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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Real World Strategies for User Centered Approach to Functional Assessment and Design of Age-In-Place Support for Older Adults

January 2015 (has links)
abstract: As people age, the desire to grow old independently and in place becomes larger and takes greater importance in their lives. Successful aging involves the physical, mental and social well-being of an individual. To enable successful aging of older adults, it is necessary for them to perform both activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL). Embedded assessment has made it possible to assess an individual's functional ability in-place, however the success of any technology depends largely on the user than the technology itself. Previous researches in in-situ functional assessment systems have heavily focused on the technology rather than on the user. This dissertation takes a user-centric approach to this problem by trying to identify the design and technical challenges of deploying and using a functional assessment system in the real world. To investigate this line of research, a case study was conducted with 4 older adults in their homes, interviews were conducted with 8 caregivers and a controlled lab experiment was conducted with 8 young healthy adults at ASU, to test the sensors. This methodology provides a significant opportunity to advance the scientific field by expanding the present focus on IADL task performance to an integrated assessment of ADL and IADL task performance. Doing so would not only be more effective in identifying functional decline but could also provide a more comprehensive assessment of individuals' functional abilities with independence and also providing the caregivers with much needed respite. The controlled lab study tested the sensors embedded into daily objects and found them to be reliable, and efficient. Short term exploratory case studies with healthy older adults revealed the challenges associated with design and technical aspects of the current system, while inductive analysis performed on interviews with caregivers helped to generate central themes on which future functional assessment systems need to be designed and built. The key central themes were a) focus on design / user experience, b) consider user's characteristics, personality, behavior and functional ability, c) provide support for independence, and d) adapt to individual user's needs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2015
2

Online Embedded Assessment for Dragoon, Intelligent Tutoring System

January 2015 (has links)
abstract: Embedded assessment constantly updates a model of the student as the student works on instructional tasks. Accurate embedded assessment allows students, instructors and instructional systems to make informed decisions without requiring the student to stop instruction and take a test. This thesis describes the development and comparison of several student models for Dragoon, an intelligent tutoring system. All the models were instances of Bayesian Knowledge Tracing, a standard method. Several methods of parameterization and calibration were explored using two recently developed toolkits, FAST and BNT-SM that replaces constant-valued parameters with logistic regressions. The evaluation was done by calculating the fit of the models to data from human subjects and by assessing the accuracy of their assessment of simulated students. The student models created using node properties as subskills were superior to coarse-grained, skill-only models. Adding this extra level of representation to emission parameters was superior to adding it to transmission parameters. Adding difficulty parameters did not improve fit, contrary to standard practice in psychometrics. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2015
3

Task-based Embedded Assessment of Functional Abilities for Aging in Place

Lee, Matthew L. 01 August 2012 (has links)
Many older adults desire to maintain their quality of life by living and aging independently in their own homes. However, it is difficult for older adults to notice and track the subtle changes in their own abilities because these abilities can change gradually over a long period of time. Technology in the form of ubiquitous sensors embedded in objects in the home can play a role in keeping track of the functional abilities of individuals unobtrusively, objectively, and continuously over a long period of time. This work introduces a sensing technique called “task-based embedded assessment” that monitors how well specific tasks important for independence are carried out using everyday objects found in the home with which individuals regularly interact. Following formative studies on the information needs of older adults and their caregivers, a sensing system called “dwellSense” that can monitor, assess, and provide feedback about how well individuals complete tasks, such as taking medications, using the phone, and making coffee, was designed, built, and evaluated. Multiple longterm (over 10 months) field deployments of dwellSense were used to investigate how the data collected from the system could support greater self-awareness of abilities and intentions to improve in task performance. Presenting and reflecting on data from ubiquitous sensing systems such as dwellSense is challenging because it is both highly dimensional as well as large in volume, particularly if it is collected over a long period of time. Thus, this work also investigates the time dimension of reflection and has identified that real-time feedback is particularly useful for supporting behavior change, and longer-term trended feedback is useful for greater awareness of abilities. Traditional forms of assessing the functional abilities of individuals tend to be either biased, lacking ecological validity, infrequent, or expensive to conduct. An automated sensor-based approach for assessment is compared to traditional performance testing by a trained clinician and found to match well with clinician-generated ratings that are objective, frequent, and ecologically valid. The contributions from this thesis not only advance the state of the art for maintaining quality of life and care for older adults, but also provide the foundations for designing personal sensing systems that aim to assess an individual’s abilities and support behaviors through the feedback of objective, timely sensed information.

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