Technical articles

Access-Ability
John Gill (May 2004)
This publication provides an overview of guidelines that are now available on the Internet to help designers, engineers and technicians solve the problems of making the technology in our everyday lives accessible and easier to use by elderly people and people with disabilities. For more information please click on http://www.tiresias.org/guidelines/access-ability/index.htm
Source:

Assistive Technology Symposium ? Towards a Better Future
Michael A. Johnson (April 2003)
Read the report on this event which was held in Glasgow on 30th April, 2003
Source: Event Report

Wheelchair Technology: Some Engineering Insights
Jacqueline Wilkie, Steffen Andreassen, Kim McCaw, Iain Traill; University of Strathclyde, UK. (April 2003)
Advances in technology have enabled many research teams to develop and implement complex and highly instrumented means of controlling power wheelchairs. One of the main factors in the lack of transition between the advanced research outcomes and high take-up on the commercial front is the cost of constructing or of retrofitting advanced instrumentation and controls. This paper looks at examples of the instrumentation requirements to achieve advanced control. Three student projects are used to illustrate some of the issues in design; the first fits a control system to a child’s buggy (stroller), the second illustrates simulation and modelling of the system using Matlab/Simulink and the third provides a simple voice activated barcode navigation system.
Source: Assistive Technology - Towards a better life, Symposium held on 30 April 2003, Glasgow

Design issues in the development of communication devices for deafblind people
Marion A Hersh and Kevin Worrall, University of Glasgow (April 2003)
This paper discusses design and other issues involved in developing assistive devices for deafblind people. The focus is on assistive communication devices, for which a design generic structure is developed, but a similar approach can be applied to other types of assistive devices. The design principles are then illustrated by a communication glove developed at the University of Glasgow.
Source: Assistive Technology - Towards a better life, Symposium held on 30 April 2003, Glasgow

A pathway to independence: wayfinding systems which adapt to a visually imparied person's context
Nicholas A Bradley; Mark D Dunlop; University of Strathclyde, UK (April 2003)
Despite an increased amount of technologies and systems designed to address the navigational requirements of the visually impaired community of approximately 7.4 million in Europe, current research has failed to sufficiently address the human issues associated to their design and use. As more types of sensing technologies are developed to facilitate visually impaired travellers for different navigational purposes (local vs. distant and indoor vs. outdoor), an effective process of synchronisation is required. This synchronisation is represented through context-aware computing, which allows contextual information to not just be sensed (like most current wayfinding systems), but also adapted, discovered and augmented. In this paper, three user studies concerning the suitability of different types of navigational information for visually impaired and sighted people are described. For such systems to be effective, human cognitive maps, models and intentions need to be the focus of further research, in order to provide information that is tailored to a user’s task, situation or environment. Methodologies aimed at establishing these issues need to be demonstrated through a multidisciplinary framework.
Source: Assistive Technology - Towards a better life, Symposium held on 30 April 2003, Glasgow

The Batcane - mobility for the vision impaired and the blind
Brian S Hoyle, University of Leeds and Sound Foresight Ltd, UK (April 2003)
Bats are the undisputed leaders in getting around in the world with poor eyesight. The presentation will explore how, inspired by them, British scientists and engineers have devised a high-tech cane for the visually impaired and blind. The ‘Batcane’ employs the ‘echolocation’ technique, used by bats to detect and avoid objects in their flight path, to provide the vision impaired user with a mental picture of the surroundings, enhancing the ability to navigate in the world.
Source: Assistive Technology - Towards a better life, Symposium held on 30 April 2003, Glasgow

Specialist equipment for hard of hearing people
Colin Foxton, Sarabec Ltd., Middlesbrough, UK (April 2003)
Varying forms of equipment exist to suit the varying forms of hearing loss. Listening systems – used by hearing impaired for Communication and Entertainment. Alerting systems – used by deaf and hearing impaired alike. These enable people to respond to or act upon what is going on around them and help them in situations where a hearing person might rely on sound or speech. Personal Listening Equipment allows individuals to tailor their own environmental needs. In particular Induction Loop Systems play a useful and significant part in enhancing hearing impaired individuals lives.
Source: Assistive Technology - Towards a better life, Symposium held on 30 April 2003, Glasgow

Foreign parts
C Evans-Pughe (April 2003)
Research into electronic body implants has attracted a lot of press attention in recent years, but the results don't yet justify the hype. In practice, electronic implants pose enormous challenges that scientists are struggling to overcome.
Source: IEE Review May 2003

The need for and the problems with Location Aware Services (LAS) for people with disabilities
G Whitney, Middlesex University (September 2002)
The aim of this poster is to identify the potential benefit that location awareness services could have for elderly and disabled people and how the systems could be used to assist many elderly and disabled people to retain their independence and fitness.
Source: IEE Seminar on Location Based Services, 16 September 2002

A speech interface for rapid reading
Freddy Y. Y. Choi, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK (March 2000)
Text-to-speech interfaces present text in sequence. Informative texts are often skim read and referenced. These common tasks require an interface which permits efficient non-sequential access to the relevant text regions. This paper presents three implemented solutions that are based on language processing techniques.
Source: IEE Seminar - Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000.

