Anton Josef Fercher

Reducing the entry threshold of AAL systems: preliminary results from casa vecchia

Ambient assisted living holds promising solutions to tackle the problems of an overaging society by providing various smart home as well as computing and internet technologies that support independent living of elderly people. However, the acceptance of these technologies by the group of elderly constitutes a crucial precondition for the success of AAL. The paper presents early results from the project Casa Vecchia which explores the feasibility of AAL within a longitudinal field study with 20 participating households. Thereby observed barriers hindering the acceptance of technologies applied in the project are discussed as well as possible solutions to reduce the entry threshold to assistive technology.

Disseminating Ambient Assisted Living in Rural Areas

The smart home, ambient intelligence and ambient assisted living have been intensively researched for decades. Although rural areas are an important potential market, because they represent about 80% of the territory of the EU countries and around 125 million inhabitants, there is currently a lack of applicable AAL solutions. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of AAL in rural areas. This discussion is underlined by the achievements of the empirical field study, Casa Vecchia, which has been carried out over a four-year period in a rural area in Austria. The major goal of Casa Vecchia was to evaluate the feasibility of a specific form of AAL for rural areas: bringing AAL technology to the homes of the elderly, rather than moving seniors to special-equipped care facilities. The Casa Vecchia project thoroughly investigated the possibilities, challenges and drawbacks of AAL related to this specific approach. The findings are promising and somewhat surprising and indicate that further technical, interactional and socio-psychological research is required to make AAL in rural areas reasonable in the future.

End Users Programming Smart Homes – A Case Study on Scenario Programming

Smart technology for the private home holds promising solutions, specifically in the context of population overaging. The widespread usage of smart home technology will have influences on computing para- digms, such as an increased need for end user programming which will be accompanied by new usability challenges. This paper describes the evaluation of smart home scenarios and their relation to end user programming. Based on related work a two-phase empirical evaluation is performed within which the concept of scenarios in the private home is evaluated. On the basis of this evaluation a prototype which enables the simulation of end user programming tasks was developed and evaluated in comparison to two commercial products. The results show that, compared to the commercial products, our approach has both, some advantages as well as drawbacks which will be taken into consideration in further development planned for the future.

Aspekte der Human Computer Interaction im Smart Home

Das Smart Home mit all seinen Möglichkeiten und Funktionen hat sich im privaten Wohnumfeld bisher nicht durchgesetzt. Die Gründe dafür sind vielschichtig, Aspekte der Human Computer Interaction (HCI) spielen dabei aber eine entscheidende Rolle. Anhand des aktuellen Leitkonzepts der HCI, User Experience, analysiert der Beitrag Bedieneigenschaften und psychologische Faktoren der Nutzer ebenso wie nicht funktionale Faktoren des Systems. Die Vorstellung von Beispielprojekten soll aufzeigen, dass ein erweiterter, HCI-orientierter Zugang einen Schlüsselfaktor für den zukünftigen Erfolg des Konzepts Smart Home darstellen kann.

AAL 4 ALL - a matter of user experience

Population over aging is at present a widely discussed and researched challenge that society will have to face in the future. Research on ambient assisted living (AAL) yields promising solutions to master those challenges and the IT industry meanwhile has identified AAL as an important future market. However, AAL solutions which are adequate for large portions of the population are still missing. When considering that population over aging will be a mass phenomenon, solutions have to be provided which are applicable for a majority of the population living in different environments and having different income levels and, most importantly, consider a broad range of usability and psychological aspects which influence the acceptance and usage of technology. In this paper we identify and discuss shortcomings of existing research activities and technological developments and present approaches overcoming these shortcomings on the basis of the concept of user experience.

Towards an Acceptance Model for AAL

As one of the major goals in the ambient assisted living project Casa Vecchia (performed in 20 real world household installations) we want to thoroughly evaluate the life circumstances of elderly people in order to be able to establish a basic ontology including all relevant factors that are actually or potentially influencing the acceptance of AAL technology. A prototype system enabling the participants to observe automated features of an AAL system as well as to perform basic interaction and communication tasks was installed. Periodic evaluation cycles that were accompanying the project which were based on a customized mix of methods and concepts frequently discussed and applied in the context of AAL research. The main concepts used are the technology acceptance model (TAM), contextual design and the analysis of social networks. The project is still up and running, but first results could already be achieved which show a different access to technology between men and women.

“Just the Place for a Snark!”: An Introduction to Calm Technology

What is the difference between how information is presented in nature and on computers? According to Professor Mark Weiser, the core difference is the ease with which the new information can move from the focus to the periphery of our attention. Technology designed with this in mind allows the user to easily move in and out of a state of flow, working at peak performance while avoiding techno-stress. That is what Weiser called Calm Technology.

“Yet, Still, Ever After…”: Future Work

This book has been about the theoretical and practical work that went into developing a truly intuitive interface for controlling networked and embedded devices in the smart homes within and in parallel to the Casa Vecchia project. Both branches of that work continue, inside and outside of the Casa Vecchia system. In this final chapter we provide an overview of the theoretical and practical efforts that have derived from Casa Vecchia and from our work on the S.N.A.R.K.; and look into the future at what will come next.

“How Do You Feel?”: Qualitative Results

The C.A.S.A. T.E.V.A. system was not designed solely to perform tasks with measurable success. The core intent was to design a new experimental means of interaction with a complex network of embedded devices that would not feel new, experimental, or complex. In this chapter we present the qualitative methods used to capture the feelings and opinions of the participants in our endeavor regarding the system. We used standard, pre- and post-experimental Likert questionnaires to gather consciously-expressed opinions, a System Usability Scale to turn some of those opinions into a deeper comparative evaluation of the system, and anthropological methods to gather unconscious opinions.

“What I Tell You Three Times Is True”: The S.N.A.R.K. Circuit

So-called natural interaction with smart homes has been limited by a misunderstanding of how humans naturally interact. Consider speech. Chatbots, developed to push the limits of voice-based interaction ignore the fact that natural human speech is actually multi-modal, supplemented both consciously and unconsciously by posture, gesture, facial expression, and a complex web of flexible situational data. In terms of UX design, this is not a bug but a feature. The inability of voice-based systems to recognize spoken commands can be corrected by using additional natural signals such as gestures, to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. This form of modular redundancy was fundamental to early satellite communications and became the basis for our S.N.A.R.K. Circuit, the means by which a human with the correct mental model can interact intuitively with a Smart Home.