Y. Demazeau et al. (Eds.): Trends in PAAMS, AISC 71, pp. 639–647. springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

An Intelligent Tutoring System Oriented to the Integration of People with Intellectual Disabilities

A. Conde, K. López de Ipiña, M. Larrañaga, J.A. Elorriaga, J.M. López, E. Irigoyen, N. Garay-Vitoria, A. Ezeiza, and J. Rubio*

Abstract. The development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) based on mo-bile platforms offers new perspectives for a better integration of people with intel-lectual disabilities. The LAGUNTXO System aims to achieve the performance of human tutors. Due to the wide diversity related to a person with disabilities, an in-telligent structure that may achieve a convenient tutoring system configuration for

*A. Conde . K. López de Ipiña . E. Irigoyen . A. Ezeiza Departamento Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Escuela Técnica superior de Ingeniería, Bilbao, Escuela Politécnica Donostia, Grupo de Inteligencia Computacional e-mail: {angel.conde,karmele.ipina,eloy.irigoyen, aitzol.ezeiza}@ehu.es

M. Larrañaga . J.A. Elorriaga

Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Grupo GALAN, Facultad de Informática e-mail: {mikel.larranaga,jon.elorriaga}@ehu.es

N. Garay-Vitoria Departamento de Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores, Laboratorio de Interacción Persona Computador para Necesidades Especiales, Facultad de Informática Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea Plaza de Europa1, Donostia, 20008 e-mail: nestor.garay@ehu.es

J.M. López Departmento de Informática e Ingeniería Industrial, Grupo de Investigación en Interacción Persona Ordenador y Bases de Datos (GRIHO) Universitat de Lleida, Pl. Víctor Siurana 1, 25003, Lleida e-mail: juanmi@diei.udl.cat

J. Rubio Fundación LEIA CDT Industrial Safety Unit, P.T. Alava – C/ Leonardo Da Vinci, 11, 01510 Miñano (Álava) - Spain e-mail: jokinr@leia.es

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each case has been incorporated. With an appropriate design of the structure and architecture of this task handler, it is very easy to operate by stakeholders. An automaton-based mechanism has been performed to technologically adapt the large amount of possibilities related to the interaction between people with dis-abilities, the task that is going to be made autonomously by users, and the mobile system elements. In this paper, LAGUNTXO architecture, operational ways, heu-ristic evaluation and a pilot study with final users are presented.

Keywords: People with intellectual and physical disabilities, Intelligent Tutoring System, Integration enhancement.

1 Introduction

Integrating people with disabilities into working and social environments is one of the main issues in applying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into the Assistive Technology field. Particularly, it is necessary to pay special at-tention to the integration problem of people with intellectual disabilities. The ori-gin of this project lies in a request of GUREAK ARABA S.L. (GRUPO GUREAK), a company that works in the integration of people with disabilities.

Computer aided systems have been successfully applied in many fields [1]. In-telligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are computer-based instructional systems with models of instructional content that specify what to teach, and teaching strategies that specify how to teach [2, 3]. The ITS monitors the learner performance to de-termine the student's mastery on certain topics or tasks and how to satisfy their re-quirements by selecting the most appropriate pedagogical strategy and content to be taught. Intelligent Tutoring Systems working into mobile platforms are an ap-propriate response to one of the main problems of people with disabilities: their integration into social and working environments [4]. These devices are designed to reach the user adaptation and to obtain an interaction that allows overcoming personal disabilities, for increasing the performance, individual autonomy, work-ing capability, personal safety and a healthy environment in workplaces [5].

At the moment, the project has been carried out by a multidisciplinary re-search group with researchers from different fields such as Computing, Psychology, Medicine, and Engineering. These studies have also caused several works with so-cial environment associations and companies devote to the industrial integration of people with disabilities. The level of success achieved within the project life is de-scribed in detail in the next sections. Section 2 describes in detail the architecture of LAGUNTXO SYSTEM. Section 3 shows results that have been obtained from the heuristic evaluation and a pilot study with final users. Finally, some conclu-sions and future work are shown in section 4.

2 Architecture of LAGUNTXO System

The LAGUNTXO system has been developed for the purpose of enhancing the in-tegration of people with intellectual disabilities into their working and social

An ITS Oriented to the Integration of People with Intellectual Disabilities 641

environments. It has to achieve the performance of human tutors, going a further step than those classical tutoring systems [3] by dealing not only with the manage-ment of the tasks to be performed but also with the broad diversity of people with cognitive disabilities. Hence, the designed LAGUNTXO prototype has been struc-tured in four main sub-systems: the Task Management System (TMS), the Intelli-gent Tutoring System in Mobile Platform (ITS-MP), the Intelligent Dialog System (IDS), and the Human Emotions Analysis System (HEAS). The Task Management System (TMS) has been developed to overcome the lack of suitable tools that deal properly with the broad diversity of people with disabilities when defining the tasks to be performed.

