D3.2: Emerging & Accessible Healthcare Technologies

Review: Emerging Interfaces for Multimodal Accessibility

Progress on Medical Interfaces for Multimodal Accessibility

Multimodal sensory interfaces display information content (and perhaps controls) in more than one sensory mode. It relates to accessibility, and clearly has implications for future interfaces for accessible medical insturmentation. For more information, see our review of some of the ongoing national and international activities in this area, especially as related to the W3C's Multimodal Interaction Activity and the V2 Standard (officially five standards called ANSI-INCITS 389-2005 through ANSI-INCITS 393-2005) for "Universal Remote Consoles" (URCs)) for "Target" devices and services.

One early focus for D3.2 has been on D3 technical reports. The specific targets will be refined based on the results of Program R.1 (Needs Analyses). In the interim, the focus has been on the development of technological reports in targeted areas related to the objectives of this project, produced by students and staff as adjunct to their primary project. There are two types of reports:

• Areas related to evolving or emerging standards (e.g., HL7, V2)
• Areas where the focus is on creation of product tables.

To date, activity has primarily been during the summers of 2003-2005. Reports are expected to be placed on the web for most of these areas during September 2005, in advance of our State-of-the-Science Workshop.

The primary target of D3.2 development activities is now the Universal Remote Console (V2) suite of standards, the work of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). This a suite of standards, now officially adopted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and called ANSI-INCITS 389-2005 through ANSI-INCITS 393-2005, allow operation of device/service through intermediate devices and intelligent agents. These URC standards build on existing network and communication standards, adding components and capabilities as necessary to allow for user interface descriptions that are standardized flexible and versatile. They are network neutral, and work with diverse networking and control technologies including Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), etc. The standards describe methods in which a device/service (called a Target in the V2 standards) can be used to provide user interface information for any remote console, which in the V2 standard is called a URC (Universal Remote Console), or intelligent agent. This information intended to be sufficient to dynamically construct a full function user interface for the device/service; the intent is to enable any of visual, audio or natural language interfaces to be constructed, given the appropriate describing documents .Along with three other RERCs, we are a member of INCITS-V2. There are two project areas:

• V2 as Device - MedURC: This project addresses control/display interfaces for three classes of common medical “target” devices, all of which build on available student technical reports: home medical “vital sign” monitors, exercise monitors, and exam table/bed controls.
• V2 as Service - UniTherapy: This project addresses how this telerehabilitation and home appliance platform, primarily developed for computer-assisted motivating rehabilitation applications, is being turned into an accessible service. This process has involved transformation to a service-oriented universal access infrastructure that supports intelligent context-awareness user interface generation that is dependent on current and emerging standards such as the URC standard. The infrastructure, expanded by non-URC components specific to UniTherapy as shown in the diagram below which borrows from the work of the Trace Center and the "myurc" web site dedicated to V2, describes the approach.

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  The URC diagram shown above for the overall framework (in an enclosed black box) comes from http://www.myurc.com/, authored by Zimmermann and Vanderheiden. This diagram extends this URC conceptualization by UniTherapy specific components. The discovery and control session between target and URC is connected by Target-URC Network. Out of band, the lower blocks in line with the "direct link" are specific to UniTherapy in order to provide a high-speed connection for performance session; a Target Intelligent Agent will be used to optimize the Target functionalities based on user’s performance data and context information such as loaded protocol; also, the User Accessibility Resources (top right) are supplemental resources needed by a URC to customize user interface design when using UniTherapy.

  An outgrowth of this work is our MUPad software tool, which was designed by Xin "Tyre" Feng and provides an interface for generating V2-compliant xml documents.