Enhanced Interaction for the Elderly supported by the W3C Multimodal Architecture

Abstract

Some elderly have resistance in what concerns the use of technology. Improving usability and accessibility is expected to increase their acceptance and use of new technologies. Combination of different modalities to support enhanced interaction, particularly including the use of spoken language, is one path with recognized potential to enhance usability and accessibility. Despite the recognized potential , there is not much work on creating the conditions for simple and fast development of such forms of interaction. In this paper we propose the adoption of the recent W3C multimodal architecture as the basis to create e nhanced multimodal interaction for the Elderly, describing its general architecture and how we implemented a multimodal framework. The implementation is composed by several components, being one of the most important, the Interaction Manager, responsible for receiving event messages from the input modalities and making decisions on how to process those messages. It is also described the implementation of the modalit ies used in this context. As a proof-of-concept, the paper ends with the presentation of an application to provide access to news feeds by voice and body gestures, used to test the developed framework.