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Designing for all means, for instance, to design for the elderly
but also to design products for people who have a disability
but also for other users,
but the main focus is to get the requirements of people with special needs into the project.
The current project design nowadays does not address the approach "design for all"
resulting in modifications that have to be done afterwards.
This is often very costly and time consuming.
For example, to adjust a car it can cost between fifteen to thirty thousand euros
The products that are already in the market are normally working fine
even if they lack accessibility from time to time
but they are also not really that user-friendly as they could be.
VERITAS is an integrated project that conducts a research
in the area of virtual user modeling, targeting people with disabilities and also elderly.
The goal is to design new products
that are fully accessible by people with disabilities and elderly
taking into account the requirements
from the very early stages of development and implementation of new products.
We are targeting various application areas:
the automotive domain, the smart living spaces domain,
the healthcare domain, the infotainment domain and also the workplace domain.
The goal of VERITAS is to create virtual user models
that can be used by developers and designers for testing the applications at any time
without the need of involving real users
which takes a lot of time and delays the implementation procedure.
Several design solutions are built in hardware prototypes
and then in real tests the accessibility is tested on these hardware prototypes
especially for aspects which cannot be simulated before.
Nowadays also in these prototypes disabled and elderly people are addressed
to do the tests on prototypes because at the moment they cannot be simulated beforehand.
The automotive development process is already strongly based on simulation
which has undoubtedly advantages in timing and coverage of performances.
When we cannot simulate we use a panel of subjects representative of the population.
So we expect from VERITAS to extend
the simulation coverage of the performance achievement of the vehicle
especially in those innovative applications which, per se, can guarantee accessibility.
You can imagine that we can design a very nice ADAS system
if the human machine interface is not correctly performed,
the system will not be accepted or trusted by the drivers.
On the other side, we are addressing all drivers. The final users are all drivers
from when you get your driving license up to elderly drivers.
And it is well known that elderly drivers have a lot of problems.
They can have some physical problems, some physiological problems,
for example, they have some head restriction, head rotation restriction,
they can have some limitation in the field of view, also some problems with the mind
we definitely think that the VERITAS project will provide us some new tools
which will be helpful to design these new ADAS systems in the future.
In the VERITAS project Piaggio intends to introduce in the ergonomic design process
new instruments that will be able to evaluate also limited physical impairments.
When we speak about the development of applications for the healthcare domain
we may find that there are a lot of user guidelines and recommendations
that will provide great usability and acceptance by the part of the end users.
But we can find that there is a lack
when we consider the accessibility for people with impairments.
The added value of VERITAS will be the possibility to have an indication
about the usability of our solution, our interfaces
before to reach the development of the product.
We expect this innovation
could have a relevant impact in our design and development cost of our solution.
We expect from VERITAS that we can set up the whole system
before we have to install it,
because the problem today is that we can only test the complete system
when it is installed and it is used by the end user
and when you want to make changes, then it is quite difficult.
With VERITAS we expect that we can do everything
before we install the whole system at the end user and we can test it and simulate it
and also involve the end user so we can save a lot of time and money
before we have the system ready.
Through the VERITAS simulation platform workspace developers would be able
to assess the applications during the designing process
by simply simulating the users of their prototypes.
Such assessment is not only targeted to the speed of interactive applications
but also is extended to the workplace itself.
Right now the design cycle for infotainment applications involves the designer
to create first an interface as a mockup, and then the application
and when the application is completed to test it against actual users
to see if the application is accessible or not to all kinds of users.
This is expensive, because at the end of the cycle, if you decide
that something is not correctly created then you need to go back to the drawing board
and redesign your interface in order to accommodate people with disabilities.
With VERITAS we are going to change this cycle so that in the design process
using the VERITAS tools, the designer can see if the user interface is accessible or not
before actually creating the application.
On the one hand, VERITAS is targeting the creation of virtual user models.
These virtual user models will represent various people with disabilities and also elderly
and will give the opportunity to the designer to introduce avatars in 3D design
or personas in 2D design in order to evaluate
the interfaces and the designs they have in various application domains
and to be able to get feedback on the accessibility of the interface
and the corrections that need to be made in order to provide more accessible new products.
The VERITAS avatar is the visual presentation of a beneficiary of the VERITAS project.
This means that it is what the end user, the designer will see in real time 3D graphics
when designing the product for the beneficiary, for the disabled or elderly people.
We constructed avatars in two ways.
The first is programmatically with software taking demographical data,
statistics about the age, the size and the weight of the people
and automatically building an avatar for the VERITAS project.
The second way is through the work - the handcraft of 3D artists
that use the very same tools that are used in cinema for digital movie production
to build the avatars that will be inserted also in the VERITAS project.
One of the most important aspects of the VERITAS project
is to monitor and measure physical parameters.
This can be done in two different ways: one way is to use a separate system of sensors,
the other one is to integrate all of them together in one platform
and that's what we have decided in VERITAS.
The multisensioral platform is composed of several systems:
the motion tracking which is used for gait analysis,
the electrogoniometer, which is used for the monitoring of the knee movement,
the inertial platform that can be used to measure the inclination
of arms and limbs with the ground,
the human glove for the monitoring of the hand,
motion capture that is used for monitoring all parts of the body,
the force panel, which is used to measure the skill of the person,
the load cell to measure the force of the arms,
the video sensing to monitor the movement of the arms in a car usually
and the Vicon which is a standard, a gold standard, very complex,
for monitoring of the whole body movements.
We developed a garment-based motion capture which is very new
in the panorama of the systems that capture the motion of users
in the sense that it is able to measure simultaneously the shape of the body and the motion.
We have as a final step gathered and completed a model
with all of these parameters, affected by psychological states
that will present different behaviors of the VERITAS user models.
On the other hand VERITAS gives the designer the opportunity
to be immersed in a virtual environment and act as the user with disabilities
in order for him or her to be able to take the role of the disabled person
and understand the actual difficulties that they have when interacting with the environment.
Let's consider this example: As a designer wants to test
if the interface he has created for one game
is visible to people with low visibility, or with cataract,
or with any other impairment concerning their eyes.
With VERITAS they can load that particular user model, let's say a cataract user model
and they can see through the eyes of the impaired user with cataract
showing black spots on the screen as they try to look at the interface.
If they try, for example, to click on a button which is not visible
because of a black spot in the impaired user's visual field,
they will have to see the interface from another point of view
and see if they can move the object to a position that is more accessible.
The main challenge is to try to represent a real human with a virtual user model.
You understand how difficult it is.
Of course, we cannot support all functionalities
a real human would be able to perform in a real environment
but we can support basic functionalities.
We can support also some complex tasks a real human would perform in his environment.
The goal is to target the main parts of the interface
of each of the applications that we are developing
in order to be sure that this interface is mostly accessible.
These measurements have taken place in many countries in Europe
with all ranges of disabilities and older people.
Of course, at the final stage we will also rely on people with disabilities
to test those kind of products that have been designed using the VERITAS simulators.
VERITAS planned three user and beneficiary forums.
Three moments in which the users- the designers and the developers,
and the beneficiaries - so older people, but also people with disabilities
and people with other different kinds of impairments
gathered together and have been able to exchange their views and their needs
on the products and services that VERITAS is dealing with.
It's a challenge - people speaking different languages
not in terms of national languages only, but also in terms of their backgrounds that they have.
So, it's a challenge on the first hand, but on the other hand it gives us a lot of benefit
so we have all the people, all the stakeholders right attending the project
and we can work very effectively, taking into account
the needs of the different stakeholders from industry, from research
but also disabled people and elderly people - all are inside the project.