Jarrod Orszulak

City browser: developing a conversational automotive HMI

This paper introduces City Browser, a prototype multimodal, conversational, spoken language interface for automotive navigational aid and information access. A study designed to evaluate the impact of age and gender on device interaction errors, perceptions and experiences with the system along with physiological indices of workload is outlined. Preliminary results, plans for further analysis and a larger scale user evaluation are presented.

Enhance Communication between Parents and Mature Children by Sharing Medication Information

Aging in place is a sustainable strategy for aging societies all over the world, although there are still various issues to be resolved. One of those issues, the isolation of the elderly, is expected to be tackled by technology. We identify three concepts for designing systems to assist the elderly in communicating with their families: provide trigger for communication, provide control of communication, and effortless communication. We develop the e-Home system on the three concepts. e-Home is a communication system that includes home monitoring; it offers shared sticky notes and video-telephony for communication media while monitoring medication compliance. We conduct a two-month field study of four households, studying e-Home use and its impact on the subjects’ communication habits. The results show enhanced communication in all households.

Who explains it?: avoiding the feeling of third-person helpers in auditory instruction for older people

Auditory instruction is a well used method for people of all ages because of its understandability. However the additional voice has the possibility to disturb the users learning during the instruction because it strongly implies the support of third-person helpers. This risk increases with older people because their confidence in their ability may decline compared to the younger people. The authors propose a method to anthropomorphize an instructed target (a vacuum) to decrease the feeling of a third person during instruction. The authors conducted the experiment using our method to explain features of household appliance and evaluated the relationship between recalled features and older peoples internal scale. The results show that older people remembered more features by using our method, and with female participants, their internal scales increased during the training. This demonstrates that our method can decrease the third-person feeling in female participants and increase the amount learned. Our findings suggest that auditory instructions may be an effective learning method for older adults.