Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

As the aged society and digital convergence have been progressed, 6most of elderly users are having difficulties in using mobile phone with complex functions. It is necessary to develop mobile phone with easy and convenient usability for universal users including elderly based on concept of universal design. We conducted qualitative & contextual research on elderly users’ contextual experience and interaction difficulties in using mobile phone in everyday life. Based on elderly users’ need figured out in this research, we tried to retrieve User Interface Design implication for universal design mobile phone, which can be used easily by anyone regardless of age and ability.

In this paper we describe work directed at exploiting existing consumer electronics to present just-in-time reminder cues to assist ageing-in-place. We describe our methodology which first employed a series of structured interviews to gain insight into older people’s opinions and expectations of consumer electronics and of the notion of autonomous and persuasive reminder systems. We then discuss our initial efforts to design and evaluate (using a Wizard-of-Oz methodology) a system which can make use of the existing programmable and wirelessly-networked, technology within the home, to provide a rich messaging service to older people as they conduct their everyday activities. Our research has the long-term aim of providing just-in-time, appropriate cues via multimodal displays to aid safer ageing-in-pace for the older population.

Digital products with small-touch-screens are increasingly affecting daily life, and most especially that of the elderly population in Taiwan which, at present, is over 9.9%. As people age, they find it increasingly difficult to operate digital products with small-touch-screens. The main purpose of this study was to investigate and categorize these difficulties for three groups of adult users. The fifteen participants in the investigation were classified into three groups: young adults, middle-aged adults and elderly adults. All of the adults were requested to accomplish different tasks using three digital products with small-touch-screens and then to provide their opinions on the kinds of difficulties they had encountered. The experts classifying the results found that the elderly adults were the group confronted with the most difficulties in the operation of small-touch-screen digital devices. In the digital dictionary experiment, the greatest difficulty for the three groups centered on cognitive ability; the majority of problems were related to motion in the PDA. In fact, the most notable problems for each of the participants were related primarily to motion in the PDA and to cognition. The results also indicated the common operational problems with the three digital products with small-touch-screens, including the impact of space or position of handwriting and button size on motion ability; and the impact of the size and color of the fonts or icons and screen brightness on perception ability. Lastly, regarding the difficulties with cognition, most of the participants were confronted with complex information, inconsistent with the interfaces of the digital products. Results of this study were based on the opinions from the three adult groups and, could be used in future designs for small-touch-screen interfaces.

It is important that the operation characteristic of the elderly have to clear for designing information equipment that was deeply considered about influences of aging. Visual search tasks were imposed on the elderly in this study and found strategy for searching target by analyzing their eye movements that gazing time, gazing position and locus in the search task. Experimental parameters of stimulus were the number of character strings, the letter types, and the number of stimulus represented on screen. Results showed that mean gazing times become long in accordance with the number of characters. When alphabetic letters was reproduced on screen, the elderly hesitated to search a target stimulus. By analysis of gazing position and locus of eye movement, the strategy of visual search of the elderly was categorized three patterns.

Older people provide much greater challenges to user-centred design than more traditional user groups. It is also very important to encourage (often young) designers to develop a relationship with, and an empathy for, older users. It is recommended that older users be fully integrated into the design process. Researchers, however, need to take care to be sensitive to the characteristics, sensory and cognitive capabilities, and the attitudes of older people to computers and to being included in research studies. The paper suggests strategies for doing this, together with the more radical approach of using professional actors as surrogates for real older users.

This paper reports on a study comparing Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2 with 18 participants aged 60 years old and over. The participants performed six groups of tasks related to browsing, navigation, navigation enhancement, bookmark, information transfer, personalization and technical manipulation. The study covers their performance, problems, and comments. This study found that menu bar is an important feature for supporting browsing activity. The participants performed the navigation tasks well but less so for personalization and technical manipulation tasks.

An important issue of the demographic change in the German population is the maintenance and promotion of the employability of aging workforces. However, there are hardly any suitable concepts or usable tools available to realize this goal. Possible approaches should push the individual strengths of the aging workers to the foreground and intercept the possible physical and cognitive losses in ability that occur with an increase in age. A model of age-differentiated adaptation of the human-computer interface, in which automatic adaptations are conducted based on individual user characteristics, is presented in this article. First connections between user characteristics and adaptation dimensions were analyzed in a study with 90 subjects ranging from 20 to 73 years of age. Results indicate a significant influence of graphical layout on memorization as well as interpretation performance.

The increase of a “graying” society is apparent in recent decades and as such, the attention of marketing and product design is more and more focused on older users of technical devices. The study addresses the relevance of hardware and software design in human-computer interaction of older users. It was found that performance significantly increased (up to 3 times) with easier sensumotor transformation and easier task type. However, this was more prominent in middle-aged users than in younger users. Task difficulty revealed a rather unspecific impact on performance (43%), and was equally apparent in both age groups. Recommendations derived from this review show that older users will profit most from touch based or mouse operated interfaces. Additionally, easy icon and menu designs are often missed and will become more and more important for older users.

An eye-tracking study of a prototype website was conducted with 10 younger adults (ages 20-39) and 10 older adults (ages 50-69) to determine if there are differences in how they scan webpages. They performed the same tasks on the website. On the average, the older adults spent 42% more time looking at the content of the pages than did the younger adults. They also spent 51% more time looking at the navigation areas. The pattern of fixations on almost all pages showed that the older adults looked at more parts of the page than did the younger adults. Implications for designing webpages that work well for older adults are provided.

The results of examining a scanning user interface implementation with command inputs in the form of head gestures for a rehabilitation robot using Fitts’ law variations and comparing these with a servo eye tracking model are made. Calculations show that the movement time prediction is more accurate in this case using the servo eye model. The response from the linearised eye model predicts that there is a minimum scanning distance that can be used and minimum spacing between commands display.