User Interfaces in Smart Assistive Environments

Abstract

Assistive environments are primarily designed to support the healthy and independent living of ageing people. Elderly are often perceived as being resistant to technology; in reality, many of them are willing to accept novel digital technologies into their lives, and to take advantage of what technology has to offer. The “not worth it” impression, on the other hand, is more likely to be triggered by unusable interfaces, that prevent the older users from perceiving technology as both usable and useful. This motivates the need of investigating suitable guidelines for the design of user-system interfaces in the field of smart assistive environments, for which elderly are the typical target users. Focusing on two specific physical user-system interfaces, i.e. smart TVs and touchscreen devices, this chapter discusses the requirements that a design for older users has to address. The theoretical discussion is supported by experimental results gained from an Ambient Assisted Living project carried out by the authors, discussed as a use case in the last part of the chapter.