Socially assistive robots have the potential to improve the quality of life of older adults by encouraging and guiding their performance of rehabilitation exercises while offering cognitive stimulation and companionship. This study focuses on the early stages of developing and testing an interactive personal trainer robot to monitor and increase exercise adherence in older adults. The robot physically demonstrates exercises for the user to follow and monitors the user's progress using a vision-processing unit that detects face and hand movements. When the user successfully completes a move, the robot gives positive feedback and begins the next repetition. The results of usability testing with 10 participants support the feasibility of this approach. Further extensions are planned to evaluate a complete exercise program for improving older adults' physical range of motion in a controlled experiment with three conditions: a personal trainer robot, a personal trainer on-screen character, and a pencil-and-paper exercise plan.

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Whereas glancing at a web page is crucial for navigation, screen readers force users to listen to content serially. This hampers efficient browsing of complex pages and maintains an accessibility divide between sighted and screen-reader users. To address this problem, we adopt a three-pronged strategy: (1) in a user study, we identified key page-level navigation problems that screen-reader users face while browsing a complex site; (2) through a crowd-sourcing system, we prioritized the most relevant sections of different page types necessary to support basic tasks;(3) we introduced DASX, a navigation approach that augments the ability of screen-reader users to "aurally glance" at a complex page by accessing at any time the most relevant page sections. In a preliminary evaluation, DASX markedly reduced the gap in page navigation efficiency between screen-reader and sighted users. Our contribution provides the groundwork for rethinking access strategies that strongly tie aural navigation to user's tasks.

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