Abstract
People with severe disabilities may have difficulties when interacting with their home devices due to the limitations inherent to their disability. Simple home activities may even be impossible for this group of people. Although much work has been devoted to proposing new assistive technologies to improve the lives of people with disabilities, some studies have found that the abandonment of such technologies is quite high. This work presents a new assistive system based on eye tracking for controlling and monitoring a smart home, based on the Internet of Things, which was developed following concepts of user-centered design and usability. With this system, a person with severe disabilities was able to control everyday equipment in her residence, such as lamps, television, fan, and radio. In addition, her caregiver was able to monitor remotely, by Internet, her use of the system in real time. Additionally, the user interface developed here has some functionalities that allowed improving the usability of the system as a whole. The experiments were divided into two steps. In the first step, the assistive system was assembled in an actual home where tests were conducted with 29 participants without disabilities. In the second step, the system was tested with online monitoring for seven days by a person with severe disability (end-user), in her own home, not only to increase convenience and comfort, but also so that the system could be tested where it would in fact be used. At the end of both steps, all the participants answered the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, which showed that both the group of participants without disabilities and the person with severe disabilities evaluated the assistive system with mean scores of 89.9 and 92.5, respectively.
Highlights
People with severe disabilities may have difficulties interacting with their home devices due to the limitations inherent to their disability
According to information obtained in the interview with the participant, Friday and Saturday were the best days of the week for her to receive the researchers in her home, so she opted to install the system on a Friday (09/14/2018) and uninstall it on a Saturday (10/06/2018)
This work presented an assistive system, based on eye gaze tracking for controlling and monitoring a smart home using the Internet of Things, which was developed following concepts of user-centered design and usability
Summary
People with severe disabilities may have difficulties interacting with their home devices due to the limitations inherent to their disability. Simple activities such as turning on or off a lamp, fan, television, or any other equipment independently may even be impossible for this group of people. Assistive technology is an area of knowledge with an interdisciplinary characteristic which encompasses products, resources, methodologies, strategies, practices, and services that aim to promote the functionality related to the activity and participation of people with disabilities, inability, or reduced mobility, aiming at their autonomy, independence, quality of life, and social inclusion [5]. The participant has difficulty walking, considered practically impossible by her, possible commands to verify that the system was working properly
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