Abstract
We present the findings of a study to determine which interaction technique (touch control, voice control, gesture control, or activity control) is preferred by the elderly to control smart home devices. We conducted a workshop with eight senior citizens during which they were introduced to smart home devices in a smart living laboratory and learned how to control them. After experiencing the interaction techniques, they were asked about their experience, what they liked and disliked and which was their most and least favorite interaction technique for a specific scenario. We compared the results to their previous opinion gained from a postal survey conducted a year before the workshop to validate our assumption that senior citizens, when asked about which interaction technique they like most, will pick the technique they know best, i.e. touch control, instead of what would actually be the easiest and most intuitive way to control a smart home device. In the postal survey, most participants selected touch control as their favorite interaction technique. During the workshop it became apparent that many of them would prefer voice control or gesture control as it is close to how they would interact with a human being and they experienced it as a very natural, thus intuitive, form of communication.
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Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the financial support by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) in the framework of “Innovative Hochschule” (project number 03IHS052, Regionales Innovationszentrum Gesundheit und Lebensqualität Fulda (RIGL), Umsetzungsprojekt GetAll - Gesundheitstechnik für die Alltagsbewältigung).
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Schak, M., Bürkner, I., Blum, R., Bomsdorf, B. (2023). Smart Home for the Elderly - A Comparative Study on Interaction Techniques. In: Gao, Q., Zhou, J. (eds) Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14043. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34917-1_5
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