My principle research interest is in the fit between technology and people, particular where technology mediates dialogue between people. The communication dialogues that I am most interested in are:
- Stories as a vehicle for education, promoting cross curricular project based learning, with an emphasis of hypermedia based reflective thinking
- The longitudinal story of activity as a predictor of care needs (the Dialogue of Care), supporting independence of older people living in the community
- The personal voice with which to tell life stories for disabled (non-speaking) people
Projects
1984 – 1988 Interface
Team member of “Interface” project funded by CEC DGV (Social Affairs). In the early 1980s the employment prospects for disabled people were bleak. The International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981 had raised awareness of the inequalities experienced by but also the potential to contribute to society that disabled people have. This catalysed the CEC to established actions to explore and address the structural and practical barriers encountered by disabled people, particularly when seeking work, including a Europe wide action research programme. I was concerned that disabled people were missing out on the new job opportunities that technology was bring to people. Computer systems were in principle adaptable so there seemed little practical reason why people with impaired functional or even cognitive abilities could not do jobs that previously they could not physical have done. In many cases the barriers were ignorance or prejudice. When the opportunity to work in the project arose I considered that this might be an opportunity to attempt to address these issues in practical and credible ways. I was given the responsibility for the establishment of a provision for training of adults with disabilities with the objective of them gaining employment. This activity was one part of a wider investigation of the social and economic integration of adults who have become disabled, and the factors that affected their employment prospects. The results of the specific training experience were published in:
1989 – 1991 IPSNI
CEC funded RACE project IPSNI (Integration of People with Special Needs in Integrated broadband communication). (Research Assistant) This project took place as digital multimedia technology was first becoming available for domestic and semi-professional users. The concern was that people with disabilities would become further marginalised if the technology was constructed in a way that was unusable for these users. At the time many in the computing and technology industries were looking to exploit the needs of business and commerce and were explicitly ignoring personal users, particularly those with disabilities, who were seen as insignificant markets within the wider demographics. The project therefore sought to understand the impact that disability would have on usage of multimedia technology and the type of adaptations that these users would need. My role in this work was to lead the functional definition of a generic multimedia terminal and to collate the recommendations and requirements for the different disabilities covered by the analysis. The publications that I was involved in include:
Denley, I., Hill, L. R. H., Whitefield, B., Papadopoulos, A. K., Clarke, A., Hine, N. (1993). Usability Principles for Service Design. In P. Byerley & S. Connell (Eds.), Computers, Communication and Usability: Design Issues, Research and Methods for Integrated Services: Elsevier Science Publishers B. V. , North-Holland.
1990 PT6V
European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) funded project PT6V: Telecommunications Standards for People with Special Needs. (Co-Investigator) This project was tasked with cataloguing the set of standards in the various national and international standards agencies that referred to provisions for disabled people and their use of telecommunications technology. We had recently set up a special focus on disabled people within the Human Factors technical committee of ETSI so there was an urgent need to establish an agenda for action within ETSI without duplicating work already accomplished or in progress elsewhere.
1991 TIDE Market Survey
CEC funded project (Co-Investigator) The European Commission had been persuaded that there was a need within the research and technology development programmes to have a special programme dedicated to develop technologies that would not be found in the other programmes such as telecommunications, education or health. The principle was that those programmes should not exclude or ignore the needs or elderly or disabled people but where general purpose solutions were needed such as communication devices for non-speaking people or generic access to windows computer interfaces for blind people, these would be covered within the specific research programme. The market survey represented the birth of this programme by establishing the baseline demographics and technology usage requirements of disabled and elderly people as a distinct market within the European population. The market survey concluded that at least 6% of the population of Europe were disabled, and whilst the needs of this market segment were diverse and fragmented it represented a sizeable number of people.
1992 PT36
European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) funded project PT36: Design of ISDN Terminal Equipment. (Co-Investigator) ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), as a fully digital infrastructure, enabled a set of new services and communication opportunities including, for example videoconferencing and embryonic Internet access. For disabled people opportunities included subtitling synchronised with video streams, text prediction and audio description. ETSI commissioned the project team to explore the standards implications for ISDN terminals if they were to be usable or adaptable for use by disabled and elderly people. I worked with colleagues from BT on systematically reflecting on all aspects of the terminal design for the various different types of disabilities and impairments defined within the WHO classifications.
1992 – 1995 IPSNI II
CEC funded RACE II project IPSNI II (Access to Broadband Telecommunications Services by People with Special Needs) (Co-Investigator) Having explored the general functional requirements and potential set of solutions and adaptations possible to enable disabled people to access emerging multimedia services and equipment in the IPSNI, the project team were funded for an additional 3 years to produce technology demonstrators that showed potential accessibility solutions. In Dundee we looked at solutions specifically for non-speaking people, many of whom had additional physical/motor impairments. The publications arising from the project that I was involved in include:
Hine, N., Arnott, J. L., Beattie, W., & McKinlay, A. 1993. Service Function Allocation when considering Adaptations for People with Special Needs. Paper presented at the International Conference on Intelligence in Broadband Services and Networks (IS&N), Paris, France, 6th -7th November 1993.
Hine, N., Beattie, W., McKinlay, A., & Arnott, J. L. 1993. Special Adaptations for PSN to Broadband Data Services. Paper presented at the International Conference on Intelligence in Broadband Services and Networks (IS&N), Paris, France, 6th -7th November 1993.
