Steve Lee :: Blog :: Summary of RAatE 2007 conference

This year's RAatE was particularly good, at least that is the opinion of the delegate I asked who had been for several years. Indeed I found my first visit highly informative with many quality presentations, interesting exhibits and a chance to advocate Jambu, Open Source, OATS and Mozilla. RAatE is a conference and exhibition for and by  those involved in providing Assistive Technology and related services in health and education for children and adults.  A couple of people kindly encouraged my work on Jambu and Open Source AT and I got several ideas for Jambu as well as developing contacts with a number of people who should be very helpful in ensuring it has maximum benefit for it's users. I also enjoyed it immensely

Attendees comprised a very  mixed assortment of clinical staff, clinical scientists, medical engineers, technicians, suppliers, service operators, engineers, academics, developers, managers. The electronic equipment included wheelchairs,  Electronic Assistive Technology and computer accessibility. Interestingly there was noticeably more coverage of physical disabilities compared to visual. This may be due to origins of the conference in wheelchair service and the interests of those attending.

Venue

The venue was the incredibly ornate 200 yr old Cutler's Hall in Sheffield, which felt something like a stately home, but which suffered from poor accessibility (loads of stairs, unusable lifts), very poor acoustics in one room (high domed ceiling) and ancient non-standard power (2-amp round pin). However the event was very well organised (including changes forced due to bad access), the catering was good and we had wifi so 'hey'.

 

Key Points

The main take homes were:

• Eye Gaze tracking is now a highly effective if expensive access method for people with physical disabilities. A cheap open source option should be really popular as long as it is reliable.
• Independence through TeleCare, or more comprehensively, TeleHealth and Environmental Controls (EC) are becoming important with our ageing population threatening to overwealm the Health Services budgets. Open Standards and Open Source will be key in ensuring ensure reasonable costs and alowing interoperability.

EyeGaze

Eyegaze was particularly high profile, due to the work of the EU funded COGAIN project, SmartBox's suppyling the Swedish MyTobii combined the Sensory software's The Grid2 (£11,000), the QuickGlance (£4000), and the tireless activity on behalf of users of one Mick Donegan who seems to be involved with just about every Eye Gaze activity going.

Eyegaze works by shining Infrared on to the operator's  face and monitoring the retina reflections (the effect that gives redeye in photographs). The specialist hardware is backed by software to track and eliminate noise problems and in the case of MyTobii a software API is used by The Grid2 to provide advanced features such as targeted dwell select and pause controls. COGAIN demo videos.

Although eyegaze is of obvious use to those with almost no usable physical control (eye control is nearly always available), it's direct pointer access  method (2 dimension random access) is also often much more effective than slow and tedious switch use (serial). Current systems require the user to confine themselves to fairly limited position but are tolerant of small movements. It requires the use of the eyes in a unusual way, controling rather than looking but this does not appear to be an issue and the initial fatigue is soon overcome with practice. Options include  single eye and blink control. I tried the MyTobii and found it easy enough to use and quite tolerent of head movement.

For Open Source projects the tracking software algorithms and some hardware are available as used in the OpenGazer project which Simon Elmsie built and described recently on the OATSoft mail list .Open Gazer uses cheap webcams and the use use of visible light is more sensitive to 'noise' and confusion than Infrared. Head tracking programs also use webcams as for example camera mouse which is now free and hopefully will become open source as development has ceased (hint: we need to lobby them). There is a need for cheap usable Infrared cameras but it is likely that very effective use can still be made of visible light with some innovation and allowance in use.

TeleHealth

I'll leave TeleCare for another post apart from saying that allowing people to  take their own clinical measurements and administer medication clearly empowers then to look after their own health when they would otherwise go to hospital (so saving large amounts of cash and stress). Environmental controls further enable people to have independence by providing assisted control of home appliances (tv, bed etc). This is an area ripe for Open Standards and Open Source components if not Open Source applications. Firefox (or XUL) should be a very effective component or platform for giving User Interface to a web infrastructure. The key features I'm thinking of are excellent customisability and extension including kiosk modes and great accessibility. Prof. Branko Cellar gave a good presentation of the effective research and systems of his MedCare systems in Australia.

Poster and advocacy

The poster on Jambu, Mozilla and Open Source was placed in a prime position and there was quite a bit of interest. It seems Open Source is familiar to many now, if not in any depth. It's clear we need Jambu code that is more user ready ASAP as several asked about downloads.

As always many people declared they use and like Firefox (one said he had gone back to IE as it had better printing so I suggested it may have been fixed and that he used the broken web site tool to report problems). Most of the Mozilla loot (swag) I had went ,which is not bad for 150 delegates. Many of those I spoke too were not aware of the many Firefox accessibility features and those I told were surprised to hear of MoFo's commitment and funding of accessibility.

I gave someone my Ubuntu CD as he was interested after seeing it on my laptop (note to self: get some nice printed CDs from Ubuntu to carry around). One of the presenters also mentioned it having seen it on my laptop just before her talk.

Speech control

One project in particular is looking at speech control and is approaching the design of a new controller in a re markedly open and user centred style. They held a workshop to get ideas and shared their ideas . The PDA based hardware being designed by Toby Churchill is Open Hardware and will run an Open Source software stack (Linux-based). This 'hackable' hardware could be useful in many projects.

Multi mode input

Of interest to Jambu was that on a couple of occasions it was reported that users preferred to use a combination of devices such as headmouse and speech recognition or voice control and a switch. This user chosen flexibility is the goal of the capability palette concept which will allow users to pick and mix gestures across devices.

Students use of Agile Technology and web 2.0

E.A. Draffan gave an challenging talk on how students are self selecting consumer gadgets and free software as their own assistive technology. She tied this in with the digitally literate generation's use of technology like Web 2.0 for social interaction and contrasted it with Assistive Technology that is currently supplied. Like teachers, clinicians need to address this widening gap between their familiarity with technology and student expectations of using it. 

Ace AT Assessment Workshop

The workshop from Mick Donegan and Jackie Ayre of the Oxford Ace Centre was excellent and I found it highly informative. Jackie explained their effective assessment approach which is highly user centred and quite holistic (plus 'fun' as Jackie was keen to point out). Mick presented demonstrations of the QuickGaze and MyTobii eye gaze systems as well as a few more programs including Tapir (see below).

It seems Vista is being a problem as many programs have not yet been updated to work on it, a problem that seems worse than with the move to XP. Some want to stick to XP and it was noted that Dell and others still supply it. It's good that we don't see this so much with Linux for a number of reasons, not least that there is not the pressure to produce feature rich new versions to encourage purchase, but rather it evolves in small frequent increments.

The main points I got about AT use were:

• need to trade off speed / accuracy, a11y / usability (I need to find out more about later)
• good technology support is vital
• know properties and limitations of systems (this can be hard for busy clinicians to achieve and a challenge for us developers)
• pass on information on possible customisations to end users.

Tapir
Tapir is an open source 'OSK' program that features both disambiguation and prediction so is familiar in operation to mobile phone users. It has been developed and designed by David MacKay's Dasher team with Mick Donegan. I will certainly work on integration with Jambu but it could also be a useful GNOME program (it depends on Python + GTK). It can optionally use festival but that could be changed to eSpeak. I'll post the idea on the lists. Mick is keen that other developers should contribute.

So a big thanks to the RAatE team for organising such a useful event and thanks to Mozilla for paying my expenses and funding Jambu and many other accessibility projects. Plus cheers to Theakston for the Old Peculier we enjoyed in the evening.