A New Living Lab for Usability Evaluation of ICT

and Next Generation Networks for Elderly@Home

António Teixeira

, Nelson Rocha

2,3

, Miguel Sales Dias

4,5

, Daniela Braga

Alexandra Queirós

, Osvaldo Pacheco

, José Alberto Fonseca

1, 6

Joaquim Sousa Pinto

, Hugo Gamboa

, Luís Corte-Real

8,9

, João Fonseca

Joaquim Arnaldo Martins

, António Neves

, Paulo Bartolomeu

, Catarina Oliveira

João Cunha

and Carlos Pereira

Dep. Electrónica Telecom & Informática / IEETA

Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

Secção Autónoma de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

Escola Superior de Saúde, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

Microsoft Language Development Center, Porto Salvo, Portugal

Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), Lisboa, Portugal

Micro-IO, Aveiro, Portugal

PLUX & Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Lisboa, Portugal

Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), Porto, Portugal

INESC-Porto, Porto, Portugal

INOVAMAIS, Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract. Living Usability Lab for Next Generation Networks

(www.livinglab.pt) is a Portuguese industry-academia collaborative R&D

project, active in the field of live usability testing, focusing on the development

of technologies and services to support healthy, productive and active citizens.

The project adopts the principles of universal design and natural user interfaces

(speech, gesture) making use of the benefits of next generation networks and

distributed computing. Therefore, it will have impact on the general population,

including the elderly and citizens with permanent or situational special needs.

This paper presents project motivations, conceptual model, architecture and

work in progress.

1 Motivations for a New Living Lab

The importance of communication and information technologies in today's society is

universally recognized. New services introduced radical changes in our lives and

increased considerably the spectrum of end-users. On the other hand, the proliferation

of multiple platforms and interaction infrastructures may create serious problems of

access to the diversity of information services currently available. This is a serious

problem of social exclusion.

From the need to overcome the gap between an individual's capabilities and the

technological resources originates the term accessibility, meaning access to

equipment and services, in terms of quantities, appropriate locations and convenient

Teixeira A., Rocha N., Sales Dias M., Braga D., Queirós A., Pacheco O., Fonseca J., Sousa Pinto J., Gamboa H., Corte-Real L., Fonseca J., Martins J.,

Neves A., Bartolomeu P., Oliveira C., Cunha J. and Pereira C..

A New Living Lab for Usability Evaluation of ICT and Next Generation Networks for Elderly@Home .

DOI: 10.5220/0003335000850097

In Proceedings of the 1st International Living Usability Lab Workshop on AAL Latest Solutions, Trends and Applications (AAL-2011), pages 85-97

ISBN: 978-989-8425-39-3

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

operating times and adequacy of the hardware and software to any user. It is a

complex concept because it involves many dimensions.

1.1 The Usability and User Acceptance Challenge

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular

tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can

also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind

an object's perceived efficiency or elegance [1]. In human-computer interaction and

computer science, usability often refers to the elegance and clarity with which the

interaction with information system is designed.

User acceptance differs from usability insofar as the first also embraces

usefulness. Use and acceptance of technologies and technical devices depend on

various factors such as adequate design, financial resources, housing situation, which

functions shall be compensated or strengthened by technologies and which skills and

competences still exist.

1.2 From Next Generation Networks to New Services

Next Generation Networks (NGN) are defined by the International

Telecommunication Union (ITU) as a “packet based network able to provide services

including telecommunication services and able to make use of multiple broadband,

QoS-enabled transport technologies and in which service related functions are

independent from underlying transport-related technologies”. NGN offer access by

users to different service providers and supports “generalized mobility which will

allow consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users” [2].

NGN include next generation “core” networks, which evolve towards a converged

IP infrastructure capable of carrying a multitude of services, such as voice, video and

data services, and next generation “access” networks, i.e. the development of high-

speed local loop networks that will ensure the delivery of innovative services.

The investment in developing NGN is motivated by several factors [3], including

social motivations, such as the demand for more personalized content or the demand

for increased interactivity.

Web 2.0 technologies combine two important characteristics or features:

collaboration and interaction. By collaboration, we refer to the “social” aspects that

allow a vast number of people to collaborate and share the same services, applications

and data over the Web. An equally important aspect of Web 2.0 technologies is

interaction. Web 2.0 technologies make it possible to build web sites that behave

much like desktop applications, for example, by allowing web pages to be updated

one user interface element at a time, rather than requiring the entire page to be

updated each time something changes.

