Tradeoffs in cross platform solutions for mobile assistive technology

With the increasing popularity and wide penetration of mobile smart devices, the advanced capabilities of mobile phones and tablets are being incorporated into assistive technologies. These technologies are crucial for assisting the elderly and people with disabilities in order for them to live independently. There are a myriad ways of designing and developing mobile assistive applications today, each comes with its pros and cons. In this paper we investigate the tradeoffs to be considered when trying to build a “one-size-fits-all” cross platform solution to the existing assistive technology. We outline the design decisions with respect to cross-platform issues, performance, development costs, maintenance overhead, and so on. These design and implementation decisions are the outcome of our two prototype implementations: (i) the development of a cross-mobile application that helps users effectively navigate the outdoor public transit system; and (ii) the development of an application that monitors a user's movement and detects certain abnormal behaviors such as falling. We also further investigate the system level concerns such as the performance and efficiency of data storage. We found that it is still challenging to develop a truly “one-size-fits-all” application with today's mobile techniques. However, this is an important first step towards platform independence of assistive technologies.