Communication is the essence of life. We communicate in many ways, but it is our ability to speak which enables us to chat in every-day situations. An estimated quarter of a million people in the UK alone are unable to speak and are at risk of isolation. They depend on Voice Output Communication Aids (VOCAs) to compensate for their disability. However, the current state of the art VOCAs are only able to produce computerised speech at an insufficient rate of 8 to 10 words per minute (wpm). For some users who are unable to use a keyboard, rates are even slower. For example, Professor Stephen Hawking recently doubled his spoken communication rate to 2 wpm by incorporating a more efficient word prediction system and common shortcuts into his VOCA software. Despite three decades of developing VOCAs, face-to-face communication rates remain prohibitively slow. Users seldom go beyond basic needs based utterances as rates remain, at best, 10 times slower than natural speech. Compared to the average of 150-190 wpm for typical speech, aided communication rates make conversation almost impossible. ACE-LP brings together research expertise in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) (University of Dundee), Intelligent Interactive Systems (University of Cambridge), and Computer Vision and Image Processing (University of Dundee) to develop a predictive AAC system that will address these prohibitively slow communication rates by introducing the use of multimodal sensor data to inform state of the art language prediction. For the first time a VOCA system will not only predict words and phrases; we aim to provide access to extended conversation by predicting narrative text elements tailored to an ongoing conversation. In current systems users sometimes pre-store monologue 'talks', but sharing personal experiences (stories) interactively using VOCAs is rare. Being able to relate experience enables us to engage with others and allows us to participate in society. In fact, the bulk of our interaction with others is through the medium of conversational narrative, i.e. sharing personal stories. Several research projects have prototyped ways in which automatically gathered data and language processing can support disabled users to communicate easily and at higher rates. However, none have succeeded in harnessing the potential of such technology to design an integrated communication system which automatically extracts meaningful data from different sources, transforms this into conversational text elements and presents results in such a way that people with severe physical disabilities can manipulate and select conversational items for output through a speech synthesiser quickly and with minimal physical and cognitive effort. This project will develop technology which will leverage contextual data (e.g. information about location, conversational partners and past conversations) to support language prediction within an onscreen user interface which will adapt depending on the conversational topic, the conversational partner, the conversational setting and the physical ability of the nonspeaking person. Our aim is to improve the communication experience of nonspeaking people by enabling them to tell their stories easily, at more acceptable speeds.

Rapid and unprecedented population ageing poses a serious social and economic challenge across the developed world. Shifts in dependency ratios point to escalating welfare and pensions costs which require radical and imaginative responses from Government and industry. Key to this is maintaining a healthy population that is able and willing to work longer before retirement and can remain independent for as long as possible afterwards. A further requirement is to bring disabled people into mainstream life and employment. This challenge is recognised increasingly, resulting in new legislation impacting on the major world economies. Addressing it requires: (1) understanding wellbeing and its relationship to independence; (2) the redesign of workplaces and jobs to suit the changed profile of the working population.There is a global market for products and services designed with older and less able people in mind, and industry is responding to this opportunity, both in the UK and internationally. A recent survey (commissioned by the UK Department of Trade and Industry and undertaken by CITD with Professors Clarkson and Coleman) of UK companies awareness and skills gap with regard to inclusive design concluded that the majority of companies are aware of inclusive design and its benefits. However, barriers remain to industry uptake in the form of: (1) the lack of a perceived justifiable business case to support inclusive design; (2) the lack of knowledge and tools to practice inclusive design; (3) a better understanding of the difficulties experienced by the majority of users of new technology products; and (4) access to appropriate user sets. Importantly, the end-user data derived from earlier Office of National Statistics surveys on disability needs to be updated with data describing users from a product/user perspective, enabling designers to estimate better reasons for, and levels of, user exclusion and to provide greater insight in the search for better design solutions.Inclusion is an important topic within Government, as witnessed by a number of recent reports from the House of Lords and offices of the lower house. All see the need for change in government and industry to reduce exclusion in society, but few solutions are put forward that will encourage such change. It is also clear that descriptions of 'end-users', i.e. those that we wish to include, are vague and lacking in the detail required to encourage positive action. However, despite these shortcomings there is a mood for change and the proposed research team have good links with many of the government offices responsible for these reports.This proposal responds to the above challenges by extending the focus of earlier i~design work and expanding the research team to reflect these new priorities. The philosophy underlying inclusive design specifically extends the definition of users to include people who are excluded by rapidly changing technology, especially the elderly and ageing, and prioritises the role and value of extreme users in innovation and new product/service development. It also prioritises the context of use, both physical and psychological, and the complexity of interactions between products, services and interfaces in contexts of use such as independent living. Key research requirements are:1. Better descriptions of product/service users linked to more accurate data and represented in designer-friendly formats2. Closer integration of anthropometric, capability and social data3. More effective application of users and user data to job and workplace design, and healthcare systems design4. Better understanding of the extent and nature of exclusion (across the whole population) resulting from and associated with the implementation of new technologies5. Definition and verification of the means to capture a national user data set: designing and piloting the research requirements for a major survey capable of international replication.

