TV Applications for the Elderly: Assessing the Acceptance of Adaptation and Multimodality

Current TV applications present uncountable challenges to an elderly user and these are prone to increase, working as a vehicle of exclusion. The GUIDE project aims at improving the elderly experience with present TV applications by deploying interfaces adapted to their abilities and preferences. We do so by building the interface based on a user model and providing new ways to interact with the TV (multimodality), and tailoring the UI to the users’ abilities, needs and preferences. In this paper, we assess concepts of the GUIDE framework with particular focus to the User Initialization Application (UIA), an interactive application able to build the aforementioned user model. We report an evaluation with 40 older users from two countries (UK and Spain). Results show that the UIA is able to create adequate profiles and that the users are able to positively observe the adaptations. Further, novel ways of interacting with the TV were also successfully evaluated as the users tended to experiment and rate positively most alternatives, particularly Speech and Tablet interaction. Keywords-accessible applications, elderly, multimodal,

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