This particular trend has made popular certain technologies like Web Services,

Mashups and software architectures like Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) or

Cloud Computing.

1.3 The Living Lab Concept

A challenge for information and communication technology (ICT) providers is to

involve users in the innovation process, from the early phases of context research and

idea generation through the later phases of development and implementation.

Important issues include access to adequate knowledge regarding the user context,

early validations in the market, trials in contexts familiar to users, valid user feedback

on state-of-the-art ICT solutions and utilization of users as a co-creating resource [4].

Living Labs are environments for innovation and development where users are

exposed to new solutions in (semi)realistic contexts, as part of medium or long-term

studies targeting the discovery of innovation opportunities [4].

The Living Lab is a new research paradigm (more than an experimental facility as

its philosophy is to turn users and intends to: increase the understanding of occurring

phenomena; explore and evaluate new ideas, concepts and related ICT artefacts;

confront new ideas, concepts and related ICT artefacts with users' value model; enable

re-usable experiments; result in more accurate and reliable products and services;

speed-up concepts to market and promote vital adoption; contribute to initiate

potential lead markets; contribute to bring science and innovation closer to the citizen.

The Living Lab methodology comprises several phases [5]:

 Generating insights – Living Lab provides access to large numbers of users,

generating insights into living behavior. Data is recorded via user-reporting and non-

obtrusive observational techniques;

 Developing and experiencing insights generated in the field are translated into

sustainable solutions by multi-disciplinary teams. Early prototypes are installed in the

Living Lab and tested by real users;

 Evaluating prototypes - fully functional prototypes are installed in existing or

newly built physical spaces in order to let users experience future product and service

ideas.

2 Project Scenario - Active Ageing at Home

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), population ageing is one of

humanity’s greatest triumphs. It is also one of our greatest challenges: the global

ageing will put increased economic and social demands on all countries. At the same

time, older people are a precious, often ignored resource that makes an important

contribution to the fabric of our societies [6].

The WHO argues that countries can afford to get old if governments, international

organizations and civil society enact active ageing policies and programmes.

The word active refers to continuing participation in social, economic, cultural,

spiritual and civic affairs, not just the ability to be physically active or to participate in

the labour force [6]. Considering the WHO definitions, active ageing [6]:

 Is an approach based on the recognition of the human rights of older people and the

United Nations (UN) principles of independence, participation, dignity, care and self-

fulfilment;

 Is the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation and security in

order to enhance quality of life as people age;

 Refers to continuing participation in social, economic, cultural, spiritual and civic

affairs, not just the ability to be physically active or to participate in the labour force;

 Allows people to realize their potential for physical, social, and mental well-being

throughout the life course and to participate in society, while providing them with

adequate protection, security and care when they need;

 Shifts strategic planning away from a needs-based approach (which assumes that

older people are passive targets) to a rights-based approach that recognizes the rights

of people to equality of opportunity and treatment in all aspects of life as they grow

older;

 Considers that older adults maintaining autonomy and independence are key goals

in the policy framework.

The adoption of healthy lifestyles and actively participating in one’s own care are

important at all stages of the life course. One of the myths of ageing is that it is too

late to adopt such lifestyles in the later years. On the contrary, engaging in appropriate

physical activity, healthy eating, not smoking and using alcohol and medications

wisely in older age can prevent disease and functional decline, extend longevity and

enhance one’s quality of life. Opportunities for education and lifelong learning, peace,

and protection from violence and abuse are key factors in the social environment that

enhance health, participation and security as people age. Loneliness, social isolation,

illiteracy and a lack of education, abuse and exposure to conflict situations greatly

increase older people’s risks for disabilities and early death.

The capacity of an older person to continue to work in a paid or voluntary capacity

is emphasise by the concept of productive ageing [7].

ICT have an important role within the active and productive ageing, whether they

are used to extend the life span, to promote the activity and participation of older

adults, to reorganize the health and social support services or simply to disseminate

information. With suitable natural interfaces and the possibilities offered by next

generation networks, the introduction of technological solutions can facilitate the

daily life of the elderly, fighting isolation and exclusion, increasing their pro-activity,

work capacity and autonomy. The envisaged services are: multimedia information

access and exchange of personal data; telehealth and automatic medication delivery;

support of daily activities and community, social and civic life; and automatic

management of the environment to improve both the quality of life and security.