Growing numbers of people across the world live with impairments. Medical and technological advances mean that babies and children with impairments are more likely to survive into adulthood, adults are more likely to survive accidents and diseases that would previously have killed them, and more people are living to old age, but often with long-term conditions and impairments. At the same time, financial constraints on governments mean that emphasis is being put on family members and friends ('carers') to provide the support that disabled and older people need to help them live independently. The UK has carried out a range of surveys of impairment, disability and carers since the mid-1980s that have helped policy makers understand how many people need and provide support and these have provided organisations with 'ammunition' to help them campaign for change. The information from the latest in these series of surveys - the Life Opportunities Survey (LOS) and the Survey of Carers in Households (SCH) - has recently become available and offers an important opportunity to explore new and emerging patterns of impairment, disability and caring. The LOS is exciting because it is the first survey to explore how the environment in which people live (housing, transport, other people's attitudes and so on) influences whether or not their impairments become disabilities. In doing this, it has responded to the criticisms of earlier surveys that disabled people and their organisations made. These criticisms pointed out that it is often the environment that people live in and the support services they have access to that turn an impairment into a disability. The LOS also collects information about everyone in a household, so we can also explore whether disabled people and other people in their household experience similar barriers to participation in society. The survey covers both children and young people (from the age of 11) and adults of all ages. The Survey of Carers in Households is important because it seems to show that the population of carers has changed since the mid-1980s, with more people providing care when they themselves are well into older age. Our work will: - explore how patterns of impairment, disability and caring have changed over time; - look at how disabled people and those who live with them experience barriers to participating in society; - explore whether disabled people who live in more deprived areas or in the countryside experience different sorts and sizes of barriers to other disabled people. We will do this by using data from the two surveys and carrying out different statistical tests that will allow us to tease out all the different factors that might affect the experience of being disabled or being a carer. As we do the project, we will be using senior researchers who have experience of this sort of work to train and 'bring on' the next generation of researchers. We will have three partners in our project - SCOPE, an organisation of and for disabled people; Carers UK, an organisation of and for carers; and the Department of Work and Pensions, the English government department with lead responsibility for policy about older and disabled people. These partners will choose detailed questions that we will explore in our work. They will also help us to bring the findings from our work to other organisations and groups who will find them helpful. At the end of the project, we will write reports of the different parts of the work, and will also write a four page summary, in everyday language, so that we can share our findings with as wide a range of disabled people, carers and the wider public as possible. We will write articles for professionals who work with disabled people and carers, as well as for other researchers. Finally, we will run a workshop where we can share our findings face-to-face with others who can use them in their work and campaigning.

