Touch and Speech: Multimodal Interaction for Elderly Persons - Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - page 370

The same data set contains virtual information about personnel, rooms and
departments in a common hospital, was used for both modalities throughout the
experiment.
During the experiment each participant was accompanied by only one investigator,
who gave the introduction and well-defined instructions at the beginning, and pro-
vided help if necessary.
An automatic internal logger of the MIGSEP system was used to collect the real-
time data, while the windows standard audio recorder program kept track of the whole
dialogic interaction process.
A questionnaire, which is focusing on the user satisfaction and includes questions
of seven categories: system behavior, speech output, textual output, interface presen-
tation, task performing, user-friendliness and user perspective, was filled in by each
participant via a five point Likert scale based grading system.

5.3 Procedure

Each participant (both touch and speech) had to undergo four phases:

• Introduction: a brief introduction was given to the participants.

• Standardized learning phase: they were instructed how to interact with the

MIGSEP system, either using the touchable screen or using the button device and
spoken natural language. After they made no more mistakes with the assigned input
modality, a further introduction was given to the verbal and graphical feedbacks the
system provides. Then they were asked to perform one task to gather more practical
experiences.
•

Testing: Each participant had to perform 11 tasks, each of which contains incom-
plete yet sufficient information about a destination. Each task was ended, if the goal
was selected, or the participant gave up trying after six minutes.
• Evaluation: After all tasks were completed, each participant was asked to fill in the

questionnaire for subject evaluation.

5.4

Questions and Methods

Altogether, there are three important questions to be answered by the experiment:

• ”Can elderly use the MIGSEP system to complete the tasks?”

Besides a general assessment of the task success, a standard measurement method
Kappa coefficient ([4]) is also used to detail the evaluation of the effectiveness.
•

“Can elderly persons handle the tasks with MIGSEP efficiently?”
This is answered by the automatically logged data of every single interaction.
• “Do elderly find it comfortable to interact with MIGSEP?”

This is answered by the data of the evaluation questionnaires.