Hine, Nick A., William Beattie, I. A. S. Gordon, John L. Arnott, Andy McKinlay, A. Spaepen, and F. Wauters. ‘Integration of Adaptations for People with Special Needs’. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Intelligence in Broadband Services and Networks: Towards a Pan-European Telecommunication Service Infrastructure, 51–60. IS&N ’94. Aachen Germany, 7th – 9th September,Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1994. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=648007.743733.
1995 – 1996 LEARN-ED
CEC funded COPERNICUS/TIDE project LEARN-ED (Learning and Education Access by Remote Networks – Enabling the Disabled) (Principle Investigator and Project Leader) Following the fall of the “Iron Curtain” in Eastern Europe and the interest expressed by several ex Eastern Bloc in becoming more closely aligned to the West, the CEC established a research programme intended to promote conversations between academics and industries in the various countries. The promise of full employment in the communist systems had resulted in some outstanding services for disabled people but access to rehabilitation and assistive technology was severely limited, not through lack of expertise but because of a shortage of advanced computing systems. We formed a consortium where we could share expertise from the vastly different perspectives within the framework of CEC funded research, and I led the project. We chose the topic of access to Higher Education by disabled students because it was evident that many activities taking place on University campuses were not accessible so disabled students were being excluded from a University education. We imagined that we could apply the lessons garnered from the IPSNI projects and use the recently launched IP videoconferencing services pioneered at Cornell University to provide access to these various learning and social activities (concerts etc) in venues that were accessible to disabled students. Whilst the project had been conceived as a means of improving inclusion, the focus had been on conventional learning delivery where teachers teach and learners receive, it became evident during the project that the innovation was not only technical but also pedagogic. Students quickly embraced new participatory practices where they could share with peers, locally and at a distance. Perhaps the most important innovation and lesson learned from the project therefore was the facility that the new technology gave to inclusive participation and peer learning, The publications arising from the project that I was involved in include:
Hine, Nick, Ian Gordon, Andrej Bebják, Miloš Kravčík, L’udmila Moravčíková, Paul Panek, Franz Peter Seiler, et al. ‘Learning and Educational Access Using Remote Networks—Enabling the Disabled’. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Part I, 173–81. ICCHP ’96. Munich, Germany, Germany: R. Oldenbourg Verlag GmbH, 1996. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=247644.247706.
1995 – 1998 TCALL
EPSRC/DTI LINK funded T-CALL project (TeleCommunications for ALL) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) Telecommunications systems pose specific problems for deaf people because the communication channel is audio. The advent of multimedia systems offered some interesting solutions such as on-screen subtitling, sign language support through the video channel and text phones. This project explored these possibilities, for example, using the SMS facility to implement a crude text phone service.
1995 – 1999 UMPTIDUMPTI
CEC funded ACTS project UMPTIDUMPTI (Using Mobile Personal Telecommunications Innovation for the Disabled in UMTS Pervasive Integration) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) The principles explored and demonstrated in the IPSNI and TCALL projects were further developed in the UMPTI project. The specific aspect that I focussed on was the development of a multimedia communication tool for people with no voice, non-speaking people. Most systems developed for non-speaking people at the time focussed on day to day transactions. On the other hand, friendships and social interactions arise from the sharing of stories. I used the new multimedia facilities for people to share stories. This became the basis for my PhD work and resulting thesis.
Hine, N., Beattie, W., & Arnott, J. L. 1998. Architecture of a Portable Multimedia Augmentative and Assistive Communication Systems.Paper presented at the 8th biennial Conference of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC1998), Dublin, Ireland, 24th -27th August
Hine, N., & Arnott, J. L. 2002. A multimedia storytelling system for non-speaking people. Paper presented at the 10th biennial Conference of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC 2002), Odense, Denmark, 10th – 15th August
1998 – 2000 RESORT
CEC funded IST project RESORT (Remote Services for Rehabilitation Technology) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) It is becoming clear with the increasing dependence on informal carers (family members and friends) rather than assuming that statutory care provision is going to meet a person’s care needs that caring is stressful. People who care find it difficult to relax or to leave a person needing care in case care is needed or an acute event occurs. The RESORT project was an early attempt to integrate an Alternative and Augmentitive Communication (AAC) system and an environmental system with a remote interface so that carers could leave a vulnerable person but do so knowing that they could communicate with the person, and make some practical interventions for their comfort an safety at a distance. The principles were successfully demonstrated using the Autonomy software from the Technical University of Vienna.
Hochgatterer, H., Panek, P., & Hine, N. 2001. RESORT – Remote Support for PC based Rehabilitation Technology – Results and Application Possibilities in the field of Vision and Hearing Impaired. Paper presented at the CVHI’2001 (EURO-ASSIST-VHI-1) Conference and Workshop on Assistive Technologies for Vision and Hearing Impairment, Castelvecchio Pascoli, Italy, 28th – 31st August.