2.1 Elderly at Home

Whatever forms of support (at home or some institution), the elder is a person with

multiple needs demanding support from multiple health and social services. The

development of information services for such a scenario requires a diverse set of users

(elderly, family, informal and formal caregivers), very different tasks and different

contexts of use.

In supporting the elderly, particularly in home care, many tasks require human

contact. However, with adequate interfaces, the introduction of technological

solutions can have much impact, namely in:

1. Daily Life: Help with activities of self care, support in carrying out domestic acti-

vities, environmental monitoring and home automation (e.g. lights control);

2. Personal Development: To support the development of learning activities

throughout life, recreation and other community activities;

3. Development of specific programs of rehabilitation and health education;

4. Medication: Notification and dispensing of medication;

5. Monitoring state of health: Vital signs (e.g. blood pressure and heartbeat

frequency), nutrition and mental functions;

6. Personal Security: Notification in situations of falling and change of routines (e.g.

motionless for a long time);

7. Home security, including intrusion and fire alarms.

3 Living Usability Lab Overview

The project aims to create a technology platform enabling development, integration

and evaluation of applications and services to optimise universal accessibility

applicable, inter alia, to the case of the elderly population, using NGNs.

For this access for all to become possible is necessary to investigate, develop,

integrate, assess and better understand the integration technologies, contemplating

since the interface device level (ex: voice capture) to the knowledge management

system and complex services.

3.1 Conceptual Model

By definition, a Living Lab is not just a set of information services, but a complex

entity, composed by physical spaces and infrastructures (information and

communication systems and services, peripheral devices, development tools and

methodologies for analysis, specification, evaluation, validation and dissemination of

the results) requiring intense involvement of stakeholders (for instance, end users,

professionals, researchers or students) to allow the research and development, in

continuum, of new technologies and services. This can be viewed (Fig. 1) as a stack

of the layers: (1) Physical Spaces, (2) Physical Infrastructure, (3) Logical

Infrastructure, (4) Development Platform, (5) Methodologies, (6) Applications, and

(7) Stakeholders.

Fig. 1. Living Lab Conceptual Model.

3.2 Physical Spaces

Living Lab concept is a challenge to involve users in the innovation process, from the

early phases of context research and idea generation through the later phases of

development and implementation. For that, the Living Lab should have conditions in

order to expose users to new solutions in (semi)realistic contexts. In order to involve

older adults in realistic scenarios several physics spaces will be included:

 A Laboratory of Gerontology (small apartment used for teaching at University of

Aveiro Health School);

 A Family House (integrated in a Rehabilitation Center);

 Apartment(s).

It is essential that researchers and students for Health courses be also involved in the

Living Lab. Therefore, besides the Laboratory of Gerontology, Living Lab will also

include a research lab (at the Institute of Electronic Engineering and Telematics of

Aveiro) and at MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center in Porto Salvo).

Service providers have a key role for a Living Lab, up to the point that sometimes

the service provider is taken as synonym for the Living Lab. Therefore, a social

institution providing care to older adults (Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Oliveira do

Bairro) and a rehabilitation centre (Centro de Medicina de Reabilitação da Região

Centro - Rovisco Pais) are involved.

3.3 Physical Infrastructure

The technological building blocks for the LUL environment include networking

technologies and networked devices.

Networking technologies should facilitate the creation and deployment of new,

value-added services. In that respect the NGN architectures are essential since they

enable the use of multiple broadband, Quality of Service (QoS)-enabled transport

technologies, in which service-related functions are independent from underlying

transport related technologies. Furthermore, NGN architectures provide open

interfaces and support a wide range of services, applications, and mechanisms based

on service building blocks.

Major requirements for the networking technologies are: connection between

different physical locations must be possible with the available services of NGN

provided by commercial operators; the use of NGN and remote computing should

allow the use of networked devices with very low computational power.

The devices to be networked include: the hardware systems to support the required

servers; interactive terminals (Personal Computers), Personal Digital Assistants

(PDA), game consoles, television sets, Set-top Boxes; domestic appliances; sensors,

actuators and robotics.

