Developing an application in Google Android to support autonomous living of people with cognitive disabilities

This master thesis studies Android, an open source software stack initiated by Google, and the possibilities of developing a mobile application that can support autonomous living of people with cognitive disabilities. The choice of using Android for this thesis is its state of the art status. As it is a rather newly released platform which has already gained massive support from many device manufacturers (such as HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson) it is expected to make an attractive platform since the development of a single application can reach a broad range of devices. The study focuses on the possibilities that Google Android is offering and how these can be used to support cognitively disabled individuals. The background research shows that the primary use of a mobile device for disabled young adults and their parents or caregivers are safety check-ins. This means reminding of upcoming events, scheduling, and coordination. These safety check-ins are a huge burden on the shoulders of the caregivers and so a prototype of an application is developed in this thesis to automate this process. The developed application reminds users of upcoming events, which are being downloaded and parsed from an online server on which the caregivers have scheduled them. These calendar events are linked to a specific location and by making use of the location functionalities that Android is offering, a checkup is being done comparing the user’s actual location with the desired one of the event. The user is reminded of the event both visually and auditory (using text-to-speech functionalities) while the caregivers will automatically be notified through a pre-defined SMS in case the user has not reached the desired location or in the rare occasions that the system has not been able to determine the user’s position. In the case that a calendar event is not location-dependent (such as a reminder to take your pills) a simple notification is being shown and no further checkup is being done. The study proves how modern technologies which offer great opportunities can be coupled to simple interfaces and how mobile applications can fix the inadequacies of the environment infrastructure to fulfill the disabled user needs. It can be concluded that Android offers a lot of new opportunities to disabled users as applications could be developed to support them in their daily tasks, while making use of mainstream devices. After all, for the most part, people with disabilities want to have the same devices, they do not want something that is designed differently.