In the first reporting period the project has significantly progresses beyond the state of the art in the field of understanding the interaction of people with PIMD with others. It has defined a comprehensive assessment tool enabling to collect relevant information. It created the so called Global PIMD Atlas which is an electronic repository system aimed at gathering information on the PIMD population thus facilitating further studies of this disability type. As far as the technological state of the art is concerned, the project has used several advanced ICT technologies in the context of direct assisting of people with PIMD. To the knowledge of the project consortium this has most likely been the first such attempt in the world that allowed to successfully confirm that employing a range of technologies from the AI and machine learning domain has a vast potential in opening new opportunities for people with PIMD, including in their everyday life and education. It is expected that until its end the project constructs a fully working, integrated technical solution for the recognition and interpretation of the non-symbolic behavioral signals of people with PIMD, and enables it for use within application scenarios ranging from communication of people with PIMD with others, through entertainment to smart home. The project is foreseen to validate the developed solution in a comprehensive study with the participation of a number of actual individuals with PIMD, thus providing evidence of the influence of advanced ICT on the life of people with PIMD and persons directly supporting them.
It is expected that the technological solution designed and developed within the project will contribute to the implementation of disability policies and other EU and UN level strategies concerned with the inclusion of people with disabilities in the society, to the enhancement of the quality of life of people with PIMD and their caregivers, and to the increase of assistive technologies market.
