HOPE (Helping Our People Easily) is a smartphone application intended to alleviate the communication issues and other day-to-day difficulties (such as muscle weaknesses leading to falls) faced by anyone, but particularly by the elderly who suffer from their age-related symptoms, such as memory, speech, hearing, and vision loss.
As the senior population increases world-wide, so does the need for alleviating such losses. HOPE is also extended to care for people suffering from such conditions as Autism and Aphasia.
HOPE is an assistive device that is designed to be cheap, ubiquitous and pleasant to use. Apart from alleviating barriers in communication, HOPE also offers other features, such as medicine reminders, fall detection and response, object magnification, location finder and emergency notifications. It is currently built on the Android OS mobile platform. With the premise that human perception and reasoning is largely visual, HOPE is used through icons and pictures, as well as through voice recognition and text/speech-to-speech/text capabilities - which again can be transformed into icons and pictures.
Our research spans across cross-cutting research domains, namely Requirements Engineering (in particular, Goal-oriented Non-Functional Requirements Analysis), Ubiquitous Computing (in particular, Context-Awareness), Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), and Mobile Platform Modeling (in particular, SmartPhone ontology, including sensors and actuators).
HOPE addresses the dimensions of Memory, Speech, Hearing and Vision that are critical for human perception and reasoning, while also hosting a myriad of other human-friendly features. Where there is a HOPE, there is a way for an independent, more enjoyable life!
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Research
HOPE to be part of a research paper at SAC RE 2013, Portugal
HOPE as a case study, presented as part of a research paper at ACIS-ICIS 2012, China
Teaching
Fall 2012 - completes with an exciting set of undergraduate student projects based on HOPE. Some past projects Now, on Youtube !
Upcoming
Version 2.0 of the HOPE questionnaire underway