We developed an end-to-end co-creative methodology for designing interactive and immersive multisensory virtual reality experiences with a particular focus on people with disability. Our method draws on what is called “design thinking” to provide a backbone to our approach. This embraces three stages, an empathic first stage, followed by an ideation phase, during which the thematic context is elaborated, and then an iterative exploration phase during which the initial concept is refined and the implementation is achieved. Furthermore, the “cognitive design” methodology developed by one of us led us to an approach incorporating all sensory modalities, not just the audio and visual modalities (that is, it includes odor, tactile, taste and proprioceptive stimuli), in order to deliver an experience that fully enhances the user’s sense of embodiment, and also led us to place the user’s experience at the heart of the installation. Users participate in the design process through co-design protocols. We showcase the application of this methodology in a detailed way for the construction of an interactive and immersive VR installation for people with disabilities.

Mobility is fundamental for social participation. Everyone benefits from pedestrian networks for their mobility and daily activities. People without disabilities may have little difficulty walking on narrow sidewalks, over potholes, and so on. However, people with motor disabilities (PWMD) may find it more difficult to deal with such conditions. For PWMD, even routine trips are often fraught with problems, with many different obstacles restricting their mobility and consequently rendering their participation in social and recreational activities difficult. The potential problems and risks associated with mobility for PWMD could be significantly reduced if navigation systems provided them with appropriate accessible routes. These routes should consider PWMD’s personal capabilities as well as sidewalk-network conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for computing a user-specific route for PWMD. Such a route is personalized based on the user’s confidence to deal with obstacles such as slopes, uneven pavement, etc. We show how user reported confidence levels could be used to aggregate sidewalk conditions in a routing model to offer user-specific routes. The proposed methodology was developed using a fuzzy approach and is evaluated by manual wheelchair users in Quebec City.

The process of body mapping may be viewed as a performative act. Here, an alternative performative act is presented and discussed – the wearing of immersive body maps. The idea of a wearable body map brings together several current trends in technology development, such as wearable computing, smart garments, and augmented reality, as well as blurring the line between computing infrastructures, fashion, art, and performance. Different kinds of wearable body maps may be created, depending on how these incorporate, or not, various interaction modalities. Hence, basic wearable body maps will be merely expressive. A basic body mapping app for such a context is presented. By combining this basic body mapping capability with data from other sensors, wearable body maps can be made more responsive to the environment. Once electronic sensors are incorporated, one can create more sophisticated interaction modalities, including proximal encounters with other persons and eventually remote encounters with larger collectives. Further, these developments may be understood in terms of an ecological framing theory, which not only directs the design process in an ethically aware manner but also offers the possibility of studying potential long-term impacts for mental health, both in terms of positive and negative outcomes.

A mental map refers to the personalized representation of spatial knowledge in the human brain and is based on the perceptions, experiences, and interactions of people with their environment. For people with motor disabilities (PWMD) some perceptions and interactions with the environment during their mobility occur in different ways and consequently lead to different mental maps. For example, these people perceive and interact differently with elevators, escalators, and steps during their mobility. Hence, their perceptions of the level of complexity and the legibility of an environment may be different. Legibility of an environment is an indicator that measures the level of complexity and the ease of understanding of that environment by a person. In the literature, legibility is mostly estimated based on the environmental factors such as visibility, connectivity, and layout complexity for a given space. However, the role of personal factors (e.g., capacities) is rarely considered in the legibility assessment, which complicates its personalization. This paper aims at studying the influence of personal factors on the evaluation of the legibility of indoor environments for PWMD. In addition to the visibility, the connectivity, and the complexity of indoor environments, we also integrate the influence of the level of accessibility (i.e., presence of facilitators and obstacles) in the legibility assessment process. The Quebec City Convention Centre is selected as our study area and the legibility of this building is quantified. We show how the integration of the above-mentioned factors can influence the legibility for PWMD and hence their mobility performance in those environments.

