Aphasia Project: Projects

ESI Planner is a multi-modal electronic planner designed to allow aphasic users to independently manage appointments on a PDA. Instead of relying solely on text, ESI Planner redundantly encodes appointment data using triplets of images, sounds, and keywords. These triplets support the needs of aphasic users by providing multiple entry points to appointment information. A formal usability evaluation with eight aphasic participants compared ESI Planner to an equivalent text-only planner and showed that participants completed more tasks correctly with ESI Planner, and that planner preference was linked to language abilities: although some mildly impaired individuals expressed a preference for the text-only planner, for individuals with larger impairments there was a clear preference for the multi-modal planner .

ESI Planner II redesigns ESI Planner by leveraging the strengths of Lingraphica to provide an easy to use, yet portable, communication aid and daily planner. ESI Planner II provides four main functionalities: a daily planner, a reminder system, an individualized store of frequently used phrases, and a system for keeping track of checklists. It uses Lingraphica for the task of composing these appointments, reminders, phrases, and checklists. These are then transferred to the ESI Planner II for portable use.

Although cooking is a daily activity for many people, traditional text recipes are often prohibitively difficult to follow for people with language disorders. The Visually Enhanced Recipe Application (VERA) is a multi-modal application that leverages the retained ability of aphasic individauls to recognize image-based representations of objects, providing a presentation format that can be more easily followed than a traditional text recipe. It is based on a visual language for cooking instructions which we iteratively developed with feedback from both aphasic and non-aphasic participants. Through our systematic approach to developing the visual language and a subsequent case study of VERA, we have shown that a combination of visual instructions and navigational structure can help individauls with relatively large language deficits to cook more independently.

PDAs have a form factor and feature set that suggest they could be effective communication tools for people with aphasia. An ethnographic study was conducted with one participant both to learn about communication strategies used by people with aphasia, and to observe how a PDA is incorporated into those strategies. The most significant usability issues found were file access and organization. A participatory design phase followed, resulting in a paper prototype of a file management system that addressed the key usability issues identified. The participatory approach continued during the implementation of a high-fidelity prototype.

PhotoTalk is an application for a mobile device that allows people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs to support face-to-face communication. Unlike any other augmentative and alternative communication device for people with aphasia, PhotoTalk focuses solely on image capture and organization and is designed to be used independently. Our project used a streamlined process with 3 phases: (1) a rapid participatory design and development phase with two speech-language pathologists acting as representative users, (2) an informal usability study with 5 aphasic participants, which caught usability problems and provided preliminary feedback on the usefulness of PhotoTalk, and (3) a 1 month field evaluation with 2 aphasic participants, which showed that both used it regularly and fairly independently, although not always for its intended communicative purpose. Our field study demonstrated PhotoTalk's promise in terms of its usability and usefulness in real life situations.

The high-level objective of this thesis is to increase the accessibility of handheld technology (such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Tablet PCs) by investigating mechanisms for assisting (especially older) users to select more easily using pen technology. Although there has been a great deal of research aimed at developing improved target acquisition techniques, including a sizeable amount directed specifically to the pen, room for improvement remains: many users still experience difficulties, and standard point and tap ( i.e., selection by (i) tapping down, (ii) possibly moving the pen, and (iii) tapping up, with selection determined based on the location of the tap up) remains the dominant technique). To address this objective, we are conducting a series of experiments to fulfill the following goals: (1) to collect quantitative data on target acquisition using standard point and tap mechanisms across a range of ages and task situations, (2) to use the findings from (1) to design and implement new interaction techniques to better support pen-based target acquisition, and (3) to evaluate the techniques developed in (2) by experimentally evaluating them against the standard point and tap mechanism across a range of ages, and where appropriate, across a range of task situations.

The overall goal of our project is to identify barriers to access -- usability problems, as well as the factors that cause them, that are experienced by normal healthy elderly users or potential users of handheld communications and computing devices. We are conducting a series of experiments, each with community living healthy adults aged 55 and older, in order to identify the most common types of usability problems with handheld computers and communication devices (e.g., hard- vs software problems) as well as the causes of these problems (e.g., declines in sensory/perceptual, cognitive or motor abilities, in personality or in experience with computers). This work is guided by a series of hypothesis that link well-documented age-related declines in sensory/perceptual skills, in attention, in memory, in motor skills and dexterity as well as in personality to specific problems in the usability of handheld computers and communication devices.

Graphical icons are commonly used in mobile device interfaces but little research has looked at the effectiveness of such icons for people of different ages. We are conducting a series of studies to: 1) determine whether older adults (65+) have more difficulty with existing mobile device icons than younger users; 2) understand how different icon characteristics (e.g., concreteness, semantic distance, visual complexity, presence of text labels, familiarity) affect icon usability for this population; and 3) understand the effect of icon characteristics on icon usability over time (i.e., after multiple exposures). The results from these studies should help icon designers and researchers to better understand how various icon characteristics affect icon usability for older people and how to design mobile device icons that are easier for this population to use.

Previous study with senior citizens revealed that both icons and images did a poor job of embodying verbs and attributes. Considering that a verb is usually a sequence of action or motion with certain intension, manner and result, instead of just using one single static image, we add three other modes into comparison, including a panel of four static images illustrating the same verb, an animated gif icon, and a video clip. A third study evaluating the efficacy of four different visual representations of verbs for subjects from the general population address the question of the best representation of both motion and abstract verbs. A list of 48 verbs are selected and modified based on the frequency of spoken English provided by BNC (British National Corpus), and the intended senses definition come from WordNet, an online lexical dictionary. Images are collected over Internet and filtered according to the ranking of 8 people. Animations mainly come from Lingraphica with some modified according to the selected senses. Videos were filmed based on scripts approved by a group of nine people, and edited to be three seconds long with moderate necessary special effect. The study is currently undergoing, and aiming to compare results from a group of 16 younger participants (of the age 20 to 39) and a group of 16 older participants (of the age over or equal to 65).