Hine, N., Sergeant, P., Panek, P., Zagler, W. L., Beck, C., & Seisenbacher, G. 2002. RESORT – Providing Remote Support for PC based AAC Systems. Paper presented at the 10th biennial Conference of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC 2002 ), Odense, Denmark, 10th – 15th August
1997 – 2000 MORE
CEC funded TIDE project MORE (Mobile Rescue Phone) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) As GPS satellite location technology was opened to general access, the project explored an integrated mobile phone that combined GSM telephony and GPS location systems. This was accompanied by a pilot emergency response service. The phone included an emergency call button which, when pressed, located the phone and sent it coordinates to the emergency centre, displaying the location on a map. The application was focussed on supporting independence of older and disabled people who lack confidence to leave home. This was the first such combination of technologies and service application anywhere in the world running on operational networks and ultimately resulted in the world’s first phone for use for trekking and similar outdoor sports and recreational activities. The role of Dundee was the review of the usability of the system, given the complexity and innovation involved in the total package and workflow.
2000 – 2001 VIP
DTI/UKERNA H.323 VIP Demonstrator Project (Principle Investigator in Dundee) As IP videoconferencing systems emerged they offered the possibility of video based conversations taking place at a person’s desk in an office using an Internet connection rather than requiring a videoconferencing suite with dedicated ISDN based systems with elaborate call control procedures. This evolution had some significant implications for education institutions that had invested heavily in ISDN conferencing suites and who were anticipating orders of magnitude increases in bandwidth requirements across their entire infrastructure. The project involved partners from several HE institutions around the UK and considered issues ranging from bandwidth usage and security to service management and usability.
2000 – 2003 PEARL
CEC funded IST project PEARL (Practical Experimentation by Accessible Remote Learning) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) Assuming that IP videoconferencing would emerge, as indeed it has, we began to consider more specific applications of the technology. Combining the principles of the work done in LEARN-ED on the remote protocols for synchronising educational content delivery, the results of the usability studies in the IPSNI projects and the fundamental insights into the capabilities and limitations of IP Videoconferencing from the VIP project, the PEARL project explored the viability of making laboratory equipment usable at a distance. Various examples were piloted, including a mass-spectrometer, electronic circuit visual inspection and, in Dundee, an electron microscope. The goals of the project included facilitating access for disabled students. The project was highly successful as a pedagogy demonstrator. At a technical level however it used the CORBA middleware platform which was complex, non-standard at an implementation level, and could not easily be configured to traverse firewalls. This meant that it quickly became impossible to use the solutions that had been developed. At a more institutional level, the PEARL project demonstrated that the technical problems were not the fundamental barrier to adoption, but rather factors such as access to technical support for remote students in the middle of the night and other logistical issues were ultimately dominant.
1999 – 2001 IBDE
Internet Based Distance Education (British Council UK & Slovakia) (Principle Investigator and Project Leader) Following independence in 1993 and prior to joining the European Union in 2004, the government of Slovakia were keen to adopt new educational practices within pedagogues that suited the context of practices and traditions that prevailed there. Working within the framework of an agreement with the British Council and a local initiative called Infovek (Infoage) I partnered with a local academic to promote distance and technology enhanced learning techniques for Slovakian schools.
2001 – 2005 FRR
CEC funded TIDE project FRR (A Friendly Rest Room) Some aspects of life are taken very much for granted … toiletting is one of them. For many disabled people, however, access to public toilets can be very difficult, if not impossible. Modern semi-automated toilets are particularly difficult; blind people cannot interact with visual/touch screen displays, deaf people are not aware of visual cues, and motor impaired people can struggle with buttons and other access interfaces. The FRR project sought address these issues, with Dundee taking a lead in the interaction design aspects.
Inglis, E. A., A. Szymkowiak, P. Gregor, A. F. Newell, N. Hine, P. Shah, B. A. Wilson, and J. Evans. ‘Issues Surrounding the User-Centred Development of a New Interactive Memory Aid’. Univers. Access Inf. Soc. 2, no. 3 (October 2003): 226–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-003-0057-7.
Inglis, E. A., A. Szymkowiak, P. Gregor, A. F. Newell, N. Hine, B. A. Wilson, J. Evans, and P. Shah. ‘Usable Technology?: Challenges in Designing a Memory Aid with Current Electronic Devices’. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 14, no. 1–2 (2004): 77–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/09602010343000129.
2002 VoiceWeb
HP Funded (Principle Investigator and Project Leader). This was a commercially funded investigation to explore the role of Voice Web in enabling assistive communication for non-speaking people.
2002 – 2005 STF 201
ETSI Specialist Task Force STF 201 (LD) on Access to ICT (Information and Communications Technology) by children – issues and recommendations (Principle Investigator in Dundee) Children represent a very special sub-group of technology users. Because they have very underdeveloped sense of risk and consequence they explore rapidly and often with remarkable results, giving the impression of being innately highly proficient users. On the other hand they are fundamentally physically and cognitively plastic, capable of growing to their potential in the right circumstance or of being severely damaged when conditions are inappropriate. They are, in principle, future adults, not little adults. Based on the collection of knowledge in the academy and the practical experiences of the project team and consulted experts, we sought to put in place a set of fundamental guidelines to constrain the telecoms industry to design and implement systems and services suitable for children.
Hine, N., Helmersen, P., Hamnes, K., Clarke, A., & von Niman, B. (2004). Exploration of the Stakeholders’ Roles in ensuring safe access to ICT for Children. Paper presented at the Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media, London, UK, 26th – 29th July.
Clarke, A., Hine, N., von Niman, B., & Hamnes, K. (2005). Human Factors (HF); Guidelines for the design and deployment of ICT products and services used by children (EG 202 423). Sophia Antipolis: European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI).
