Our research proposes a novel methodology for the design of immersive learning environments that prioritize accessibility and inclusion of adults with various disabilities. In contrast to existing hyper-specialized approaches that lack generalizability, it integrates Universal Design for Learning and participatory design to balance scalability and personalization. The iterative process promotes adaptable and universally accessible solutions through multidisciplinary collaboration and empirical validation. Preliminary results confirm the potential of Extended Reality to overcome pedagogical, spatial and social barriers and underline the need for standardized, flexible design guidelines.

While access to quality health services is a basic human right, it is not guaranteed for everyone, especially for people with neurodevelopmental disorder such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). For people with ASD, emotions can play an important role in the success of therapy. Severe anxiety before and during visits to specialists often leads to behavioral problems and poor cooperation, which can make treatment impossible. Using digital tools to support people with ASD in their daily lives can help manage anxiety and stress when accessing healthcare paths. However, the adaptation of these tools to ASD is still very rare. In this context, within the framework of the ACCESS project, we aim at developing a technological solution for personalized access to healthcare for individuals with ASD (including users of any age), and to demonstrate the developed methodology in the use case of the specialised Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) treatments for people with ASD. The main challenges of this study is the development of a system that can support people with ASD through customizable features tailored to their needs. We will conduct two experimental studies to validate the effectiveness and usability of our solution.

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often face various barriers in accessing healthcare due to anxiety and fear. Our framework of the ACCESS project aims to develop a system that supports people with ASD during Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) examinations. By incorporating personalized serious games and information materials, we aim to reduce anxiety and improve cooperation. We have developed two applications, WithMe: Paziente and WithMe: Clinica. Compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation was a crucial aspect of the development process. In this paper, we explain the methods and design solutions that we used to develop our system, ensuring both ease of use and data protection.

Progress in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can make a real difference in the quality-of-life of persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by acting on several aspects, from customized software for communication, to emotion recognition, to social behavior and also to provide systems for the observation of the wide spectrum of manifestations, to ease the diagnosis, to support the therapy, and to monitor the improvement and the growth of children with ASD. This has been achieved by the introduction of a large number of innovative technologies, spanning from Internet of Things, to robotics, virtual and augmented reality, etc. Differently from other surveys on the same research area, we focus this survey on innovative technologies used in this field, and we organize a classification of the papers based on three different but strictly crossed axis, namely the triad of impairment (either communication, social interaction, or social behaviors), research purpose (either diagnosis or therapy), and system activity (either monitoring or intervention).

Oral health care can be a challenging experience for children with autism, for their parents and for dentists. Recently, some technology-enhanced systems have been proposed to help people with autism to cope with distressing situations originated by unknown social-life contexts, such as dental care settings with intense sound-visual stimulations. Results were positive in mitigating anxiety at the dental clinic but seem to fail in supporting proper oral hygiene at home. Thanks to the increasing spread of household Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) and Vocal Conversational Agents (VCAs), we envisage new opportunities considering the Voice-enabled IPAs not only as support on daily activities but also to enrich and simplify access to healthcare procedures from home. This work attempts to extend the use of technology-enhanced systems for dental care by exploiting the potential of the Vocal User Interface, Amazon Alexa, as an instructional agent with children on the spectrum. To this purpose, we developed a personalized Alexa Skill with two different functionalities: (i) support the child during the routine transition toward the target activity: move to the bathroom to brush their teeth; (ii) act as a persuader and a timer to guide the child during the procedure observing the proper brushing time. We conducted a three-week preliminary study with three children of different autistic profiles. The goal was to collect opportunities and issues deriving from the device introduction in the home context and test the device usage to favour dental care. Results and feedback were encouraging and gave insights to improve this approach.

Dental health in children with autism presents many challenges, due to their different perception of sensory experience and difficulty accepting unknown social contexts. The dental care setting presents strong sound-visual stimulations that can upset a patient with autism, often forcing dentists to administer chemical sedation in order to deliver dental care. In recent years, several technology-enhanced systems and apps have been proposed to help people with autism adapt to new contexts and cope with distressing social situations. Our study explores the potential of personalized digital tools for familiarizing these children with dental procedures and environments, and teaching them how to perform proper oral hygiene at home. A 3-month study to test ICT tools created to control children's anxiety and avoid sedation was carried out involving researchers, developers, dentists, psychologists, parents and ten children with autism observed under natural conditions during their first dental care cycle. The results appear to confirm the potential of personalized technology to reduce anxiety in professional settings, increasing children's wellbeing and safety and encouraging oral hygiene as part of their daily routine.

The realization of smart cities relies on the availability of large amount of data about occurring phenomena/events that can be guaranteed by very large deployments of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). This poses a great challenge to the scalability of current routing protocols for WSN due to the size and density of the network and the presence of mobile sensors.We tackle this problem by proposing a solution based on virtual coordinate systems combined with mechanisms that renew the virtual coordinates and suitable routing schemes. The simulation results show that this approach is actually suited to this context and that it guarantees high delivery rate and low path length.

