Touch and Speech: Multimodal Interaction for Elderly Persons - Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - page 366

• Validation: the CSP specified structure of a unified dialogue model can be vali-

dated by using Failures-Divergence Refinement tool, (FDR (cf. [27])), which is a
model checking tool for validating and verifying concurrency of state automata.
• Generation: according to the given CSP specification, finite state automata can

then be generated by the FormDia Generator.
• Channels Definition: channels between the dialogue management and applica-

tion/domain specific components can be defined. These channels are at first black
boxes, which will be filled with deterministic behavior of concrete components.
•

Simulation: with the generated finite state automata and the communication chan-
nels, dialogues scenarios are simulated via a graphical interface, which visualizes
dialogue states as a directed graph and provides a set of utilities to trigger events and
the dialogue state update for testing and verification.
• Integration: after the dialogue model is validated and verified, it can be integrated

into a practical interactive dialogue system via a dialogue management driver.
The FormDia toolkit shows a promising way for developing formally tractable and
extensible interaction. It enables an intuitive design of dialogue models with formal
language, automatic validation of related functional properties, and it also provides an
easy simulation, verification for the specified dialogue models, and the straightfor-
ward integration within a practical interactive system. In addition, with the unified
dialogue model, FormDia toolkit can even be used in multimodal interactive system.

4 Multimodal Interactive Guidance System for Elderly Persons

The Multimodal Interactive Guidance System for Elderly Persons (MIGSEP) was
developed for elderly or handicapped persons to navigate through public spaces.
MIGSEP runs on a portable touch screen tablet PC. It serves as the interactive media
designed for an autonomous intelligent electronic wheelchair that can automatically
carry its users to desired locations within complex environments.

4.1 System Architecture

The architecture of MIGSEP is illustrated in Fig. 4. A Generalized Dialogue Manager
is developed using the unified dialogue modelling approach. It functions as the
central processing unit and enables a formally controllable and extensible, meanwhile

Fig. 4. The architecture of MIGSEP