2002 STF 204
ETSI Specialist Task Force STF204 (LG) TC/HF on Multimodal interaction, communication and navigation (Principle Investigator in Dundee) As the European Union anticipated services moving from paper based activities to technology mediated ones (voting, shopping, education, medical consultation etc), it became clear that industry needed guidelines and insights to ensure that the technology used was accessible to all anticipated users, irrespective of ability or disability. For this reason, the project team was tasked with consulting with domain experts, representing both the users and the industries in order to collate an appropriate set of guidelines. Where best practice or insights did not exist, the project undertook some targeted user needs studies.
Furner, S., Schneider-Hufschmidt, M., Groh, L., Perrin, P., & Hine, N. 2003. Human Factors guidelines for multimodal interaction, communication and navigation. Paper presented at the 19th International Symposium on Human Factors in Telecommunication, Berlin, Germany, 1st–4th December.
Hine, N., Furner, S., Groh, L., Schofield, S., & Joel, S. 2003. Multimodal Transactional Interaction, Communication and Navigation: A User Needs Study. Paper presented at the 9th Association for Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE) Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 31st August – 3rd September.
2002 – 2005 RAFT
CEC funded IST project RAFT (Remote Accessible Field Trips) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) There are moments when an advance in technology opens a new educational opportunity that has simply not been possible before. This was the case with the advent of 3G mobile data services and tablet style laptop computers. It is becoming increasingly difficult arrange the logistics (insurance, staff cover etc) to take a full classroom of school pupils out of the classroom into the field in order to observe and measure natural phenomena firsthand. The RAFT project proposed taking a subset of a cohort into the field and linking them live back to the classroom where the tasks could be set and gathered data analysed live. Touch screen laptops were configured with GPS hardware and software, AV capabilities and sensors and probes for on-site measurement. In the classroom mapping software tracked the movement and displayed a live dynamic map. At the same time live audio and video feeds provided a conversation channel. Data being gathered in the field was presented as a live evolving graphic along with any photos showing the context of the phenomena being measured. Inevitably the set of kids chosen to leave the school are motivated by the opportunity … most of the kids left in the classroom are not happy to be there. The challenge for the educators was to devise an event protocol that fully engaged all students in the experience and give the classroom kids a role in the activity, something to enable them to feel value in their participation. The solution was to make the classroom responsible for the activity, directing the field study, reflecting on the data live and feeding back instructions to the field. This real time cooperation distributed the ownership across the cohort and proved to be a powerful learning exercise for all participants. Ultimately the project was just that, a project. Once the funding ran out the technical support and the institutional practice by-in was just too demanding for the education authorities involved. It is interesting to not that tablets such as the iPad have within a single integrated package most of the functions that we had to add to the tablet laptops of the time, and the cloud based data transfer functionality is readily practiced and indeed expected using tools such as iCloud or DropBox. The pedagogy of the RAFT project was sound so it maybe the correct time to revisit the institutional issues affecting adoption of such practices.
Hine, N., Rentoul, R., & Schofield, S. 2003. Enhancing classroom learning through live interactions with field trips. Paper presented at the 10th European Conference For Research On Learning And Instruction, Padova, Italy, 26th –30th August.
Rentoul, R., Hine, N., Arnott, J. L., Joel, S., Judson, A., & Schofield, S. 2003. Enhanced Learning Opportunities for School Students with Disabilities: Pedagogic and Technological Issues. Paper presented at the 7th Association for Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE) Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 31st August – 3rd September.
Rentoul, R., Hine, N., Specht, M., & Kravcik, M. 2003. Beyond Virtual field Trips: Collaboration and m-Learning. Paper presented at the 10th North American Web Based learning Conference, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, 18th-21st October.
Hine, N., & Rentoul, R. 2004. ICT Collaboration Between Classroom and Field Trips; Opportunities for Educators. Paper presented at the BETT 2004 Conference, London, UK, 7th-10th January.
Schofield, S., Hine, N., Arnott, J. L., Joel, S., Judson, A., & Rentoul, R. 2004. Virtual Learning Environments: Improving Accessibility Using Profiling. Paper presented at the 2nd Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology, Cambridge, UK, 22nd – 24th March.
2003 – 2006 DSM
DTI Next Wave Technology and Marketing funded Domain Specific Modelling Project (Principle Investigator in Dundee) The demographic profile of the population of the Uk has changed radically in the last few decades, with less people being born to smaller families and older people living longer. Those living longer do so, in general, with a range and mixture of different chronic conditions which can have significant impact on the quality of their lives. The solution is often to have to move into sheltered or supported environments where care and support can be provided as part of a provision to a cohort of people. The result of this for the older people is a loss of independence and disconnection from memories, places and artefacts that have defined their lives. Home based care could be seen as a means to preserve the independence but is becoming unsustainable as the number of carers is falling. The smaller families mean that there are less informal carers to attend to the needs of older relatives, and those family members that take on care responsibilities do so at the expense of other roles in society or their careers. A shrinking pool of young people graduating into work is inevitably leading to a reduction in the pool of formal carers, including social workers, community nurses, occupational therapists and doctors. BT had previously been part of an investigation into the feasibility of using technology in the home to sense change in the lifestyle or behaviour of older residents in a way that can be correlated to their vulnerability and indirectly to their quality of life. We were invited to become partners with them in a submission to the UK Department of Trade and Industry (now TSB) to consider how to compute what any change in home sensed data might mean. We focussed initially on the means of visualising change in data and seeking to map that onto lifestyle and behaviour changes in order to be able to discuss with stakeholders what the possible meaning of those changes could be. In order to avoid excessive loss of privacy we did not seek to understand what exactly the home dweller was doing, but rather to sense changes in patterns of “busyness” in spaces in and outside the home. Rather than compute meaning, we sought to present the data in a contextualised representation that could be discussed within what we called a “Dialogue of Care”. The publications that arose form this work are presented below.