Fig. 1 (a) Structure of the TMS, (b) Structure of the ITS-MP

In this work, a system that provides the possibility of personalized configura-tion has been created: it handles any possible case in separate profiles due to the diversity of the disabled people collective.

The TMS is composed by three modules where the information is divided in the following parts: Tasks to carry out, Ergonomic characteristics and Users’ personal information: to prevent accidents and emotional blockage situations for avoiding personal and physical damage.

In the TMS (Figure 1.a) this information is organized in several databases or re-positories which can be continuously updated by users, tutors, caregivers and rela-tives. Moreover, the TMS has been designed to allow a comfortable and simple configuration, giving to users an easy way to build the profile that will be loaded into ITS-MP (Figure 1.b). In this sense, TMS has inside an automaton-based

(a)

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642

mechanism supporting sevnication with tutors, carefunctionality. Finally, it geconfigurable devices whicscreen to configure automwhich are connected by subtask (simple or compleing on user disabilities, tastates and transitions willpriate media type (image, and the device features. Tand the existing mobile pl

Fig. 2 (a) Interface to createing the TMS (c) ITS-MP inte

For every device, inforfor a particular user or chatains their personal informinvolved. This informationDatabase structure is co

A. Conde et a

veral functions. First, the automaton handles the commuegivers and relatives to allow better understanding of ienerates the characteristics map of all Intelligent Tutorinch will be activated. Finally, Figure 2a shows an editio

maton states. These states are organized in several leveconditional transitions. Each state represents a differeex) to perform in order to solve the entire tasks. Dependasks profiles, and handheld mobile platforms, approprial be charged on those platforms. Furthermore, the approsound, etc.) will be used considering both the user profi

TMS manages information about people with disabilitielatforms.

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rmation that might be used to determine if it is appropriaaracteristic is provided. Meanwhile, the users records con

mation in an anonymous way, as well as the personal taskn is encrypted with different levels of access by passwor

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An ITS Oriented to the Integration of People with Intellectual Disabilities 643

images, videos, texts, etc., configuring the skeleton of the task. There exist two types of states. For interconnecting states, different transitions, defined by the stakeholders, have been created. The program is user-friendly, reliable, usefulness, agreeable, with a clear interface to be used by people with low computing knowl-edge. These interfaces are presented on tables or menus, depending on handled data (Figure 2).activated. Looking at ITS-MP in Figure 1b, and due to the characteristics of the people who will use these devices, it is absolutely necessary to design an in-terface that shows the following features: friendly, comfortable, flexible and ergo-nomically adapted to their characteristics. The main objective of this project lays in providing these users with a cognitive tool that contributes to the improvement of their autonomy, quality of life as well as help in the occupational health and safety management. Another objective is to integrate a task management into the portable device. To improve this, intelligent technologies based on fuzzy systems are used [2]. The basic structure of ITS-MP is based on rules and on an automaton mecha-nism to communicate with all sub-system of the ITS, similar to the mechanism pre-viously detailed. An interface example can be seen at Figure 2c. It shows several screens where users may select the next subtask step by audio-video messages.

3 Evaluation

3.1 Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation is a well-known and used usability evaluation method. To ap-ply this technique, a group of experts must evaluate the fulfilment of a set of prin-ciples (or heuristics) by the user interface of the system to be evaluated [6]. In this sense, a Heuristic Evaluation has been carried out on the user interface of LA-GUNTXO system. The evaluation process has been divided in two parts. First, the user interface of the tutor generator was evaluated using the set of heuristics pro-posed by Pierotti [7]. Second, the user interface of a concrete tutor was evaluated in a mobile phone, using the eight heuristics principles defined by Bertini [8]. A ninth heuristic was incorporated to evaluate learnability, as it is considered an im-portant issue for LAGUNTXO system. Each heuristic principle was composed by a set of subheuristics that evaluators had to evaluate by following the Severity Ranking Scale (SRS) proposed by Nielsen [6], which ranks the potential usability errors according to their importance.

A total of 12 experts participated in the evaluation from different fields such as Computing, Psychology, Medicine, and Engineering. Every expert evaluated both ITS-TMS and ITS-MP systems, each of them using its corresponding set of heu-ristics and subheuristics. The procedure established that every expert had to pass all the heuristic and their corresponding subheuristics to the user interface. For every subheuristic, as a first step, experts had to check whether it was applicable or not to the user interface been studied. In case the subheuristic was applicable, the experts had to rank it according to Nielsen’s SRS, ranging from 0 (no usability problem at all) to 4 (usability catastrophe). Not applicable subheuristics have not been represented in the results of the evaluation as the focus was set on identifying potential usability errors on applicable subheuristics.

