PhD Dissertation Defense by CHOO TSU Wei Kenny | Empathetic Computing for Inclusive Application Design

About The Talk

The explosive growth of the ecosystem of personal and ambient computing devices, and high-speed connectivity has led to extremely powerful and varied mobile computing applications that we use everywhere. Yet today, there is poor design support for mobile applications to be inclusive, despite the growing number of impaired users (approximately 19% of the population have a disability). Impairments are extremely diverse, varying in presentation even for the same type of impairment. To compound this, mobile apps are typically designed by unimpaired designers, for unimpaired users. Without the ability to directly understand the specific problems that impaired app users face in the environments that they use the apps, app designers are extremely challenged in supporting app accessibility or to innovate new types of applications that seek to support impaired users.

My dissertation investigates the challenges in supporting the designer-developer in designing apps for inclusiveness. Specifically, I examine these main themes: How can we support designers to design for impaired users on mobile devices? How do we design and develop a VR system that supports the naturalistic interaction and assessments of mobile apps with simulated impairments and environments? How does such a system outperform existing methods for mobile app design? In this talk, I show how this body of work paves the way for future research to develop and validate more complex models for impairment and environmental simulation such as to support app developers to redesign and innovate applications to be inclusive.

Speaker Biography

Kenny CHOO is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He works under the guidance of Associate Professor Rajesh Balan and Assistant Professor Lee Youngki (former faculty). His primary research is on empathetic computing interfaces that support mobile application design. He is also interested in the application of mobile and pervasive context monitoring to support wellness. He received his B. Eng (ECE) from the National University of Singapore and MSc in Vision, Imaging and Virtual Environments from University College London. Before starting his PhD, Kenny worked on learning pedagogies for serious games for 6 years at DSO National Laboratories.