A Model for Gaze Control Assessments and Evaluation

2013 ◽  
pp. 332-343
Author(s):  
Eva Holmqvist ◽  
Margret Buchholz

Technical aids can contribute towards improved health and satisfaction in life by giving the user increased possibilities for participation in a number of areas of daily life. Assessing people with disabilities that affect their motor, communication and cognitive skills can be a complex matter. The result of an assessment might be the user’s only way of independent activity and communication. This stresses the importance of making high quality assessments. This chapter discusses the prerequisites, structure and key elements of a successful gaze control assessment.

Author(s):  
Eva Holmqvist ◽  
Margret Buchholz

Technical aids can contribute towards improved health and satisfaction in life by giving the user increased possibilities for participation in a number of areas of daily life. Assessing people with disabilities that affect their motor, communication and cognitive skills can be a complex matter. The result of an assessment might be the user’s only way of independent activity and communication. This stresses the importance of making high quality assessments. This chapter discusses the prerequisites, structure and key elements of a successful gaze control assessment.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Thomas Meyer ◽  
Selina Weber ◽  
Lukas Jäger ◽  
Roland Sigrist ◽  
Roger Gassert ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Advanced assistive technologies (AAT) aim to exploit the vast potential of technological developments made in the past decades to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities. Combining complex robotic technologies with the unique needs of people with disabilities requires a strong focus on user-centered design to ensure that the AAT appropriately addresses the daily life struggles of target users. The CYBATHLON aims to promote this mindset by empowering the AAT target users (“pilots”) to compete on race tracks that represent daily life obstacles. The objective of this work was to investigate the influence of the CYABTHALON on AAT technology development, acceptance, and user involvement (i.e., application of user-centered design).Methods: With an online survey targetting the pilots and technical leads of teams preparing for the CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition, we investigated to what extent the pilots were involved in device development and how this influences the perceived daily life usability of the showcased AAT. Furthermore, the effects of user-centered design variables on the individual race performances were analyzed.Results: A total of 81 responses from 35 pilots and 46 technical leads were collected in the two weeks prior to the event. Of all teams partaking in the included disciplines of the CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition, 81.8% (36 of 44) were included in the study. User-centered design appeared to be a prevalent practice among the teams, as 85.7% of all pilots reported a certain level of involvement. However, only 25.5% of the pilots reported daily life usage, despite QUEST usability scores of both respondent groups showing moderate to high satisfaction with the respected AAT across all investigated disciplines. An explorative linear mixed model indicated that daily life usage (p < 0.05) and prolonged user involvement (e.g. more than 2 years, p < 0.001) have a significant positive effect on the race performance at the competition.Conclusions: We conclude that the CYBATHLON positively fullfills its conceptual goals of promoting active participation and inclusion of people with disabilities in the design and evaluation of AAT, thereby stimulating the development of promising novel technological solutions. Also, our data could underline the value of the competition as a benchmark, highlighting remaining usability limitations or technology adoption hurdles.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Gutiérrez-Conejo ◽  
María-Dolores González-Rivera ◽  
Antonio Campos-Izquierdo

The importance of professional competence lies in the effective application of job-oriented knowledge and skills which guarantee one’s successful adaptation to the work. This study analyzes the perception of the importance of physical activity and sports (PAS) professionals’ competence in working with individuals with disabilities in Spain. As a descriptive quantitative study, face-to-face interviews were conducted through a survey to extract the data. The sample consisted of 214 PAS professionals working with people with disabilities. According to the results, the analyzed constituents of professional competence are important for adequate performance (&gt;65%), with the exception of competences of leadership and use of new technologies (&lt;50%). It was also found that the perceived importance of each element of professional competence varies according to age, experience and training. Based on the obtained results, the degree of importance of each constituent of professional competence and its implication for the access of people with disabilities to high-quality physical activity and sports services was determined.


