Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Tactile screen (or touch screen) - a system able to recognise the contact with
the finger of the user (or a pointer), and specify in which point of the area, the
screen has been contacted. It simplifies the user interface, making it more
intuitive, compact and robust.
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Multi-touch screens, and tables, smart boards - an emerging technology used
in touch screens and touch pads, in order to recognize several contact points
simultaneously. It makes easier the direct handling of some systems by means
of recognizing intuitive gestures performed with some fingers.
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3D movement tracker - a device that informs about its three-dimensional
location and orientation with respect to a reference point.
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Eye-tracker - a technique able to register in real time the eye movement, for
example to control of the pointer in a screen by tracking the users' sight.
However, the higher prevalence of visual impairments in elderly may make
this technique unsuitable.
Gesture-based interaction - to control services with the hands without touching
the device. For example hand waving, finger movement, proxy objects, For
certain physical impairments, gesture control is much easier than using a
mouse or touchpad.
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Natural language interfaces use linguistic entities such as words and phrases for
controlling services. Important components of natural language interfaces are:
Voice recognition - the process of converting digitalized voice, captured with
a microphone, in a set of phonemes, that are then mapped to words from a
vocabulary. It can solve some interaction problems for people who are not
used to deal with computers, or who have some motor disabilities. Typically
voice recognition can be speaker-independent or have wide vocabularies, but
not both at the same time. Training the system to a specific user and filtering
out ambient noise improves the performance of voice-recognition systems,
and recognition rates well over 99% are achievable under ideal conditions.
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Handwriting recognition, - a technology used for recognizing intelligible
manual writing with a special kind of pen or pointer - or possibly captured by
a camera. The written letters would normally be mapped to a vocabulary of
words.
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Natural Language Understanding - to make sense of a text, mapping it to
representations that relate to a model of pre-programmed concepts in a system.
It typically involves analysis of syntax (grammar), semantics and discourse.
Voice recognition and handwriting recognition becomes more precise if
several probable outcomes are analyzed as they relate to the model of pre-
programmed concepts, and their possible meaning evaluated based on
statistical models of user behavior. This is one step further from the emerging
natural language translation systems that are based on statistical patterns of
just word and phrase sequences.
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Voice synthesis - a system that generates voice by concatenating some
phonetic symbols. It solves some problems of interaction with the machine,
for people with visual disabilities. The natural interaction adds an important
affective component to this interface component.
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