For many adults with disabilities, sexual self-stimulation is their primary means of sexual activity, and many are not even capable of engaging in this activity independently. The increase in the availability of sexual toys in the last three decades has not yet taken into consideration adults with disabilities. There are some community initiatives all over the world that allow people with motor disabilities to get together with professionals to develop their sexual autonomy, but no official programme that presents sex toys, or other methods, to make their sex lives easier. Our chapter focuses on the rather difficult reality of the sexuality of adults with motor disabilities. It also explores some design solutions for sex toys that can assist them in their sexual self-stimulation activities. Using a co-design methodology, participants with upper limb mobility limitations were engaged, from beginning to end, to develop design solutions that would lead them towards sexual autonomy and well-being in their masturbation practices. Results concerning current masturbation practices, some of the problems experienced by participants and the testing of the design solutions are documented. Finally, we situate this work within a broader context of socially constructed ideas about sexuality, disability and health. (sexuality, disability, sex toys)

Understanding disability remains a challenge. Although the international community has largely embraced the idea that disability is the product of social and environmental practices, society still lacks good conceptual frameworks. In an era when the rights of persons with disabilities have been enshrined in international and national laws, such frameworks have become a necessity. Within the province of Quebec, Canada, the Disability Creation Process (DCP) model has served such a role. Furthermore, recent efforts to enrich the model enhance the applicability of this powerful tool to a broader range of contexts. As a result, the DCP model could be used more widely than it is today. In this paper we provide the foundations of the approach encapsulated by the model and explain how its usage guides policy development and service delivery within the province of Quebec. We also highlight its forward-looking capacities.

Opera as an art form should lend itself to participatory design, given its wide variety of theatrical and musical components.Opera, however, imposes its own constraints and challenges.The problem as laid out in the early stages of the project was to design a short one-act interactive opera that could be managed within a modest budget.The source material was a science fiction manuscript currently undergoing publication by a small independent publishing house.Our research and production team included a composer, several singers/musicians, an engineer, a designer, and a choreographer/dancer as well as the writer.Furthermore, several of these had done extensive work with interactive and immersive environments.In addition to the opera itself, which incorporated both live and virtual elements, we recycled the 3d virtual designs as the substratum for an online co-creation environment that could be used to elicit public participation in the future development of our operas.We discuss both the diverse challenges involved in creating the opera and the co-creation environment, and highlight projected future work.

Measuring the proximity of the body to the environment has the potential to provide rehabilitation health care professionals (RHCP) new, additional information to assess mobility. The aims of this study were to explore the opinions and needs of professionals to use a new device to measure such proximity, and to determine potential barriers and facilitators to implement it within the clinical setting. Four focus groups were conducted with 23 RHCP. The concept of a proximity measurement device in the early stages of development was introduced. A qualitative content analysis using a model of clinical utility as guidance for coding of the transcribed texts was used. Many potential uses were raised including: improving patient safety, motor learning, independence in tasks as gait, transfers and reaching tasks, saving time during assessment, improving follow-up with the client, data precision and objectivity to assess tasks. Barriers were related to still unclear relevance, effectiveness, the added value of such a device, and time required for use. The development of a turnkey device with support to facilitate its implementation was seen to be positive. These focus groups provided important information to further identify potential uses of such a device and to help to decrease barriers to its implementation.

An effect of immersion is a desirable quality in VR interfaces and its improvement has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, enhancing immersion by eliciting feelings of embodiment and presence through multimodal interactions often requires expensive and bulky dedicated tracking systems. This renders these interactions prohibitable for mobile VR platforms. Our work focused on developing a voice and motion gesture controller with tactile feedback to induce physical sensations and arouse the feeling of embodiment and presence in mobile VR platforms. A mobile virtual reality interface was designed to validate our system through a user experiment. The results indicate that the feelings of presence, embodiment and overall immersion in the mobile VR interface were increased by the use of our system.

The quality of life of people with disabilities strongly depends on their ability to access urban spaces and conduct their daily activities without any restriction. Unfortunately, there is a significant gap between traditional urban design and the way people with disabilities live in urban environments, which significantly limits their mobility and hence their social participation. In recent years, several governments and administrations have issued norms and guidelines that aim to ensure the construction of environments that are accessible and barrier-free in order to facilitate the mobility of these people. However, the goal and the means to improve mobility and quality of access to urban environments are still misunderstood by the public authorities and the actors involved. In order to help people with disabilities overcome the existing environmental barriers, we need to better understand how they perceive the accessibility of an urban environment while taking into account the heterogeneity of their profiles. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework of a new approach to assess accessibility of urban environments centered on users’ perception. To take into consideration the diversity of users’ profiles, the proposed framework combines the principles of the Disability Creation Process model and ‘Cognitive Design’. These two paradigms provide a solid background for the definition of experimental protocols for assessing the level of accessibility of urban spaces that may contain diverse obstacles and facilitators. In addition, this paper illustrates the importance of geospatial technologies for the implementation of such protocols.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities recognizes the right of people with disabilities to attain full social participation without discrimination on the basis of disability. Furthermore, mobility is one of the most important life habits for achieving such participation. Providing people with disabilities with information regarding accessible paths and accessible urban places therefore plays a vital role in achieving these goals. The accessibility of urban places and pedestrian networks depends, however, on the interaction between human capabilities and environmental factors, and may be subdivided into physical or social factors. An optimal analysis of accessibility requires both kinds of factors, social as well as physical. Although there has been considerable work concerning the physical aspects of the environment, social aspects have been largely neglected. In this paper, we highlight the importance of the social dimension of environments and consider a more integrated approach for accessibility assessment. We highlight the ways by which social factors such as policies can be incorporated into accessibility assessment of pedestrian networks for people with motor disabilities. Furthermore, we propose a framework to assess the accessibility of pedestrian network segments that incorporates the confidence level of people with motor disabilities. This framework is then used as a tool to investigate the influence of different policies on accessibility conditions of pedestrian networks. The methodology is implemented in the Saint-Roch neighborhood in Quebec City and the effectiveness of three policy actions is examined by way of illustration.

