Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
towards increasingly more elderly persons, there rises a growing research focus on the
ultimodal communication technology, which aims at enhancing the quality of interac-
tion by taking age-related decline into account (cf. [3]).
Elderly people often suffer from decline of sensory, perceptual, motor and cogni-
tive abilities. Considering these facts we first present a list of elaborated design guide-
lines regarding basic design principles of conventional interactive systems and the
most common elderly-centered characteristics. Meanwhile, in order to achieve a flex-
ible and context-sensitive, yet formally tractable and controllable interaction, we de-
signed a unified dialogue modelling approach, which combines a finite state based
generalized dialogue model and the classic agent based dialogue model, and imple-
mented this by a formal language based development framework. According to the
proposed design guidelines and the unified dialogue modelling approach, an interac-
tive guidance system was especially designed and developed for the elderly. To eva-
luate the touch input and natural spoken language modalities with respect to their
feasibility and acceptance by elderly persons, an empirical study was conducted with
31 older participants. The general framework PARADISE [4] has been applied in
our evaluation process. The study also aimed at the evaluation of the multimodal
interactive guidance system as a whole, while regarding the essential criteria of the
following aspects for interaction: the effectiveness of task success, the efficiency of
executing tasks and the user satisfaction with the system.
The following text is organized as follows: section 2 presents the proposed general
guidelines for designing multimodal interactive system for elderly persons; section 3
introduces the unified dialogue modelling approach which combines the classic agent
based approach and the recursive transition network based theory for building the
discourse management of the multimodal interaction; section 4 then describes the
multimodal interactive guidance system, which is developed based on the unified
dialogue modelling approach and the presented set of design guidelines; section 5
describes the experimental study, and the results are analyzed and discussed in section
6. Finally, section 7 concludes and gives an outline of the future work.
2
Design Guidelines of Multimodal Interactive Systems for
Elderly Persons
[5] indicated that the decline of elderly persons should be considered while designing
interactive systems for the elderly. Therefore, we defined a set of design guidelines
for multimodal interaction with respect to the decline of seven very important abili-
ties. They are implemented and integrated into our multimodal interactive guidance
system and tested in an empirical pilot study. The results are described in [6] and the
improved guidelines are presented as follows:
2.1
Visual Perception
Visual perception declines for most people with age (cf. [7]) in different ways: many
people find it more difficult to focus on objects up close and to see fine details; the
size of the visual field is decreasing and the peripheral vision is successively declin-
ing. Rich colors and complex shapes are making perception difficult. Rapidly moving
Search WWH ::




Custom Search