Self-determination is a universal right and a central concept in support processes for people with disabilities. Enabling a disabled person to make choices, and to have a life plan not influenced by the entourage, are major challenges. In this context, the aims of the present study are: 1) To design and develop a digital assistant for the elaboration of a life plan that is easily usable by future users (adapted to the cognitive characteristics of people with Down Syndrome (DS); 2) Assess the impact of the use of this assistant on the life plan, autonomy, and quality of life of people with DS. The design process resulted in the development of a mock-up, two prototypes and the final version. Each version has been evaluated (user scenarios to evaluate objective usability and SUS scale and QUEST 2.0 to assess subjective usability and user satisfaction) and improved taking into account the comments from the previous step (37 adults with DS in total). Results confirm the relevance of the improvements made between the different versions and provide a final version offering a high degree of usability. The second objective was to assess the ability of the assistant (final version) to improve the life plan and the autonomy of such people. Evaluations were carried out on 9 adults (5 using the assistant and 4 control subjects who used a computer-based word game, during the same period) using questionnaires relating to the life plan, autonomy, and quality of life of the users. After one month of using the assistant, a positive impact was observed (compared to the control group) on the richness of the life plan and on the person’s autonomy using the Ryff psychological well-being scales.

Although Mental Imagery based Brain-Computer Interfaces (MI-BCIs) seem to be very promising for many applications, they are still rarely used outside laboratories. This is partly due to suboptimal training protocols, which provide little help to users learning how to control the system. Indeed, they do not take into account recommendations from instructional design. However, it has been shown that MI-BCI performances are significantly correlated to certain aspects of the users' cognitive profile, such as their Spatial Abilities (SA). Thus, it remains to be elucidated whether training the SA of BCI users would also improve their BCI control performance. Therefore, we proposed and validated an SA training that aimed at being included in an MI-BCI training protocol. Our pre-studies indeed confirmed that such a training does increase people's SA abilities. We then conducted a pilot study with 3 participants, one with a standard MI-BCI training protocol, one with the proposed SA training integrated into a standard MI-BCI training, and another control integrating another training, here verbal comprehension tasks, into a standard MI-BCI training. While such a small population cannot lead to any strong result, our first results show that SA training can indeed be integrated into MI-BCI training and is thus worth being further investigated for BCI user training.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a critical role in software systems, especially when targeting vulnerable individuals (e.g., assistive technologies). However, there exists a gap between well-tooled software development methodologies and HCI techniques, which are generally isolated from the development toolchain and require specific expertise. In this paper, we propose a human-driven software development methodology making User Interface (UI) a full-fledged dimension of software design. To make this methodology useful in practice, a UI design language and a user modeling language are integrated into a tool suite that guides the stakeholders during the development process, while ensuring the conformance between the UI design and its implementation.

The goal of this study is to explore new navigation methods in Virtual Reality (VR) and to understand the impact of motor activity on spatial cognition, and more precisely the question of the spatial learning transfer. We present a user study comparing two interfaces with different motor activities: the first one, a walking interface (a treadmill with rotation) gives the user a high level of sensorimotor activity (especially body-based and vestibular information). The second one, a brain computer interface (BCI), enables the user to navigate in a virtual environment (VE) without any motor activity, by using brain activity only. The task consisted in learning a path in a virtual city built from a 3D model of a real city with either one of these two interfaces (named treadmill condition and BCI condition), or in the real city directly (the real condition). Then, participants had to recall spatial knowledge, according to six different tasks assessing spatial memory and transfer. We also evaluated the ergonomics of these two interfaces and the presence felt by participants. Surprisingly, contrary to expectations, our results showed similar performances whatever the spatial restitution tasks or the interfaces used, very close to that of the real condition, which tends to indicate that motor activity is not essential to learn and transfer spatial knowledge. Even if BCI seems to be less natural to use than the treadmill, our study suggests that BCI is a promising interface for studying spatial cognition.

The use of virtual reality in the area of spatial cognition raises the question of the quality of learning transfer from a virtual to a real environment. Among the challenges, one is to determine the best cognitive aids to improve the quality of transfer and the conditions in which this is best achieved. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of passive and active exploration mode on quality of transfer in three different spatial recall tasks when the route was simple or complex.