Touch and Speech: Multimodal Interaction for Elderly Persons - Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - page 369

4.4 Interaction with MIGSEP in a Hospital Environment

We have implemented a MIGSEP system and set its application domain to hospital
environments. Fig. 7 shows a user interacting with it via speech modality and a sam-
ple dialogue between the MIGSEP system and a user who would like to be guided to
the cardiology department, to a doctor named Wolf.

Fig. 7. A user is interacting with MIGSEP and an Example of a dialogue with MIGSEP

5 The Experimental Study

To evaluate how well an elderly person is assisted by MIGSEP system, an experimen-
tal study concerning speech and touch input modalities was conducted.

5.1 Participants

Altogether 31 elderly persons (m/f: 18/13, mean age of 70.7, standard deviation 3.1),
all German native speakers, took part in the study, in which 15 participants were us-
ing the speech input and 16 were using touch input. They all finished the mini-mental
state examination (MMSE), which is a screening test to measure cognitive mental
status (cf. [28]). A test value between 28 and 30 indicates slight decline yet sufficient-
ly normal cognitive functioning, therefore, our participants showing 29.0 averagely
(std.=.84) were in the acceptable range.

5.2

Stimuli and Apparatus

Except the variation of the input possibilities between touch and speech, where the
touch modality was supported by a touchable screen of a laptop and the spoken lan-
guage instructions were only activated if the button was being pressed and the green
lamp was on (cf. Fig. 7), all other stimuli are the same for both modalities, e.g., visual
stimuli were given by a green lamp and a graphical user interface; audio stimuli as
complementary feedbacks were also generated by the MIGSEP system and presented
via two loudspeakers at a well-perceivable volume. All tasks were given as keywords
on the pages of a calendar-like system.