Authors:
Carlos Romeiro
1
and
Pedro Araújo
1
;
2
Affiliations:
1
Department of Computing, Beira Interior University, Covilhã, Portugal
;
2
Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT-UBI), Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Usability, Ambient Assisted Living, User Interaction, Automation, Heuristics Analysis.
Abstract:
With the aging of the population, healthcare services worldwide are faced with new economic, technical, and demographic challenges. Indeed, an effort has been made to develop viable alternatives capable of mitigating current services’ bottlenecks and of assisting/improving end-user’s life quality. Through a combination of information and communication technologies, specialized ecosystems have been developed; however, multiple challenges (ecosystems autonomy, robustness, security, integration, human-computer interactions and usability) have arisen, compromising their adoption and acceptance among the main stakeholders. Dealing with the technical related flaws has led to a shift in the focus of the development process from the end-user towards the ecosystem’s technological impairments. Although many issues, namely usability, have been reported, solutions are still lacking. This article proposes a set of metrics based on the parametrization of literature guidelines, with the aim of prov
iding a consistent and accurate way of using the heuristic methodology not only to evaluate the ecosystem’s usability compliance level, but also to create the building blocks required to include automation mechanisms.
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