Empirical Study and Design of Multimodal Ambient Assisted Comfort Services for Senior Citizens

The growing size of the aging population is becoming a significant issue for many countries, which can be helped through use of ambient assisted living systems to allow seniors to live at their homes longer. Many previous works have focused on the emergency and autonomy services, and lack studies on comfort service. The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study of using multimodal interfaces in ambient assisted comfort services for senior citizens targeting participants at their home, with a prototype system that supports both traditional and multimodal interaction methods. Scenarios have been defined that include common tasks such as item finding, communication, media access, and setting calendar events. 15 senior citizens have answered questionnaires and scale rating questions from each performed scenario. The comparison between traditional and multimodal interfaces were done through a set of evaluation criteria including efficiency (time), pleasantness, fatigue, naturalness, ease of learning, and perceived efficiency. The results showed that all the participants have enjoyed the multimodal interface, and showed better efficiency than traditional interaction method.