wireless Personal-Area Network Assistive Environments

The daily life of people with severe motor system impairments is challenging and thus often subordinated to extensive external help; increasing their level of self-support is thus highly desirable. Recent advances in wireless communications, in particular in wireless personal-area networks, serve as technological enablers well suited for implementing smart and convenient assistive environments which can increase self-support. This paper presents the design and prototyping of a versatile interface for such wireless assistive environments. We propose a modular framework that can accommodate several wireless personal-area network standards. The interface is built upon this framework and is designed in such a way that it can be controlled by various types of input devices such as a touch screen or a tongue-control unit. The interface can automatically discover consumer appliances (e.g. Zigbee and Bluetooth enabled lights and computers) in the user’s environment and display the services supported by these devices on a user-friendly graphical user interface. A demonstrator is prototyped and experimental results show that the proposed interface is context-aware, i.e. it successfully detects available appliances, adapts itself to the changes that occur in the user’s environment, and automatically informs the user about these changes. The results also show that the proposed interface is versatile and easy to use, i.e. the user can easily control multiple devices by means of a browser menu. Hence, the proposed work illustrates how assistive technology based on wireless personal-area networks can contribute to improving the quality of life of motor system impaired persons.