Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
User Capabilities
The constraints coming from user capabilities can be categorized according to the main
categories of human impairments: perception, cognition and physical abilities. Most
people suffer more or less deterioration of all of their capabilities as they grow older, so
it is a key issue to address impairments properly and provide interfaces that are adapted
exactly to the capabilities of each user.
Physical disabilities with direct impact on interaction are for example motor
disabilities, tremor, and various health problems that restrict breathing etc.
Perception capabilities comprise how well the user can encode and understand
visual artefacts, audio artefacts, touch (including muscular state), smell and taste. For
each of these senses there are many different kinds of possible limitations that need to
be considered, so interaction components must be possible to personalise with regard
to visual sizes and colours, audio volume and frequencies, strength of vibration/haptic
modes and any exotic uses of smell and taste.
Cognition capabilities comprise many different aspects, including memory,
reasoning and actability etc. While cognition capabilities can be impaired for many
reasons, it should be noted that a large proportion of the population develops milder or
more severe dementia symptoms with old age, causing a wide variety of cognition
problems. Therefore AAL interaction components must be highly personalisable in
terms of the complexity services, information and user interfaces, the level of
abstraction in symbols used, and relying more or less on pro-active functionality.
5.4.4. Vision: Adaptive Interaction Configuration
Considering the user and system goals, the dynamic user context and the interaction
constraints, our vision is that an optimal configuration will be determined for delivering
content to the user and allowing control of active services. This will increase usability
of AAL services by avoiding interaction obstacles cause by a mismatch between how
the services are presented and the capabilities of the user.
This consists of selection of a nearby device to use, or several devices that together
can mediate content and services with suitable modalities, sufficient media richness
and limited information complexity, in order to match the physical, perception and
cognition capabilities of the user. In the general case, this is quite complex even in the
case of scalable content and services with fully multi-modal devices to use.
Middleware
To promote uptake of this necessary but complex future technology, it will need to be
packaged as middleware, for example as user interface development toolkits or to be
directly supported by innovative operating systems. Key enabling technologies for this
are:
Scalable content - information, media and services hierarchically organized so
that overviews of complex information or functionality can be presented to
persons with limited cognitive abilities, or in contexts where interaction
richness is limited by the available devices. Automated overall scaling of
services and information will require advances in service models and semantic
analysis, while effective media scaling technologies already exist.
Federated devices (“pieceware”) - a set of nearby devices acting as one. While
this is mostly a conceptual model for optimal selection of a group of nearby
devices, it can be well emulated in situations where there are media-rich
Search WWH ::




Custom Search