Speech

Assistive Technology - Towards a better life
(March 2003)
Accessibility and inclusive are two key societal objectives enshrined in recent European and UK legislation. They are also considered the hallmarks of a caring and socially advanced community. Assistive technology enables many members of society to overcome the restrictions caused by their sensory and/or mobility impairment allowing them to enjoy normal life and access the many amazing services and products emerging from the computing and information digital revolution.
Source: Assistive Technology - Towards a better life, Symposium held on 30 April 2003, Glasgow

The development of ICU-Talk: a communication aid for patients in intensive care units
F MacAulay, M C Etchels et al, University of Dundee, and Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, UK (March 2000)
ICU-Talk is a three year collaborative research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), to develop and evaluate a communication aid for patients in an intensive care unit (ICU) who are temporarily unable to speak due to intubation. This multi disciplinary project involves the Speech & Language Therapy Department and the Intensive Care Unit at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee and the Department of Applied Computing and the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Dundee. The project is staffed by a software engineer, an ICU nurse, a speech and language therapist and a PhD student. This paper will outline the development of ICU-Talk and the results from the first nine months of the project.
Source: IEE Seminar -Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000.

Virtual signing: capture, animation, storage and transmission - an overview of the ViSiCAST Project
J A Bangham et al, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK;S Rankov and M Wells, TeleVirtual, Norwich, UK (March 2000)
We present an outline of the technical aspects of the recently started ViSiCAST project, which aims to provide deaf citizens with improved access to services and facilities through sign language. We first give an overview of the main application areas, before considering in more detail the two areas of supporting technology development: language and notation, and virtual human signing.
Source: IEE Seminar - Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000.

Speech technology: a solution for people with disabilities
Norma Conn and Michael McTear, Faculty of Informatics, University of Ulster at Jordanstown, UK (March 2000)
Inexpensive software that supports the use of voice for the production of documents and the control of the computer could enable people with various types of disability to have greater access to education and employment. There have been few reports, however, on what has actually been achieved in the use of speech software by people with disabilities and on issues that relate to this type of user. This paper describes initial experiences gathered in the SCRIBE project, which involves training people with disabilities to use a commercially available speech software package. The paper reports on a number of issues, including: characteristics of trainees and suitability of the software for use by people with particular types of disability; benefits of the software and of the training programme for users with disabilities; and research and development issues.
Source: IEE Seminar - Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000.

Signing for the deaf using virtual humans
J A Bangham et al, University of East Anglia, UK; M Tutt and M Wells, TeleVirtual, Norwich, UK (March 2000)
Research at Televirtual (Norwich) and the University of East Anglia has investigated the feasibility of using virtual signing as a communication medium for presenting information to the Deaf. We describe and demonstrate the underlying virtual signer technology, and discuss the language processing techniques and discourse models which have been investigated for information communication in a transaction application in Post Offices, and for presentation of more general textual material.
Source: IEE Seminar -Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000.

Speech-to-text systems for deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing people
C Brooks, Possum Controls Limited (March 2000)
Hearing aids and lip-reading are most effective in face-to-face communication between a small number of people. Unfortunately, there are many events where the speaker may be poorly lit or too far away to be seen or heard clearly, or where high levels of background noise prevent the successful use of a hearing aid. It is in these circumstances when a simultaneous visual transcript of speech may be helpful. In response to the report of the Commission of Enquiry into Human Aids to Communication, the Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People set up a working party to look at ways of encouraging existing machine shorthand reporters working in the Crown Court System to work with deaf people.
Source: IEE Seminar -Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000

Vision

Architecture and requirements for a Windows screen reader
Paul Blenkhorn and Gareth Evans, Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester, UK (March 2000)
For nearly twenty years blind people have been successfully accessing standard applications on desktop computer systems using screen readers. These programs can echo user input and provide screen information to the user by using synthetic speech and/or a Braille display. This paper describes two aspects of screen readers. Firstly, it describes the mechanisms currentlyavailable for capturing the activities of the user and the user's application(s) that normally result in updates to the screen display. Secondly, the interface for presenting that information in an appropriate form to blind users is discussed. In both cases these are illustrated by reference to an ongoing project to produce a Windows screen reader for blind people, called Lookout. In the first instance this project only uses synthetic speech and, consequently, we will not discuss Braille output in this paper.
Source: IEE Seminar -Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People 4 April 2000.

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Embedded systems

Introduction to Single Event Effects- Environments & Phenomenology
Professor Clive Dyer (December 2005)

Source: IEE Seminar on Cosmic Radiation

Observations of SEE phenomena using CCDs
S.P. Platt (December 2005)

SEE interactions
Experimental technique
Example SEE image features
SEE image analyses
Work in progress