3.4 Logical Infrastructure

Different devices use different infrastructures and different protocols for

communicating and there must be a way for making the bridge between the different

protocols. There are some possible solutions for fulfilling this goal. One of the most

promising ones is the NGN architecture. These open interfaces support a wide range

of services, applications, and mechanisms based on service building blocks. This is

the adopted solution for integrating the heterogeneity inherent to the Living Usability

Lab (LUL).

3.5 Development Platform Architecture

Building open distributed systems that allow interaction among evolving

heterogeneous devices has always been a complex task. Developers face several

challenges such as interoperability, resource management, synchronization,

performance issues, providing security, scalability and dependability. Specifically, an

open system composes autonomously implemented and administrated software

systems, which communicate over a public or private network. The composed

systems may be implemented in different programming languages and deployed on

different software and hardware platforms.

The generalization of the Internet and the diversification of connected devices

have led to the definition of a new computing paradigm of service orientation: the

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows developing software as a service

delivered and consumed on demand. The benefit of this approach lies in the looser

coupling of the software components making up an application, hence the increased

ability for making systems evolve as, e.g., application-level requirements change or

the networked environment changes.

SOA can be described as a distributed architectural model in which applications

are encapsulated into services that can communicate with each other through a

communication system inherent to the architecture.

SOA architectures can be divided into different layers of abstraction so it can be

discussed from a conceptual standpoint. The four basic layers include:

1. The applicational layer, which includes for example, older systems (legacy),

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or

additional databases;

2. A layer of services where services are provided based on the applicational layer

and normally through WSDL described interfaces;

3. The processing layer where services are orchestrated,

that is, are composed in

order to compose a file in the form of processes, for example in Business Process

Execution Language (BPEL);

4. Finally, the presentation layer provides users SOA’s functionalities through

desktop applications or Web applications (portals).

SOA as architecture proposes itself to several objectives. One is the aggregation of

complex business logics based on standard service interfaces, that is, to be able to

obtain new service based applications through simple integration of the corresponding

interface. With it, the business layer implementation is hidden and not so important

for the development of applications.

A feature of SOA lies in its ability to enable inclusion of additional software in

static and dynamic ways, thus ensuring that it will be easy to expand the architecture

in the future if needed. As such, a recently published foreign service can be

discovered by the architecture and adopted as a component for building new software

systems that in their turn may also be published and made available as new services.

The adopted SOA based architecture seeks a minimum dependence (loose

coupling) between applications (components in the case of SOA), allowing therefore

that they can be made available as reusable services.

3.6 Methodologies

The Living Lab is not just a repository of technologies. It is essentially an interactive

environment in order to facilitate the research, development, integration, validation

and evaluation of multimodal, adaptability and user monitoring technologies, new

modes of interaction and new services supported by NGN. In this sense, the Living

Lab necessarily has to propose and develop new methodologies, in particular for the

specification of new services with a strong involvement of potential users, the

evaluation of new services and the dissemination of knowledge.

During the specification user involvement can be achieved through [8]: idea

generation; scenario development workshops; focus groups; brainstorming groups;

nominal group technique.

The evaluation has several goals: evaluate process/ways of working changes;

measure hard data of the improvements/changes; evaluate fit between software

concepts (e.g. workflow, communication support) and users real way of working;

evaluate acceptance, satisfaction, motivation and individual performance of users.;

evaluate usability, bugs, functionality of software; create ideas about improvements

and new features.

3.7 Applications

The only way to evaluate/validate the various "components" resulting from the project

is their use in practical services and applications. New devices and service pilots are

being developed based on technologies and will be evaluated.

3.8 Stakeholders

Real users are essential within the Living Lab context. They are contributors to the

innovation process through initial ideas, evaluative feedback and improvement ideas,

or just being users that allow to be observed or logged for evaluation. Therefore, they

are central contributors to Living Lab because they are expected to be a source of

ideas (creative role for the generation of radical new ideas), a mechanism for product

improvement (creative role in an iterative product development process) and

validation (evaluation role) as well as diffusion agents (marketing role). In our case,

users are not only individual elderly end-users but also health professionals (e.g.

gerontologists), developers of new services, ICT developers and institutional care

providers.