Hine, N., Sixsmith, A., Garner, P., & Brown, S. 2003. Lifestyle Modeling as a tool for promoting the well-being of older persons. Paper presented at the International Conference on Aging, Disability, and Independence, Washington, DC, USA, 4th-6th December.
Sixsmith, A., Hine, N., Neild, I., Clarke, N., Brown, S., & Garner, P. (2007). Monitoring the well-being of older people. Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation, 23(1), 9-23.
2003 – 2004 WWAAC
CEC funded IST Project WWAAC (World Wide Alternative and Augmentative Communication) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) The semantic web is a technology approach that is concerned with meaning rather than labels … what is a boot, what does that label mean; the boot of a car or foot ware, or a verb sometimes used to mean kicking? An essential component of the semantic web is the concept of an ontology, a list of concepts with distinct meanings in a domain of knowledge, and the set of words that can be used to label that concept. Whilst these are often constructed to remove ambiguity of meaning in conversations within specific domains of knowledge such as architecture, medicine or environmental science, Wordnet was constructed as a meaning dictionary for the English language. The basic architecture has since been extended to cover a host of world languages. Some disabled people are unable to use language as conveyed by orthographic systems consisting of words made up of letters or other symbols governed by grammar rules. This may be because a physical disability prevents them from manipulating elemental components in time to generate and become familiar with language at an orthographic level. Others may have cognitive difficulty coping with the complexity of language. A number of symbol systems depicting concepts have been developed with various degrees of complexity and conceptual subtly. The task of the WWAAC project was to use semantic web principles to bridge between these symbol systems and conventional orthographic representations of languages using Wordnet as the semantic bridge. We were able to demonstrate the feasibility of the principle in enabling access to essential Internet services of webpage access and email. Emails constructed as a sequence of symbols could be transposed in English, Dutch, Finnish or Swedish for example. Because of my experience in running or being part of the steering boards of previous CEC projects I was invited to join the management team of this project together with technical participation form members of my lab team.
Hine, N., Judson, A., Lysley, A., Black, K., & Hunnicut, S. 2004. Electronic Mail And Internet Access For Individuals Using Graphic Communication Systems: Theoretical Issues And Methodological Challenges. Paper presented at the 12th biennial Conference of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC 2004), Natal, Brazil, 4th – 12th October.
Hine, N., & Judson, A. 2006. Internet Access For Individuals Using Graphic Communication Systems: The Current and Future Research Agenda. Invited Paper presented at the The Role of People with Special Needs in Building the Information Society, Kuwait, May 1-3
2003 – 2006 Supporting Independence
EPSRC/EQUAL funded Supporting Independence Project (Principle Investigator in Dundee) This project complimented the work that were doing on the DSM project focussing more on the case for Telecare and the deployment issues. It had been imagined that a generic telecare system should be fitted to homes of older people in order to detect generic change in lifestyle that would indicate a change in quality of Life. This seemed to us suggesting that all older people should have generic visits to GPs who would prescribe a generic therapy of treatment, which is obviously nonsense. Ageing happens for people in very different ways, requiring very different response. For this reason, we undertook an ethnographic survey with our colleagues from UCL of the lives of six older home dwellers at Pocklington Rise near Plymouth, an extra care residential care centre run by Thomas Pocklington Trust. This demonstrated the fundamental diversity of lifestyles and care needs in what were essentially the same dwelling types. As a result we understood that telecare, whilst seeking to use generic technology components, needs to be individualised, just as doctors use specific drugs within individualised care or treatment programmes.
Hanson, Julienne, Dorota Osipoviĉ, Nick Hine, Telmo Amaral, Richard Curry, and James Barlow. ‘Lifestyle Monitoring as a Predictive Tool in Telecare’. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare 13, no. 1_suppl (July 2007): 26–28. https://doi.org/10.1258/135763307781645040.
