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A challenge to individuals with cognitive impairments in wayfinding is how to remain oriented, recall routines, and travel in unfamiliar areas in a way relying on limited cognitive capacity. According to psychological model of spatial navigation and the requirements of rehabilitation professionals, a novel wayfinding system is presented with an aim to increase workplace and life independence for people suffering from diseases such as traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, schizophrenia, Down syndromes, and Alzheimer's disease. This paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of travel guidance for persons with cognitive disabilities. The unique strength of the system is the ability to provide unique-to-the-user prompts that are triggered by context. As this population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons) and presents the designer with the need to tailor prompts to a 'universe-of-one' the use of images specific to each user and context is implemented.The key to the approach is to spread the context awareness across the system, with the context being flagged by the QR-code tags and the appropriate response being evoked by displaying the appropriate path guidance images indexed by the intersection of specific end-user and context ID embedded in the tags. By separating the context trigger from the pictorial response, responses can be updated independently of the rest of the installed system, and a single QR-code tag can trigger multiple responses in the PDA depending on the end-user and their specific path. A prototype is built and tested in field experiments with real patients. The experimental results show the human-computer interface is friendly and the capabilities of wayfinding are reliable.

In Chinese culture, filial piety for a son is closely linked to his capacity to produce an heir to ensure continuity of the paternal line. For Taiwanese gay men, coming out as gay may be interpreted as a refusal to produce a male heir and thus constitutes a major conflict within their family. This study explores how gay men in Taiwan come out to their parents within this cultural context. Thirty-two men in total were interviewed. Findings demonstrate that the decision to come out was often motivated by the son's perception of his parents' attitude towards homosexuality. Respondents worked hard to prepare for coming out and to minimize the risk and the impacts of the process, their report shows that some parents go through their own process of coming out and/or hiding in the closet after their gay son's coming out. Although many parents still see homosexuality as illness, some adopt alternative discourses to reinterpret the meaning of being gay as a spiritual path to eternal enlightenment or friendship. These findings imply sites of resistance to the privileged discourse of filial piety in constituting the experiences of coming out for Taiwanese gay men and their parents.

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BackgroundA challenge to individuals with cognitive impairments in wayfinding is how to remain oriented, recall routines, and travel in unfamiliar areas in a way relying on limited cognitive capacity. While people without disabilities often use maps or written directions as navigation tools or for remaining oriented, this cognitively-impaired population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons on maps or signage) and presents the designer with a challenge to tailor navigation information specific to each user and context.MethodsThis paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of travel guidance for persons with cognitive disabilities. A solution is proposed based on passive near-field RFID tags and scanning PDAs. A prototype is built and tested in field experiments with real subjects. The unique strength of the system is the ability to provide unique-to-the-user prompts that are triggered by context. The key to the approach is to spread the context awareness across the system, with the context being flagged by the RFID tags and the appropriate response being evoked by displaying the appropriate path guidance images indexed by the intersection of specific end-user and context ID embedded in RFID tags.ResultsWe found that passive RFIDs generally served as good context for triggering navigation prompts, although individual differences in effectiveness varied. The results of controlled experiments provided more evidence with regard to applicabilities of the proposed autonomous indoor wayfinding method.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that the ability to adapt indoor wayfinding devices for appropriate timing of directions and standing orientation will be particularly important.