This paper analyzes the behavior of the MAC layer in applications using stencil skeletons in Visual Sensor Networks (VSN) applications. Specifically, we analyze the communication pattern required by a specific skeleton (INS) and simulate its behavior using a selection current MAC layers available on VSN. We analyze both the energy required by different MACs and their ability to reach low latencies needed for real-time applications. The results show that, using energy efficient protocols like T-MAC, it is possible to reach a good tradeoff between performance and energy. To reach this result, however, T-MAC parameters (frame size, contention time and timeout) need to be carefully tuned exploiting the characteristics of the pattern.

Due to limitations in sensors' hardware and communication, routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has required different approaches as compared to more powerful and conventional networks. One successful approach to the routing problem in WSN is based on geographic protocols that, however, must rely on coordinates and that are limited to two-dimensional networks. We propose here an approach that guarantees packet delivery in networks of any dimensionality. This approach combines a recursive coordinate assignment protocol based on the network topology and a specific routing protocol. Both protocols are simple, and the path lengths produced by the routing protocol are slightly larger than the shortest paths.

In-network storage of data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is considered a promising alternative to external storage since it contributes to reduce the communication overhead inside the network. Recent approaches to data storage rely on Geographic Hash Tables (GHT) for efficient data storage and retrieval. These approaches, however, assume that sensors are uniformly distributed in the sensor field, which is seldom true in real applications. Also they do not allow tuning the redundancy level in the storage according to the importance of the data to be stored. To deal with these issues, we propose an approach based on two mechanisms. The first is aimed at estimating the real network distribution. The second exploits data dispersal method based on the estimated network distribution. Experiments through simulation show that our approach approximates quite closely the real distribution of sensors and that our dispersal protocol sensibly reduces data losses due to unbalanced data load.

Storage of sensed data in wireless sensor networks is essential when the sink node is unavailable due to failure and/or disconnections, but it can also provide efficient access to sensed data to multiple sink nodes. Recent approaches to data storage rely on Geographic Hash Tables for efficient data storage and retrieval. These approaches however do not support different QoS levels for different classes of data as the programmer has no control on the level of redundancy of data (and thus on data dependability). Moreover, they result in a great unbalance in the storage usage in each sensor, even when sensors are uniformly distributed. This may cause serious data losses, waste energy and shorten the overall lifetime of the sensornet. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol, Q-NiGHT, which (1) provides a direct control on the level of QoS in the data dependability, and (2) uses a strategy similar to the rejection method to build a hash function which scatters data approximately with the same distribution as sensors. The benefits of Q-NiGHT are assessed through a detailed simulation experiment, also discussed in the paper. Results show its good performance on different sensors distributions on terms of both protocol costs and load balance between sensors. 1

LEO/MEO constellations of communication satellites have recently been proposed as a powerful tool for improving internet performance and for extending it beyond the earth (InterPlanetary Internet). Several aspects of such usage must still be investigated. Among them, proper routing and MAC protocols play a prominent role. In this paper,we assume that the MAC protocol is an MF/TDMA one (as usual in satellite communication), and we consider the problem of assigning packets to a set of shortest paths in a satellite constellation, with the goal of minimizing the overall packet scheduling problem. We present an optimal polynomial time algorithm which works offline and balances the load over all possible shortest paths, allowing a minimum schedule length for the entire constellation to be found in polynomial time.

In this paper, we study the problem of on demand minimum length packet scheduling in single-hop multichannel systems. Examples of these systems are those centered around switching networks, like crossbar switches, and WDM optical fiber networks. On demand scheduling require that packets are scheduled upon receipt, and without changing the schedule of earlier packets. On demand scheduling is performed by on-line algorithms. In this paper we-show that a large group of online scheduling algorithms, called maximal algorithms, are asymptotically optimal (in the worst case sense). This result is established by first giving the competitive ratio of these algorithms (nearly 3), and then by showing that no on-line algorithm can (asymptotically) perform better in the worst case. Then, we run a simulation experiment on randomly generated problem instances, whose outcome indicates an average increase of the schedule length of maximal algorithms, of 5% with respect to the lower bound.

Abstract The paper presents a parallel programming methodology that ensures easy programming, efficiency and portability of programs to different machines belonging to the class of the general‐purpose, distributed‐memory, MIMD architectures. The methodology is based on the definition of a new, high‐level, explicitly parallel language, called P3L, and of a set of static tools that automatically adapt the program features for each target architecture. P3L does not require programmers to specify process activations, the actual parallelism degree, scheduling, or interprocess communications, i.e. all those features that need to be adjusted to harness each specific target machine. Parallelism is, on the other hand, expressed in a structured and qualitative way, by hierarchical composition of a restricted set of language constructs, corresponding to those forms of parallelism that are frequently encountered in parallel applications, and that can be efficiently implemented. The efficient portability of P3L applications is guaranteed by the compiler along with the novel structure of the support. The compiler automatically adapts the program features for each specific architecture, using the costs (in terms of performance) of the low‐level mechanisms exported by the architecture itself. In our methodology, these costs, along with other features of the architecture, are viewed through an abstract machine, whose interface is used by the compiler to produce the final object code.

A methodology is presented which is aimed at the development of efficient and portable software for general-purpose highly-parallel computers. The methodology has two major components: a programming language that allows the programmer to express the parallelism of an application at a high level and an abstract model of parallel computers that allows programs written for it to be mapped efficiently to different multiple instruction-multiple data (MIMD) parallel computers.>