2005 – 2014 Our Digital Culture
Having completed a number of projects where technology was demonstrated to enhance the learning experience in schools and universities, I realised that after 20 years of technology being available for education, very little real innovation had moved from the research lab into the everyday practice. Projects took place in real practice settings but educators, even those involved in the project, invariably stepped back to let researchers drive a trial or conduct a study. Once the project was completed little legacy remained. This is frustrating if the results of the research show potential benefit. The position is characterised by a statement by one teacher who explained that a sanction that they employed for inappropriate classroom behaviour was to withdraw a child’s computer privilege. The technology was not seen as an essential teaching tool but as a privilege. I wondered what behaviour would cause book or pencil privileges to be withdrawn. Knowledge consumption, and in fact production, has changed, but in too many cases the pedagogy has not kept pace with the change. As the RAFT project drew to a close, I took a step back and engaged in number of in-depth conversations with local teachers and educators. The conclusion I came to was that the source of knowledge was no longer only the school or public library because “all knowledge was now on the Internet”. In the minds and practices of the students therefore, knowing is no longer necessary for success. What students believe they need is skills, to be doing. This position has a number of flaws, and could be seen as fundamentally oppressive. A population that does but does not know can be manipulated and driven. At an individual level, lack of knowledge means that people lose the power of their own voice, and can’t repurpose knowledge from one domain to another. Cognitive scientists warned us that there is a measurable decline in analytical skills in today’s school graduates. The answer is found in Critical Pedagogy and the work of Friera, who argues that every member of society has a voice and should be taught to exercise it, but in way that is responsible and benefits society. The voice needs education, knowledge driven and organised by thinking. Copying and pasting from Wikipedia may give the “right” answer, but unless the knowledge has been reflected upon and appropriated by a student it is not “their” answer. This is so difficult, particularly for young children to understand. They are driven by the right answer. This argument formed the basis of an international research and practice network that became known as OurDigitalCulture where young people and students around the world shared stories based on their understanding of curriculum topics and their personal identity with their peers. In order to emphasise production and reflective thinking over consumption, the stories were organised within a hypermedia framework called “SchoolPedia”, a growing knowledge space linking the contributions from all students into a network of knowledge. Activities were organised, with videoconferences, to enable pupils to discuss and critique each others work in response to comments and questions. This is a new classroom practice, with verifiable benefits. Work needs to be done to implement a platform that employs this approach that is robust when used in a classroom setting. In a digital world, therefore, the nature of education, and the stakeholders involved in innovation and change have an added layer of complexity. This is characterised in the diagram below. At an institutional level it becomes clear that these types of collaborative activities depend on a network of teachers working together, and networks require leadership. Resourcing this type of activity as a practice rather than a project is not normal in most educational contexts. In practice, the lack of resources available for teachers to really innovate within a community is the biggest single barrier to change and progress in education.
Hine, N. 2008. Web 2.0 is not enough: Building the learning communities Paper presented at the ITTE 2008: ICT & the Learning Environment, Cumbria, UK, 14th-16th July 2008.
Hine, N. 2008. Children Are All Different: How does this affect Teaching and the Role of Technology in Education? Invited Keynote Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Pedagogy and Children, Bogota, Colombia, 17th-18th October 2008.
Hine N., 2011 Language, Identity and the role of in Language Learning Invited Paper presented at the Colloquia on Research in Foreign Language and Educational Innovation, Bogota, Colombia, 17-19 August 2011.
Hine N., 2013 ICT and Citizens; Smart Cities: Bogota Invited Paper presented at the Smart Cities Bogota Expo, Bogota, Colombia, 2-4 October 2014.
2005 – 2007 REXNET
CEC funded IST ALFA Project REXNET (Remote Experimental Networks) (Principle Investigator in Dundee) The engineering and computing industry is fundamentally global both in terms of markets in which companies trade but also in terms of supply chains and niche expertise. Engineering education depends fundamentally on demonstrating how the theoretical mathematics based predictions of behaviour in structures and machines work in practice. University level labs can be expensive, particularly where they reflect the state of the art of knowledge and practice. Students who are educated in places where lab provision is restricted (too many students or not enough expensive kit) are at a disadvantage compared with their peers competing for the same jobs, nationally and internationally. The REXNET project sought to address this inequality by applying the technical feasibility work undertaken in the PEARL project to the context of collaboration between students and lab sharing between universities in Europe and Latin America. Technically this practice is feasible and pedagogically valid. The issues are essentially institutional and structural. Labs need materials and consumables and they require technical support. This is manageable during the working day. Latin America is in general 6 hours behind Europe, nearly a full working day. The labs in Latin America are quite whilst the European students are busy, and the European students leave in time for the Latin American students to use the equipment. But the lab technical support staff could be on call at times which are fundamentally unsociable.The alternative is to construct labs where consumables are self replenishing and equipment is robust.
2005 – 2013 MATCH
Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home. Scottish Funding Council funded project (Co-Investigator) The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) made money available for major collaborative research funding to encourage universities to work together on topics of national importance to Scotland. Building on the work done in the DSM and Supporting Independence projects we worked with Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling Universities to continue to address open question in telecare. The project helped us to understand the diversity of the perspective of the different stakeholders. In general, informal carers care about someone that they see as a well known individual, whilst formal carers for people who may be largely anonymous. The nature of the care differs greatly, so the information needed would be different for each carer, leading to a different technical specification of sensors and data processing needed to answer the care question. Informal carers may well ask more general questions such as “is my grandfather ok?” whereas formal carers would be looking for evidence of a measurable change in a symptom following a medical or therapeutic intervention. These insights lead to very different information interfaces for different carers. Developing algorithms to hilight where something important has changed in the loire of an older person is difficult. people are individuals, and however regular and predictable they would like their lives to be, they are constantly being interrupted or modulated by external events. In order to compute the meaning of change a large amount of data is required. This is simply not available. Nor is a good understanding of how older people actually live in their own homes, often alone. So we build a model home, a fully sensored dollshouse where we can simulate everyday behaviour by a couple of older residents. In conversations with residential care staff we are building model lives which we can subsequently extend from days to weeks or years, replicate with reasonable variations to produce a population of older people, and introduce changes into the life patterns that would correspond to a specific condition such as Parkinsons Disease or COPD. With these well understood populations of data we can build algorithms that can be tested in live telecare installations before being more widely deployed.