4 The Architecture for New Services Development

As mentioned before, the architecture for services development adopts the paradigm

of service orientation, which allows developing software as services that are delivered

and consumed on demand. The benefit of this approach lies in the loose coupling of

the software components that make up an application. Discovery mechanisms can be

used for finding and selecting the functionality that a client is looking for. Many

protocols already exist in the area of service orientation.

The architecture comprises three layers [9]: base middleware, intelligent

middleware and applications.

4.1 Base Middleware

The base middleware contains the functionality that is needed to facilitate the

operation of the networked environment. It provides the semantics to communicate

and discover available services and devices in the network, including the ones that are

based on existing communication and discovery standards. This implies that

independence is accomplished for existing hardware and software and, therefore, new

services can be discovered and composed.

Different devices use different infrastructures and different protocols for

communicating and there must be a way for making the bridge between the different

protocols. Therefore, the compliant device platform Interface allows algorithms to

access the different devices (such as sensors and actuator) by a single interface that

abstracts from proprietary properties of the device wherever possible.

4.2 Intelligent Middleware

The intelligent middleware layer contains the functionality that is needed to facilitate

the usability and acceptance of the services. They broker between users and service

providers, and provide context information, combine multiple sources of information

and make pattern-based predictions. Information is tailored to user profiles and adapts

to the user's situation and changes in the context: user modeling and profiling, user

interface management, context awareness and notification.

4.2.1 User Modelling

User modelling provides the methodology to enhance the effectiveness and usability

of services and interfaces in order to [9]: tailor information presentation to user and

context; predict user's future behaviour; help the user to find relevant information;

adapt interface features to the user and the context in which it is used; indicate

interface features and information presentation features for their adaptation to a multi-

user environment.

User modelling is a very broad research area with decades of historical

development. In general, the concept of user modelling addresses issues of

understanding users in order to make a system useful and make user-system

interactions user friendly and universal.

As a variety of users may operate with the system, a user model is a representation

of the properties of a particular user or group of users. More simply, user models

serve as a description of the users of a system and a prediction of how they will

behave and perform tasks. These goals are achieved by constructing, maintaining and

exploiting user models and profiles, which are explicit representations of individual

user’s abilities and preferences.

4.2.2 Context Awareness

Context awareness is a property of a system that uses context to provide relevant

information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task.

Different types of context can be distinguished [10]: device context (ex: available

memory); user context (ex: localization); application context (email received,

websites visited or preferences); social contexts (group activity, social relationship or

people nearby); physical context (weather, altitude, and light). Not all types of

contextual information can be easily sensed. Some types of contextual information

(e.g. the mood or activity of individuals) can only be derived by intelligent

combination of other information, or by human inputs [10].

To develop a context aware application it is necessary to address modelling of the

storage and retrieval of contextual information [9]. For example, an RFID sensor in a

room may provide information at several levels and to several applications. The

provided information can then be used to indicate the presence of someone or to

enable their identification or even to know their position. This requires context

information to be understood by different applications. Thereby it raises the concern

of its meaning [10].

The context awareness and notification modules will provide the basic

functionality required to develop applications allowing people and other applications

to stay aware of any significant change in context with minimal effort.

Work on context modelling and environment sensing started by the creation of a

general webservice to manage, store and provide access by client applications. The

first contextual information to this service is provided by agents producing

information on the noise level in the environment of use, illumination conditions, and

distance and position of the user regarding the display device. As a first use of this

context webservice, an advanced adaptation of output modalities (text and speech) has

been developed [11].

4.2.3 Multimodal Interaction

The focus of this intelligent component, nuclear for the Living Usability Lab, is to

support interaction based on multiple smart artefacts with intuitive and natural

interfaces that are multimodal. Usability and comprehension by end-users are crucial

in order to create engaging and coherent experiences for users.

Speech input and output modalities have a key role in the development of natural

interaction, particularly with non-specialists in the use of technological devices. In

result, the project is dedicating great efforts in making available the necessary speech

recognition and synthesis systems usable by European Portuguese older adults. In

addition, a major effort already started in the creation of a Toolkit for the easier

inclusion of Multimodal Interaction in the new services envisioned for our Living

Lab.

Fig. 2. Multimodal interaction.