Rapid and unprecedented population ageing poses a serious social and economic challenge across the developed world. Shifts in dependency ratios point to escalating welfare and pensions costs which require radical and imaginative responses from Government and industry. Key to this is maintaining a healthy population that is able and willing to work longer before retirement and can remain independent for as long as possible afterwards. A further requirement is to bring disabled people into mainstream life and employment. This challenge is recognised increasingly, resulting in new legislation impacting on the major world economies. Addressing it requires: (1) understanding wellbeing and its relationship to independence; (2) the redesign of workplaces and jobs to suit the changed profile of the working population.There is a global market for products and services designed with older and less able people in mind, and industry is responding to this opportunity, both in the UK and internationally. A recent survey (commissioned by the UK Department of Trade and Industry and undertaken by CITD with Professors Clarkson and Coleman) of UK companies awareness and skills gap with regard to inclusive design concluded that the majority of companies are aware of inclusive design and its benefits. However, barriers remain to industry uptake in the form of: (1) the lack of a perceived justifiable business case to support inclusive design; (2) the lack of knowledge and tools to practice inclusive design; (3) a better understanding of the difficulties experienced by the majority of users of new technology products; and (4) access to appropriate user sets. Importantly, the end-user data derived from earlier Office of National Statistics surveys on disability needs to be updated with data describing users from a product/user perspective, enabling designers to estimate better reasons for, and levels of, user exclusion and to provide greater insight in the search for better design solutions.Inclusion is an important topic within Government, as witnessed by a number of recent reports from the House of Lords and offices of the lower house. All see the need for change in government and industry to reduce exclusion in society, but few solutions are put forward that will encourage such change. It is also clear that descriptions of 'end-users', i.e. those that we wish to include, are vague and lacking in the detail required to encourage positive action. However, despite these shortcomings there is a mood for change and the proposed research team have good links with many of the government offices responsible for these reports.This proposal responds to the above challenges by extending the focus of earlier i~design work and expanding the research team to reflect these new priorities. The philosophy underlying inclusive design specifically extends the definition of users to include people who are excluded by rapidly changing technology, especially the elderly and ageing, and prioritises the role and value of extreme users in innovation and new product/service development. It also prioritises the context of use, both physical and psychological, and the complexity of interactions between products, services and interfaces in contexts of use such as independent living. Key research requirements are:1. Better descriptions of product/service users linked to more accurate data and represented in designer-friendly formats2. Closer integration of anthropometric, capability and social data3. More effective application of users and user data to job and workplace design, and healthcare systems design4. Better understanding of the extent and nature of exclusion (across the whole population) resulting from and associated with the implementation of new technologies5. Definition and verification of the means to capture a national user data set: designing and piloting the research requirements for a major survey capable of international replication.

Rapid and unprecedented population ageing poses a serious social and economic challenge across the developed world. Shifts in dependency ratios point to escalating welfare and pensions costs which require radical and imaginative responses from Government and industry. Key to this is maintaining a healthy population that is able and willing to work longer before retirement and can remain independent for as long as possible afterwards. A further requirement is to bring disabled people into mainstream life and employment. This challenge is recognised increasingly, resulting in new legislation impacting on the major world economies. Addressing it requires: (1) understanding wellbeing and its relationship to independence; (2) the redesign of workplaces and jobs to suit the changed profile of the working population.There is a global market for products and services designed with older and less able people in mind, and industry is responding to this opportunity, both in the UK and internationally. A recent survey (commissioned by the UK Department of Trade and Industry and undertaken by CITD with Professors Clarkson and Coleman) of UK companies awareness and skills gap with regard to inclusive design concluded that the majority of companies are aware of inclusive design and its benefits. However, barriers remain to industry uptake in the form of: (1) the lack of a perceived justifiable business case to support inclusive design; (2) the lack of knowledge and tools to practice inclusive design; (3) a better understanding of the difficulties experienced by the majority of users of new technology products; and (4) access to appropriate user sets. Importantly, the end-user data derived from earlier Office of National Statistics surveys on disability needs to be updated with data describing users from a product/user perspective, enabling designers to estimate better reasons for, and levels of, user exclusion and to provide greater insight in the search for better design solutions.Inclusion is an important topic within Government, as witnessed by a number of recent reports from the House of Lords and offices of the lower house. All see the need for change in government and industry to reduce exclusion in society, but few solutions are put forward that will encourage such change. It is also clear that descriptions of 'end-users', i.e. those that we wish to include, are vague and lacking in the detail required to encourage positive action. However, despite these shortcomings there is a mood for change and the proposed research team have good links with many of the government offices responsible for these reports.This proposal responds to the above challenges by extending the focus of earlier i~design work and expanding the research team to reflect these new priorities. The philosophy underlying inclusive design specifically extends the definition of users to include people who are excluded by rapidly changing technology, especially the elderly and ageing, and prioritises the role and value of extreme users in innovation and new product/service development. It also prioritises the context of use, both physical and psychological, and the complexity of interactions between products, services and interfaces in contexts of use such as independent living. Key research requirements are:1. Better descriptions of product/service users linked to more accurate data and represented in designer-friendly formats2. Closer integration of anthropometric, capability and social data3. More effective application of users and user data to job and workplace design, and healthcare systems design4. Better understanding of the extent and nature of exclusion (across the whole population) resulting from and associated with the implementation of new technologies5. Definition and verification of the means to capture a national user data set: designing and piloting the research requirements for a major survey capable of intern