Hine N., 2010 Technology Mediated Care: Who Cares? What Technology? Invited Keynote Paper presented at the ICOST 2010, 8th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, Seoul, South Korea, 22-24 June 2010.
Hine N., 2011 Who cares?: The place of technology in telecare, Invited Paper presented at the National Meeting of Research and Development (ENID) 2011, Bogota, Colombia, 24-26 August 2011.
Coughlan, T., Leder Mackley, K., Brown, M., Martindale, S., Schlögl, S., Mallaband, B., Arnott, J., Hoonhout, J., Szostak, D., Brewer, R., Poole, E., Pirhonen, A., Mitchell, V. Pink, S., & Hine, N. (2013). Current Issues and Future Directions in Methods for Studying Technology in the Home. PsychNology Journal, 11(2), 159 – 184.
2006 – 2008 MATLIDAH
(The use, application and role of advanced technologies in the lives of disabled people). UK Economic and Social Science Research Council funded project (Co-Investigator) One disturbing characteristic of the market for assistive technology for disabled people is that many devices sold do not ultimately meet the needs of the user and become quickly abandoned and discarded. This is particularly troubling as the technology is often prohibitively expensive and require protracted fund raising and charity donations. The goal of this project was to explore this pattern of abandonment both from literature and from a set of user case studies. The results confirmed the perceived wisdom about abandonment and sought to make recommendations to industry and to policy agencies to improve the fit between users and the offered solutions, including the assessment strategies to ensure that users are properly guided when choosing technology.
2006 – 2008 STF 304
AT Commands for Assistive Mobile Device Interfaces. European Telecoms Standards Institute funded project Adapting mobile phones so that they can be used by the widest possible set of users, irrespective of disability or age is a problematic task because few phones are designed to be adaptable. At a hardware level many adaptations can be connected using the standard or proprietary connector used for charging and data transfer. Software adaptation is considerably more problematic, particularly in phones without a standardised operating systems such as Android or iOS. Embedded within feature phones however are an extended set of AT commands based on the original modem operating commands. These can server as an API to the functional behaviour of the phone, including accessing applications such the phone book or calendar. The goal of this project was to review the set of AT commands and propose extensions to provide a standardised path to the features added since the original set of mobile phone extensions were agreed. The project can only be considered a partial success as the industry were robust in arguing that the agreed set (essential for harmonising the disparate approaches that existed prior to the advent of GSM and for creating sufficient scale to spawn a global market) was all that was necessary and that any further standardisation was likely to impede competitive freedom. With the widespread deployment of smartphones, fundamentally more adaptable than feature phones, the situation has improved, but this assumes that disabled and elderly people can afford or want a smart phone, which is certainly not the case.
2006 – 2008 Digital Literacy in Schools: Hypermedial Narratives.
Colombian National Research Council funded project (Principle Investigator in Dundee) This project used the OurDigitalCulture platform to specifically explore the aspects concerned with language teaching. it was associated with a Masters Programme in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, which I also taught on. Reading theses produced by a number of students I was struck by a fundamental and systemic problem: It was as if the theses had been written by Enid Blyton! The language was from my childhood. Why? Because the students, all in the late twenties to early forties, had learned English 10 to 20 before (1990s) from teachers who had themselves learned it 20 years or so before that (1970s) using text books written 20 years before that (1950s). Whilst very correct, this language was poor preparation for the contemporary school kids to converse with their peers in English. So we connected language students learning English or learning Spanish with native speaking peers where interactions took place in idiomatic contemporary language. This project raised an important point for reflection for the teachers. Bogota, and indeed Colombia, has a bilingualism policy. Watching the lives and realities of the kids from the poorest barrios in the cities, teachers found themselves wondering what the point of learning English was. There were much more fundamental concerns to be addressed. Teachers were organising clothes collections for some of the kids who would not come to school without shoes. Some kids could not be spared by their parents but were needed in the family shop or recycling business so they missed school regularly. Of course English for the kids in the private schools and in the more affluent neighbourhoods made perfect sense. But what about the poorer kids. The answer for some teachers was to be creative, including the teaching of English in other activities concerned with digital literacies such as journalism and radio programming. This has been a springboard for many to see a future with more possibilities than had been imagined, not only in these fields but also in teaching and engineering.
Hine, N., Clavijo Olarte, A., Quintero, L. M., & Quintana Ramirez, A. 2006. Cross Cultural Interaction in a Bilingual Story Sharing Forum. Invited Paper presented at the Second International Symposium on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education in Latin America, Bogotá, Colombia, October 5-7
Hine, N., & Clavijo Olarte, A. 2007. The challenge of language teaching in a connected world. Invited Paper presented at the 10th National ELT Conference ‘Information Technology and ELT’, Bogoá, Colombia, April 26-28.
Clavijo Olarte, A., Hine, N., & Quintero, L. M. (2008). Exploring the EFL Curriculum Through The Use of a Virtual Forum. In L. Lopriore & K. Graves (Eds.), Designing a new curriculum for school age learners. Alexandria, VA,: TESOL.
