Towards Effective, Efficient and Elderly-friendly Multimodal Interaction

 Multimodal interfaces are considered as a promising possibility to improve the quality of communication between users and systems and have significant impact on effectiveness and efficiency of interaction. They also enhance users' satisfaction by providing a more natural and intuitive way of interaction. On the other hand, the demographic development towards more elderly keeps motivating the research of elderly-friendly interactive systems focusing especially on the multimodal communication channels. In this work, we present an interactive guidance system for elderly persons. It uses a unified interactive modelling approach combining the classic agent based dialogue theories and a formal method supporting generalized recursive transition network based method to achieve a flexible and context-sensitive, yet formally tractable and controllable interaction. Furthermore, it is developed according to a number of elaborated guidelines with respect to basic design principles of conventional interactive systems and the most common elderly-centered characteristics. In order to evaluate the system, two experimental studies were conducted. The first experiment aimed at the evaluation of the interaction model used in the guidance system by task success. The second experiment was focused on the natural spoken language input interface of the system, regarding the essential criteria of aspects like the effectiveness of task success, the efficiency of executing tasks and the user satisfaction with the system. The results of the experimental studies are overall positive, provide evidence for our proposed design guidelines, approaches and frameworks on interactive system development, and deliver several valuable findings for the further development as well.

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