4.3 Services and Applications

The application layer should allow dynamic services composition, which is essential

to allow the congregation of different services to build domain specific applications.

Therefore, the application services must be described based on a standard, commonly

declarative, service description language to enable service discovery and invocation

independently of its implementation details. This description is commonly syntactic

and functional (i.e., the functional interface provided by the service in terms, for

instance, of operations that may be remotely invoked). An example of a suitable

service description language is the XML-based WSDL language, used to describe

Web services.

Since the priority of the LUL translational research in the use of multimodal

adaptable interfaces, NGN, and monitoring technologies to support people with

special needs, AAL services for the older adults was the selected application domain

to instantiate, evaluate and validate the proposed architecture.

5 First Results of the Project

In the first months of the project, started in April 2010, work contemplated:

1. Definition of Scenarios and Requirement Analysis [12] – Studies with users were

performed to obtain information regarding scenarios and usability and technology

requirements. One of the studies relates to the evaluation of existing Speech

Recognition and Speech Synthesis systems [13]. Other study, involved a group of

mobility-impaired individuals (paraplegic and quadriplegic) from Associação

Salvador [14]. The goal of the study was to unveil usability issues and to derive

design recommendations towards the development of future user interfaces that

facilitate an integrated access to several communication and social media services

(email, agenda, audio and video conferencing, and social media services). Analysis

focused on touch, gesture and speech interaction;

2. Definitions of the General Architecture - The results are reflected on the

conceptual model and architecture presented in this paper;

3. State-of-the-art review [15] in: speech technologies for the Elderly [13];

Multimodal Interaction; Accessibility technologies for the Elderly; Next Generation

Networks; Service Oriented Architectures; Cloud Computing and indoor and human

care robotic applications;

4. Development of sensors and wireless communication for integration in a Home

network. This work was essentially made by the companies PLUX and Micro I/O.

 Micro I/O has developed a wireless module and a gateway prototype, capable of

providing reliable real-time short-range wireless communications in noisy

environments, in particular those encompassing WiFi interferers. This company has

also studied solutions to monitor events at a common dwelling, for example detecting

when someone sits in the couch;

 PLUX developed a “Patient Tracking System” prototype – conceived to be used

inside buildings, capable of monitoring continuously biosignals and location. The

system consists of wearable sensors that allow the caregivers to monitor Heart Rate,

fall detection, location and lock detection. Furthermore, the system has integrated a

safety tool that enable the caregiver to have acknowledgment of abnormal situations

and the end-user to trigger an alarm whenever needs for assistance. The results

obtained with the system show that patients feel more comfortable and safe when are

continuously monitoring and caregivers can optimize their time and provide a better

and faster assistance to the end-user;

5. Video tracking, particularly on the evaluation of algorithms [16];

6. Development of a robotic platform, based on the improvement of the University of

Aveiro/IEETA team of soccer robots (CAMBADA), in particular the design of new

motor controller electronic boards and development of algorithms for navigation,

object recognition and omnidirectional control (see for example [17]);

7. Start of the acquisition campaign of a new database of European Portuguese

Elderly speech (see www.doaravoz.com) [13]. This is crucial to the training of

speech recognizers for the target group of the project;

8. The first modules, essentially related to input and output modalities, to support the

use of Multimodal interaction in the applications and services planned for the project

were defined and developed;

9. Development of the first prototypes and SDKs/Toolkits- An SDK and prototype

named Personal Life Assistant was developed [14]. Development of a prototype of a

new Telerehabilitation Service [11].

6 Conclusions

This paper presents an overview of the Living Usability Lab Next for Generation

Networks and relevant developments made during the first months of the project. This

project is a Portuguese industry-academia collaborative R&D project, active in the

field of live usability testing, focusing on the development of technologies and

services to support healthy, productive and active citizens. It is the first general

description of the project made available to a general audience. Work in progress

includes development of a multimodal interaction toolkit, creation of suitable

evaluation methods and live evaluation of new services (ex: Telerehabilitation [11]).

Acknowledgements

This work is part of the COMPETE - Programa Operacional Factores de

Competitividade and the European Union (FEDER) under QREN Living Usability

Lab for Next Generation Networks (http://www.livinglab.pt/). Special thanks to

Salvador Mendes de Almeida and Associação Salvador.

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