User interface based on natural interaction design for seniors
Introduction
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the growing number of elderly people is going to reach 2 billion by 2050. The problems of population aging in most nations are rapidly increasing. Portet, Vacher, Golanski, Roux, and Meillon (2013) considered that this population could able to live autonomously as long as possible as comfortably as possible and to age well, therefore, this primary issue cannot be ignored in the present.
As the technology and information spread fast, ICT (Information Communication and Technology) applications nowadays are closely related to our daily life. These applications are already appropriate for young or middle aged people, that is, the digital natives. However, elderly users have to make the strenuous effort to learn and incorporate these new media, consequently, they may just choose not to try. With the advance of ICTs, the elderly has become isolated gradually (Castilla et al., 2013). Prensky (2001) defined the digital natives, that is, the population group masters ‘‘digital language’’ and they were born in the age of the Internet, videogames and computers. The digital immigrants mean that this population group had to learn to interact with technology at an older age, and they were born before the age of the technology revolution. With this fast evolution, the gap of technology between the digital natives and the digital immigrants has become more marked. Alex, Autry, and Zane (2011) claimed that generations are participating in different experiments including development activity and learning. Training events usually miss and hit deployments, and they often cause a result of generational differences and their experience using new technology. Therefore, they thought that the disconnection between perceived learning preferences and instructional delivery must be reduced. Additionally, the teaching strategies and learning preferences involved must align, because development and training efforts should be efficiently increased between digital natives and the digital immigrants. Besides, Dickinson, Newell, Smith, and Hill (2005) provided that the elderly could more difficult to control ICTs, and when they do, they success rate is lower due to their fewer experience. Another essential problem is the usability and recognition towards the same products among different age groups (Chou & Hsiao, 2007). This issue is worth discussing especially in the elderly. With aging, the elderly face memory loss and security problems and these results in a certain degree of disturbance in life.
In the aging society, it is of great value to insert technology to the elderly’s daily life (Dupuy, Consela, & Sauzéon, 2016). Technology has the potential to be involved in various ways to the seniors, such as information access, delivering, educational opportunities, telemedical uses, working from home (Alm, Gregor, & Newell, 2002). However, we all know that technology plays a vital important role in this society, the elder still seems very hard to manage it. In order to reduce this gap, the study focuses on the user interface based on natural interaction for elderly users. The Kinect sensor is adapted as a medium of human-computer interactions. Additionally, the key point of this user interface is that it can be operated by hand gestures. Users’ gestures can efficiently recognized and at the same time present interface that can be operated intuitively and with high usability. Therefore, the elderly can directly operate the interface by their hand gestures without thinking, therefore, it can effectively solve the problem of recognition. Besides, in general, the seniors usually preferred the large button, since their visual acuity gradually decrease (Dyk, Renaud, & Biljon, 2012). The small button could cause elderly users to push the incorrect number and hard to recognize the character of the icon in the electronic products (Culén and Bratteteig, 2013, Yusof et al., 2014). According to Xiong, Muraki, and Fukumoto (2014), accurately pressing a small button needs acceptable motor skills in the operating fingers. Otherwise, input errors from selecting wrong buttons, and the time and physical efforts spent in correcting these would be prolonged. According to the aforementioned, small buttons in the electronic products cause inconvenience for seniors, therefore, this study through the reanalysis of the interface elements a video interface system based on motion sensing is designed for replacing the original one that operated the remote control, and this interactive interface system cannot limited by these factors. On the other hand, the button location and spacing are important points influencing the users’ operation (Dall & Kerr, 2010). Consequently, Interpretive Structure Modeling (ISM) is used to decompose and realize the relationship of each element of interactive interface. Furthermore, the concept of affordance is integrating to the development of the graphical user interface that proposed in this study, intuition in operating the interface will increase, and cognitive and memory problems will decrease for elderly users.
Section snippets
Literature review
As growing older, the elderly has obvious change among perception, movement and recognition, and these bring many problems in daily life (Okada, 1997). Williams, Alam, Ahamed, and Chu (2013) explore some common problems older users face when operating technological devices, including cognition, auditory, haptic, visual, and motor-based troubles. They could also experience in different aspects of vision problems, such as visual acuity, presbyopia, peripheral vision and dark adaptation (Nunes,
Interpretive structural model
Human’s information processing is similar to computers’ input and output actions. However different from computers, human brains have limited memory span, and all the information go through coding and decoding processes when storing information. This enables both information storage and access work in an efficient way. Interpretive structural model (ISM) is an information formatting process which adopts a two-dimensional array (Boolean’s algebra) and produces a multilevel structural hierarchy.
Research framework
The research framework proposed by the study is shown in Fig. 7, which provides a complete solution alternative for users in terms of Natural Interaction (NI) with video interface system. To produce interaction with the system, the whole research framework is divided into two parts, action input and system response. First, by the assistance from Kinect sensor (Fig. 8(a)), in-depth information of the interaction between users and the system can be obtained. Then, related information (Fig. 8(b))
Case study
The study proposed a user interface design method for the elders based on natural interactions. Through the reanalysis of the interface elements a video interface system based on motion sensing is designed for replacing the original one that operated the remote control. The newly developed interface can realize the functional service provided by the multimedia systems by intuitive operation with one’s hand. The procedure of a digital designing video interface for a digital TV is taken as an
Results
The study proposed a user interface for seniors which was based on natural interaction which enabled users to undergo human and computer interactions by using hand gestures. Kinect sensor played an important media on this interface design to retrieve in-depth information for users’ motions especially hand gesture data. To recognize hand gestures among in-depth information, morphology method was used to search for hand gesture’s feature points. At the same time, the pressure coefficient
Discussion
In this study, the following three problems are observed and need to be revised.
- (1)
The location and direction of Kinect sensor
Kinect sensor is a common entertainment facility in digital family life. Unlike motion entertainment, which is applied to a wide range of body movements, only specific goal is required and precision is not required. As a medium in interface operation, it used to sense and retrieve hand gesture data, and to recognize hand gesture points. This belongs to a relative small
Conclusions
The user interface is constantly making progress and ubiquitous nowadays, however its design currently is still lack of concern towards the usability and accessibility of the elderly.
Besides, seniors have significant involution among perception, movement, auditory, haptic, visual, and recognition, etc., and therefore, they usually have challenges in understanding and operating many conventional interface devices. In order to solve these problems, the purpose of the study was to develop a user
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