Abstract. The human-computer interaction community has largely defended the use of an iterative process in which the users and stakeholders participate in all activities throughout the development of an interactive system. This work can become challenging when users have an evolving profiles in degenerative diseases (e.g. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s). The needs of the users at the start of the process may no longer be the same at the end when the system is validated. As consequence, it is important to integrate users in different stages of the disease in the whole process. The involvement of stakeholders (such as healthcare professionals, family members and caregivers) is also crucial for the better understanding of the user’s needs and their evolving profile. This article presents how we deal with the evolving user profile in the development of a communication aid software for people with Parkinson’s disease. To that end, we have customized the ISO 9241-210 human-centred process with a series of human-computer studies from a broad to a more focused goal. It presents this process and the complementary studies carried out with 97 people with Parkinson’s disease, 5 relatives/caregivers and 5 health professionals. In light of the insights gained from this experience, we have formulated several recommendations for human-centred design in the context of a user with an evolving profile. These recommendations outline a human-centred approach to guide the development of software applications for users with evolving profiles.

While the serious game concept has considerably evolved in the last two decades, it still needs to be clearly differentiated from other types of artifacts. Thus, there is a degree of confusion about the relationship between serious games and other related applications, such as simulators or the repurposing of entertainment games within educational practices for most outside the domain. This article proposes a formal approach toward classifying games, toys, serious games, serious toys, serious repurposing and modding, and simulators. The aim of this theoretical work is twofold. First, on a practical level, this approach aims at helping actors from different ecosystems, such as health, to differentiate between these various devices and use them to their best advantage. Second, from a research perspective, based on a formal approach, our work aims to contribute to developing a taxonomy for gamified intervention with serious purposes. This formal approach demonstrates that unique combinations can be proposed to distinguish each kind of application. In this context, serious games can be seen as a specific purpose and not as a synonym for other existing applications.

Everyday travel in expanding cities is becoming increasingly complicated. Going to the doctor, to work, to the cinema, or simply discovering the districts of a city requires knowledge of the city and navigation skills. The future challenge is more than just providing correct guidance to make navigation easier; it is more about delivering the relevant information when it is needed and prioritizing the continuous development of the users’ navigation skills. This article aims to present a novel model based on existing literature about the cognitive wayfinding process by proposing a state diagram for interactive system analysis and design. This diagram may help to illustrate different states of the wayfinding task and how navigation aid systems for pedestrians can consider this context awareness to create an adaptive behavior considering the spatial knowledge of the user. A first study, focusing on one state of the wayfinding process: Path Following state, and its results are presented illustrating one example of different studies that can be designed considering our wayfinding model. At the end of this article, we highlight a set of design guidelines that may lead to the next generation of navigation aid systems based on the wayfinding model.

After having outlined the uses of new technologies such as smartphones, touch-screen tablets, and laptops, this article presents the TangiSense interactive tabletop, equipped with RFID technology tagged on tangible objects, as a new paradigm of interaction for ambient intelligence. Within its framework, this article aims to distribute surfaces (tables) interacting mainly with tangible objects. Leads for interactive surface distribution such as interactive tables are given. The article proposes to describe some tangible objects, which are the interaction supports; these are called Tangigets. They are defined according to an augmented Presentation-Abstraction-Control structure to take the tangibility element into account. Six categories of Tangigets are also proposed, which are tangible objects, and the supports of distributed collaboration. To validate the Tangiget concept and its use on the TangiSense tabletop, illustrations in centralized and distributed configurations are proposed. A first evaluation is also presented. To conclude, the article presents the directions under consideration for our future research.

The last years witnessed a continued growth of the amount of data. The data analysis and exploration has become more and more difficult. So, it seems important to find means to visually represent this flood of data. Information visualization can help any user to get and understand information efficiently and implicate him/her in the data mining process thanks to our perception possibilities. The visualization domain proposes a large number of information visualization techniques which have been developed over the last decade to support the exploration of large data sets. In this paper, we propose a classification of information visualization techniques. We present also each technique, its advantages and disadvantages.