Novel Functional Technologies for Age-Friendly E-commerce

In this paper, we present an age-friendly E-commerce system with novel assistive functional technologies, aiming at providing a comfortable online shopping environment for the elderly. Besides incorporating human factors for the elderly into the design of user interface, we build an age-friendly system by improving the functional usability. First, to improve the searching experience, we design a multimodal product search function, which accepts image, speech, text and the combination of them as inputs to help the elderly find products easily and accurately. Second, we develop a product reputation function to provide an objective evaluation of products’ quality, which helps the elderly filter out low-quality products while saves their energy in product comparison. Additionally, to reduce the elderly’s visual burden when browsing the Web, a personalized speech feedback function is designed to provide speech assistant for the elderly. Our system has been testified using real-world E-commerce data, and the result demonstrates its feasibility.