Olarte, A. C., Hine, N., & Quintero, L. M. (2008). The Virtual Forum as an Alternative Way to Enhance Foreign Language Learning PROFILE: Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 9
2006 – 2009 SAPHE
UK Department of Trade and Industry funded SAPHE (Smart and Aware Pervasive Healthcare Environment) project. (Principle Investigator in Dundee) The project combined two relayer projects funded by the UK DTI, the DSM Project and the UbiCare project run by Imperial College, London. We were invited to join the consortium by our partners in DSM, BT, The research focus for us in this project was to seek to identify how to ensure that health professional, in this case Community Matrons, could be aware of care needs of their patients living at home through medical and environmental sensor and medical sensor data. After studying the way that nursing staff worked, we appropriated an idea from a telecare trial taking place in Kent which was to organise the patients into virtual wards. These wards contained patients clustered according to medical care needs and perceived vulnerability. This work is reported in the following publications.
2007 – 2008 EduWear
(Children designing tangible and wearable computing for playful educational purposes). European Union funded project (Principle Investigator in Dundee) An example of technology being deployed in areas not previously considered as “technical” is that of clothing. Conductive and robust materials, miniature sensors and lights, buzzers and colour changing fabrics provide designers with exciting possibilities. They also allow therapists and sports scientist to better understand how people are using their bodies within rehabilitation or training programmes. This project introduced these technologies to school age children in different countries around Europe. At the same time we piloted a couple of sessions as distance learning experience with students in Colombia. A byproduct of this work was the application of technology in a domain that is considered to be one favoured by females rather than males as a means of showing the girls in particular the diversity of applications for technology and the possibilities for careers as technologists. This had an interesting spin-off where some of the students (the girls) took the principles of micro-controller based solutions to topics such as water and pollution monitoring and management in the neighbourhoods of Bogota, including building computerised (MINDSTORM) LEGO models to show to city ministers and planners.
2008 – 2010 STF 352
Personalization of eHealth systems by using eHealth User Profiles. European Telecoms Standards Institute funded project. (Principle Investigator in Dundee) When people use technology they do so in ways that reflect their individual goals, interests and capabilities. This is particularly true when the usage is in the context of health and well-being. General user profile functionality (e.g. the Netflix profiles) demonstrate the application and the importance of personalisation in products and services. The concern of ETSI was to build on the foundation of work done on Generic User Profiles and to extend them to cover the specific and sensitive attributes associated with health service access and usage. The goal was to standardise the data structures and fundamental usability principles so that users could migrate seamlessly between service, improving choice for users and reducing the learning and cognitive load associated with service usage. In reality industry tends to support standards when they facilitate interoperability, but can be reluctant to embrace them if they sense a loss of opportunity for competitive advantage. It currently suites companies to avoid a standardised user profile as it locks a customer into a product on the assumption that leaving to use another service would be too confusing or difficult to learn. The type of regulatory framework that allows people to move bank accounts may be necessary to ensure that the interests of the customers are better provided for.
Hine, Nick, Francoise Petersen, Mike Pluke, and Torbjorn Sund. ‘Standardization Work on Personalized eHealth Systems’. In 2008 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 1518–20, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1109/IEMBS.2008.4649457.
2012 – 2012 UKIERI
Cooperation & travel grant with Anna University, Chenai, India This funding allowed me to visit Anna University and for a staff member to visit Dundee. We have discussed the possibility of research in how to provide technical education and Telecare in rural communities using cloud techniques accessed via mobile phone networks. This would have some interesting technical challenges similar to those addressed in the LEARN-ED Project but would also need to recognise the constraints on the service providers and the realities of rural life and work in India.
2013 -2014 Lego Storytelling
This research sought to understand the role that tangible world models could assist early years children to communicate their understanding of taught concepts before they have writing and strong drawing skills. Teachers do not have time to verbally discuss with each pupil in the class, so there are pupils who rarely share their understanding with teachers, leading to disengagement with the curriculum. The proposed approach involved building a LEGO® world where the figures (Minifigs) had attached RFID tags that could be used to track movements around the world. These movements would be captured and placed in comic-book representations of the scenes of the world which could be annotated by the children. These captured stories, based on, for example, aspects of the citizenship curriculum could then be shared and discussed with the teacher.
2014 New Routes
Dundee City Council Pilot Exploration with School of Nursing This project was inspired by the work of Vik Muñoz where recyclers from the landfill site of Rio de Jeniero made self portraits from garbage as a means of discovering their personal voice, identity and ambition. In Dundee a small group of people living in marginalised situations were assisted in exploring their place through photography. As a result of this experience funding will be sought to work with homeless and marginalised people within the city of Dundee to find an alternative voice. The essential findings of the project were the creativity of the participants to use photography to explore their world and to express what is of interest to them and the need for technology that provides a satisfactory user experience for people who have had little exposure to media and communications tools. At the same time, the logistics of engaging in a project such as this were problematic because people living in these situations have great difficulty in having routines and personal agendas, compounded by the need to present themselves for appointments and interviews and to be available for zero-hour contract work according to someone else’s agenda.
MSc and PhD Studies
Hine, Nick, and John L. Arnott. ‘Assistive Social Interaction for Non-Speaking People Living in the Community’. In Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies, 162–69. Assets ’02. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1145/638249.638279.
Saidin, Aeni Zuhana, Catriona Macaulay, Nick Hine, Nassiriah Shaari, and Asmidah Alwi. ‘Persuasion Knowledge for Design Community: Design of PToolkit Prototype’, 241–46. Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, 2013. http://www.icoci.cms.net.my/icoci2013/home.asp.