Although our society still perceives them as asexual, people with motor disabilities still have the organ that regulates libido: the brain. Due to their pathologies, people with motor disabilities often face multiple difficulties when they wish to masturbate. Sex toys are often a means of reaching their genitals. Since the toys now on the market are not adapted to their condition, the objective of this article is to document their masturbation practices and to design adapted sex toys for people with motor disabilities. The study is based on two co-design meetings (semistructured individual interviews) with participants with motor disabilities and with a focus group of professionals (caregivers, occupational therapists, sexologists). Ultimately, this study will allow for the design of sex toys that are adapted to the condition of people with motor disabilities, and efforts will be made to ensure that these designs are accessible to this population with motor disabilities.

An appropriate assistance provided to blind pedestrians requires communicating relevant and useful spatial information about the environment where they navigate. To achieve this purpose, a semantically enriched spatial database must be designed. The aim of this paper is to propose a cognitively inspired methodology that allows designing conceptual spatial data model to help visually impaired pedestrians carrying out navigation activities. This conceptual model is the result of innovative research dealing with modeling the mental representations of urban environments based on image schemata. The developed data model incorporates two main layers. The first layer reflects the semantics of the urban environment, where its classes and relations are deduced from a configuration model of the mental representation of the urban environment. The second layer consists of the ISO standard 19133:2005 that describes the data and services needed to support tracking and navigation services. At the end of this paper, a typical scenario of the navigation of a blind pedestrian in urban area is presented. This scenario shows how the develop spatial database model will help the blind pedestrian to efficiently and safely perform his or her navigation activities.

An obvious way to assist people with disabilities in their efforts to move around in urban areas is to offer information regarding accessible path segments that take into account their specific needs. Providing safe navigation in urban areas for people with disabilities can substantially enhance their opportunities for full social participation and the exercise of their basic rights. In order to offer these people information on accessible paths, we need to assess the accessibility Accessibility of pedestrian networksPedestrian networks . Accessibility is the result of interactions between the individual and the environment. These interactions need to be more carefully considered when we evaluate accessibility for persons with disabilities. This paper proposes a new approach for assessing accessibility, based on user confidence while moving around in urban space. For validation purposes, the proposed approach is applied in the Saint-Roch area of Quebec City using confidence information from 127 manual Wheelchair user wheelchair users. The results are presented and discussed and further research perspectives are proposed.

For a city to be inclusive, its physical environment needs to be identified, characterized and assessed prior to transformations and improvements. Such identification is the first step to impact on politics for citizens with impairments and functional limitations since environmental obstacles limits their social participation. The objective of this research was to develop a comprehensive and applicable information set for the description of the physical environment in support of the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities in Quebec City’s context. We developed a taxonomy based on the Human Development Model – Disability Creation Process (HDM-DCP). We reviewed documents containing nomenclatures with respect to the specific case of Quebec City’s physical environment. We organized the information under the original taxa of the HDM-DCP, this was carried out via an iterative process where elements of similar type were organized into a common level of one hierarchical branch under general categories. When categories linking objects to broader subcategories were not already identified, we expanded the structure by creating new sub-categories or hybrids. Applicability of the developed taxonomy was tested through field analyses and testing (photos of street sections) to determine whether it included all objects and infrastructures observed in the city. The resulting taxonomy was found to be useful in identifying/mapping elements of the physical environment. Both at the individual and collective level, it allows the identification of the elements that play a role in mobility, resulting in enhanced social participation or disabling situations for people with disabilities.