Gorka Epelde: Doctoral dissertation defense “User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society”

Gorka Epelde, researcher at the eHealth and Biomedical Applications department of Vicomtech-IK4, has recently defended his doctoral dissertation “User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society”.

This doctoral dissertation work is focused in making interactive services accessible to the television (TV). The TV set is present in most homes worldwide, and it is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services’ consumption on TV sets is limited.

The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context.

They have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and they have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results.