An Orientation Method with Prediction and Anticipation Features

Abstract

Nowadays, progress is constant and inherent to a living society. This may occur in different arenas, namely in mathematical evaluation and healthcare. Assistive technologies are a topic under this evolution, being extremely important in helping users with diminished capabilities (physical, sensory, intellectual). These technologies assist people in tasks that were difficult or impossible to execute. A common diminished task is orientation, which is crucial for the user autonomy. The adaptation to such technologies should require the minimum effort possible in order to enable the person to use devices that convey assistive functionalities. There are several solutions that help a human being to travel between two different locations, however their authors are essentially concerned with the guidance method, giving special attention to the user interface. The CogHelper system aims to overcome these systems by applying a framework of Speculative Computation, which adds a prediction feature for the next user movement giving an anticipation ability to the system. Thus, an alert is triggered before the user turn towards an incorrect path. The travelling path is also adjusted to the user preferences through a trajectory mining module.

Adapting the User Path Through Trajectory Data Mining

“…In the advanced stages of this condition (severe and extreme) the person may not be able to use a mobile device, thus the orientation is not viable. Being an on-going work the main features of the system have been described in [13,14,15]. The goal is to guide the user by using an augmented reality interface (Figure 1b) in which we try to minimize the cognitive effort needed to understand the direction that should be (a) Waiting for a GPS signal (b) Informing the path to the user Fig.…”

“…CogHelper [15,14] is a system where the main goal is to guide people with mild or moderate cognitive disabilities. In more extreme cases of this diagnosis the person may not learn how to use a mobile device, thus his orientation is not possible.…”

“…Considering our previous work (CogHelper, see [14,15]), we intend to implement a module of trajectory data mining where the goal is to adapt the path to the user preferences. Thus, instead of guiding the user through the shortest path, the system may suggest a longer but preferred traveling path.…”