An apartment-based metaphor for intuitive interaction with ambient assisted living applications

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) aims at supporting elderly people in their daily lives, allowing them to grow old at home. In order to provide easy remote control over the rapidly growing number of assistance services from anywhere in the apartment, many AAL environments offer a universal control device. However, the problem of structuring the numerous services for intuitive usage has not been solved satisfactorily yet. This paper introduces a spatial metaphor for universal control devices to structure available services based on the elderly person’s own apartment. We carried out a study with 18 younger elderly people using a prototype to evaluate the appropriateness and acceptance of this metaphor. The results included in this paper show that this apartment metaphor is appropriate and accepted by this main target group of AAL.