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Fig. 3 Percentages of Cosmetic, Minor and Major usability problems found for ITS-TMS (a) and ITS-MP (b)

In order to normalize the results, values have been divided into three groups. Every group has been represented regarding its percentage for every subheuristic, so their relevance for every subheuristic can easily be seen in the figure. A first group was composed by subheuristics that are not considered as potential usability errors and the ones considered as cosmetic problems; this group has been repre-sented in the figure with blue color. On the other hand, brown color represented the subheuristics identified as minor usability problems. Finally, major and catas-trophic usability problem have been represented by using green color in the figure.

Figure 3 shows the results of the heuristic evaluation for both ITS-TMS and ITS-MP systems. Results show that studied systems have achieved a remarkable usability level. Even if there still are a number of major usability issues to solve, their amount is significantly low compared to the amount of subheuristics applica-ble on both studied user interfaces. Moreover, the sets of heuristics employed comprised 292 and 48 subheuristics respectively and have been based on solid foundations found in literature. This fact indicates that performed evaluation has been complete enough to ensure the validity of employed sets of heuristics and subheuristics. Besides, according to Nielsen [6], a number of five expert evalua-tors is enough to discover a relevant amount of usability problems in a user inter-face. In this sense, the amount of experts involved in the evaluation ensures that a relevant number of usability problems belonging to the user interface have been identified in the evaluation process.

3.2 Pilot Test

So as to test a first version of the ITS, we developed a prototype which has been used with people with intellectual disabilities and with people in risk of exclusion, both in working and collective environments. This prototype has been integrated into a mobile phone, as shown in Fig. 4. For evaluation purposes a module that collects data of the use of the tutor was developed. Initially, 14 users participated in the test: 7 people were chosen in indoor working places, and other 7 in a flat dedicated to the learning of daily life skills.

An ITS Oriented to the Integration of People with Intellectual Disabilities 645

Fig. 4 An user of the ITS by a mobile phone

From the beginning of each test the implication of users and caregivers or working trainers was sought. Different indicators covering both subjective and ob-jective parameters were created and measured during the test.

This allowed the project team to evaluate the usability of the tools taking into account the efficacy and efficiency of the tool and the satisfaction of the people implicated in the test. With relation to objective indicators (Table1), results show that tutor help was mainly used during first days and that performance is rapidly enhanced when using the tutor. Both caregivers/human tutors and researchers in-volved in this work expressed a remarkable satisfaction and considered it very useful. It is worth mentioning the short cycle of use and that it is used even outside the workinghours.

Table 1 Evaluation items and (b) subjective and (c) objective indicators

Type What Work activities User Initial/final interviews and questionnaires

Subjetive Satisfaction Trainer Initial/final interviews and questionnaires Client Final interviews Efficiency Trainer Number of calls

Objetive and client Number of questions Efficacy Trainer % os success in tasks

Subjective Indicators

Attribute User Trainer Client Satisfaction Very

high High High

Usefulness Very high

High High

Improve the train-ing

High Moderate

Improve the auton-omy

High Moderate

Improve speed Low Low Reduce errors high Moderate

Objetive Indicators Task per-formance

Most suc-cessfully finished

Questions Few/first days

Phone Calls Few first days

646 A. Conde et al.

5 Concluding Remarks and Future Outlines

A Due to the wide casuistic of the people with intellectual disabilities a friendly, comfortable, flexible and ergonomically adapted Intelligent Tutoring System into mobile platforms has been designed. A prototype called LAGUNTXO has been developed (free software under GNU license). It works as an active distributed support system, and allows compensating user disabilities through task program-ming, facilitating suspension and resuming of tasks, offering help in blockage situations.

Heuristic evaluation and pilot tests indicate a high level of satisfaction of both the users and the stakeholders. On the one hand, it is increasing the users’ auton-omy, improving their training and the quality of their work. On the other hand, stakeholders have a new and easily configurable tool that reduces the time they have to dedicate in training.

Moreover, the job made so far has offered an opportunity to establish a solid link of communication between the social world of disabled people, caregivers and trainers, and the technological world of researchers. This link is leading to improve the knowledge and to overcome the gap between these two often sepa-rated worlds. In these sense, work is already being done to fulfil the new chal-lenges that the project collaboration is generating. Complementary tools are being integrated in the system to improve its usefulness and to include the system within an ambient intelligence architecture. These tools are based on pattern matching (images and speech), human emotional feeling analysis, contextual information deployment (GPS, networking), and Artificial Intelligent (AI) techniques, giving the system the capacity of dynamic adaptation to the learning process.

Acknowledgements. The involved work has received financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, project TSI2006-14250-C02-01, and the Spanish Min-isterio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio, project PDM-2006-178.

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