GigaScience ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Majidian ◽  
Fritz J Sedlazeck

Abstract Background The detection of which mutations are occurring on the same DNA molecule is essential to predict their consequences. This can be achieved by phasing the genomic variations. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art haplotype phasing is currently a black box in which the accuracy and quality of the reconstructed haplotypes are hard to assess. Findings Here we present PhaseME, a versatile method to provide insights into and improvement of sample phasing results based on linkage data. We showcase the performance and the importance of PhaseME by comparing phasing information obtained from Pacific Biosciences including both continuous long reads and high-quality consensus reads, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, 10x Genomics, and Illumina sequencing technologies. We found that 10x Genomics and Oxford Nanopore phasing can be significantly improved while retaining a high N50 and completeness of phase blocks. PhaseME generates reports and summary plots to provide insights into phasing performance and correctness. We observed unique phasing issues for each of the sequencing technologies, highlighting the necessity of quality assessments. PhaseME is able to decrease the Hamming error rate significantly by 22.4% on average across all 5 technologies. Additionally, a significant improvement is obtained in the reduction of long switch errors. Especially for high-quality consensus reads, the improvement is 54.6% in return for only a 5% decrease in phase block N50 length. Conclusions PhaseME is a universal method to assess the phasing quality and accuracy and improves the quality of phasing using linkage information. The package is freely available at https://github.com/smajidian/phaseme.


1992 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Krefting ◽  
Nora Groce

People with disabilities make up a significant part of the human family, with estimates of their numbers ranging from the tens to the hundreds of millions worldwide. One highly regarded estimate places the number of significantly disabled individuals—people with serious hearing, vision, mobility, or cognitive impairments—as high as one in every ten persons. Nor are these impairments recent in origin. Any review of written or oral history, or archaeological skeletal population, large or small, allows us to identify many individuals for whom a physical or mental impairment played a significant role in daily life.


2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natilene I. Bowker ◽  
Keith Tuffin

AbstractPeople with disabilities often face physical, social, and psychological barriers in daily life because of inaccessible structures and disability prejudice. The online medium's physically, nontaxing capacity for participation as well as a lack of visually mediated cues can potentially eliminate such barriers. This study discursively explored the psychological meaning of what it meant to be online for people with disabilities, focusing on possibilities for operating beyond their standard practices in daily life. Participants were recruited from various disability organisations in New Zealand and were invited to take part in an online interview. The notion of transcending barriers to participation formed a broad pattern in participants' data. This talk comprised 3 linguistic resources: life-altering, overcoming physical barriers, and disconnecting disability. Each resource offered participants a highly positive and significant transformation in subjectivity, enabling people with disabilities to be positioned as equal members of society.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily C Willroth ◽  
Arasteh Gatchpazian ◽  
Sabrina Thai ◽  
Bethany Lassetter ◽  
Matthew Feinberg ◽  
...  

Transient affect can be tightly linked with people’s global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regulatory role of sleep: insulating people’s global life satisfaction from the affective highs and lows of daily life. We tested this hypothesis in two daily diary samples (N1=3,011 daily diary observations of 274 participants and N2=12,740 daily diary observations of 811 participants). Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, following nights of reported high-quality sleep, the link between current affect and global life satisfaction was attenuated (i.e., lower affect globalizing). Sleep-based interventions are broadly useful for improv-ing psychological health and the current findings suggest another avenue by which such interventions may improve well-being: by providing a crucial protection against the risks associated with affect globalizing.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zebulun Arendsee ◽  
Jing Li ◽  
Urminder Singh ◽  
Arun Seetharam ◽  
Karin Dorman ◽  
...  

AbstractMotivationThe goal of phylostratigraphy is to infer the evolutionary origin of each gene in an organism. Currently, there are no general pipelines for this task. We present an R package, phylostratr, to fill this gap, making high-quality phylostratigraphic analysis accessible to non-specialists.ResultsPhylostratigraphic analysis entails searching for homologs within increasingly broad clades. The highest clade that contains all homologs of a gene is that gene’s phylostratum. We have created a general R-based framework, phylostratr, for estimating the phylostratum of every gene in a species. The program can fully automate an analysis: select species for a balanced representation of each strata, retrieve the sequences from UniProt, build BLAST databases, run BLAST, infer homologs for each gene against each subject species, determine phylostrata, and return summaries and diagnostics. phylostratr allows extensive customization. A user may: modify the automatically-generated clade tree or use their own tree; provide custom sequences in place of those automatically retrieved from UniProt; replace BLAST with an alternative algorithm; or tailor the method and sensitivity of the homology inference classifier. phylostratr also offers proteome quality assessments, false-positive diagnostics, and checks for missing organelle genomes. We show the utility of phylostratr through case studies in Arabidopsis thaliana and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.Availabilityphylostratr source code and vignettes are available on GitHub at https://github.com/arendsee/[email protected]


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