Empathetic computing for inclusive application design

The explosive growth of the ecosystem of personal and ambient computing de- vices coupled with the proliferation of high-speed connectivity has enabled ex- tremely powerful and varied mobile computing applications that are used every- where. While such applications have tremendous potential to improve the lives of impaired users, most mobile applications have impoverished designs to be inclusive– lacking support for users with specific disabilities. Mobile app designers today haveinadequate support to design existing classes of apps to support users with specific disabilities, and more so, lack the support to design apps that specifically target these users. One way to resolve this is to use an empathetic computing system to let designer-developers step into the shoes of impaired users and experience the impairment while evaluating the designs of mobile apps. A key challenge to enable this is in supporting real-time naturalistic interactions in an interaction environment that maintains consistency between the user’s tactile, visual and proprioceptive perceptions with no perceivable discontinuity. This has to be performed within the context of an immersive virtual environment, which allows control of any visual or auditory artefacts to simulate impairments. To achieve this, substantial considerations of the interaction experience and coordination between the various system components are required. We designed Empath-D, an augmented virtuality system that addresses this chal- lenge. I show in this dissertation that through the use of naturalistic interaction in augmented virtuality, the immersive simulation of impairments can better support identifying and fixing impairment specific problems in the design of mobile appli- cations. The dissertation was validated in the following way. I first demonstrate that the concept of immersive evaluation results in lower mental demands for designers in a design study. I then show that Empath-D despite the latencies introduced through creating the augmented virtuality, is ...