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Promoting Independence with a Schedule Management Assistant that Anticipates Disruptions

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Abstract

We motivate and overview a system for schedule management assistance that we are developing specifically to help adolescents with disabilities who are transitioning to independent adulthood. We summarize how we have overcome a number of engineering challenges in creating a prototype system. The expert feedback on our prototype suggests how and why the tool is expected to be useful, and has directed our focus toward handling schedule disruptions. In the latter part of this paper, we provide deeper technical material on new metrics and strategies for giving scheduling advice that is resilient to disruptions while also giving the user more freedom.

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Notes

  1. If on a particular day the activity’s time needs fall outside this range, or it needs to start sooner or end later than usual, then as will be explained shortly the user can “Modify” the activity in the midst of the day.

  2. Improving this part of the interface to strike the right balance between informing and not overwhelming the user is an area of future research (Section 13).

  3. In our prototype, we “fast forward” to the end of the chosen activity in simulation by tapping the UI area labeled “Advance system time to next decision point.”

  4. In our user interface (Section 6), this is the upper bound on the “other” activity’s time.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to our collaborators (Dr. Ned Kirsch, Dr. Jason Sleight, Donna Omichinski, Drew Davis, Jordan McKay, and Drew Canada).

Funding

This work has been supported, in part, by the by the US HHS under NIDILRR grant 90RE5012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering, U. Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Edmund H. Durfee & Lynn H. Garrett

  2. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, U. Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Abigail Johnson

Authors
  1. Edmund H. Durfee
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  2. Lynn H. Garrett
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  3. Abigail Johnson
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Correspondence to Edmund H. Durfee.

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Durfee, E.H., Garrett, L.H. & Johnson, A. Promoting Independence with a Schedule Management Assistant that Anticipates Disruptions. J Healthc Inform Res 4, 19–49 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41666-019-00060-5

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