Exploring Limitations of User Interface Design to Understanding the Gap Between Technology and Seniors

Participating in social activities promotes healthy ageing, whereas loneliness and isolation are known to cause adverse effects on both physical and mental wellbeing. Technology that exists in society today can facilitate healthy ageing. However, a gap can be seen between seniors and technology in today’s internet and communication technological device’s user interfaces. Due to limited prior knowledge of interacting with touch screen devices, seniors sometimes have difficulties using them. This research aims to explore the user interfaces and their elements designed using a human-centered design methodology by involving seniors as activate participants in the design process. This work’s outcome can improve current user interface design practices in touch screen devices, which might be seen as contributing step to understand the gap between seniors and technology.

An AAC tablet application for children with language impairment

People with communication impairment need an alternative communication channel to complete daily activities. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems can help provide a communication medium to support such users. The involvement of speech and language pathologists (SLPs) who work in rehabilitation centers can help develop better solutions. This paper presents the development of an AAC tablet application that uses pictures on the screen and voice feedback to help children with language impairment improve the efficiency in their communication. The proposed solution maps the sentences commonly used by children into appealing symbols. The children can use these symbols instead of constructing sentences from scratch, as done by most of the previously proposed solutions in the literature. The application was evaluated by SLPs on six children with language impairment. This research presents a design methodology when providing such a solution for touch screen devices for people with language impairment. A set of accessibility guidelines is proposed for AAC computer-based solutions, which can help researchers and practitioners. The obtained results prove that the proposed system improves the children’s stimulation to communicate and decreases communication time. Such a solution can assist therapists as a resource to improve their patients’ communication.

Actions with Virtual Objects on Touch Screen Devices: Analysing the Perceptual Experience of Contemporary Preschoolers

The paper focuses on the analysis of perception of virtual objects (objects of the virtual environment displayed on the screens of touch screen devices) in children of early and preschool age engaged in actions with these objects. The first part of the article reviews the psychological outcomes of a child mastering how to operate a touch screen device as a tool from the standpoint of D.B. Elkonin’s theory of child development and P.Ya. Galperin’s concept of the functional differences between a tool and a means. In the second part of the article we analyze the perceptual experience obtained by children of early and preschool age when using touchscreen devices. As we see it, the main distinguishing feature of perception of virtual objects is the discrepancy between the information received through the visual and haptic channels. We analyze the results of experimental studies that reveal the impact of this phenomenon on the process of perception of virtual objects and the extent to which the representations of virtual and real objects differ: 1) the ability of children to process haptic information, as well as to implement intermodal transfer, improves at the age of 5 to 7 years; 2) in situations of a significant discrepancy in information from different senses, children under 6 do not perform multisensory integration, but rely on one sense (usually vision). In our pilot study (17 children aged 4—5 years), a significant increase in the time of haptic recognition of a virtual object as compared to a visually perceived one (Temp = 28 at p ≤ 0.05) was detected. This can be taken as an argument in favor of the fact that children move beyond the limits of processing only visual information in situations of visual-haptic discrepancy.

Older Adults-Friendly Multi-Modal Touch-Screen Platform Measures for Bilingual Cognitive Interventions

There is an increasing interest in using touch-screen devices to conduct cognitive training and collect measurements of cognitive performance. However, older adults often have concerns such as anxiety about using these systems and poor comprehension of language instructions (Czaja & Lee, 2007). Given that Singapore is a multilingual society, we examined the deployment of an age-friendly multi-modal touch-screen platform (a game-based application on a tablet) in a cognitive intervention research. After modification of the platform to include features such as simplified instructions, multi-level prompts with a local accent, and four different instructional languages (including local dialects), participants were less reliant on the researchers and reported fewer difficulties in comprehending the instructions. The integrity and reliability of the data collected improved as a result. In sum, multilingual age-friendly touch-screen platform can be a novel yet effective method to study cognitive interventions in the Asian older adult populations.

Monitoring and Enhancement of Mobile System Performance

Android operating system, since its first start, is growing very fast and takes a large space in smart devices market. It is built and developed on Linux and designed basically for touch screen devices such as, mobiles, tablets, etc. Mobile devices are markedly complicated and feature-rich; therefore they are prone to reliability of software and performance problems. Because of the small resources, smart devices, such as CPU, RAM, suffer from problems. One of these problems is Software Aging (SA). SA is recognized in long running OSs as a shortage in resources, performance retreating, and finally failure. SA is looked at from two sides, namely the poor response time of application which represents the end user side and the shortage in metrics related to device resources, such as RAM and storage. In this paper, a set of eight experiments is conducted to distinguish SA in Android mobiles. These experiments are conducted to find the correlation between Launch Time (LT) with RAM and storage metrics covered in this paper. Statistical methods, such as Mann Kendall test, Sen’s slope, Spearman rank correlation, and Design of Experiment (DOE) are used to prove the correlation statistically. These experiments assist to detect SA, which will be helpful in the rejuvenation strategy of applications.

A First Approach to Authentication Based on Artificial Intelligence for Touch-Screen Devices

Most authentication schemes follow a classical approach, where the users are authenticated only once at the beginning of their sessions. Therefore, it is not possible to verify the legitimate use of such a session or to detect any usurpation. In order to address this issue, we propose a second-phase authentication scheme that provides not only continuous user authentication during their sessions, but also in a transparent manner, since no additional or intrusive hardware is required. To this purpose, a novel approach was applied to create specific user profiles by means of different Artificial Intelligence techniques. In this work, we aim to study the feasibility of such an authentication scheme, so that it could be applied to a real time environment in order to verify the identity of the actual user against the legitimate user profile.

Experimental Evaluation on the Effect of Electrode Configuration in Electrostatic Actuators for Increasing Vibrotactile Feedback Intensity

Vibrotactile feedback is a key feature of many modern touch displays, which greatly enhances user experiences when interacting with an onscreen interface. Despite its popularity in small touch screen devices, this haptic feature is absent in most large displays due to a lack of suitable actuators for such applications. Thus, a growing need exists for haptic actuators capable of producing sufficient vibrations in large touch displays. This study proposes and evaluates a novel electrostatic resonant actuator (ERA) with a moving mass and dual electrodes for increased vibration feedback intensity. The dual-electrode ERA was fabricated along with a comparable single-electrode ERA to investigate the effect of the electrode configuration on the maximum vibration intensity. When measured directly on the mass, the maximum vibration intensity of the dual-electrode actuator increased by 73% compared to the single-electrode actuator. When mounted and measured on a mock panel, the maximum vibration intensity of the dual-electrode actuator increased by nearly 65% compared to a similarly mounted single-electrode actuator. These results show that the dual-electrode configuration can significantly increase the vibration intensity when compared to the conventional ERA. This demonstrates a promising potential for the use of the proposed actuator for generating vibrotactile feedback in large touch displays.

Do input modalities matter? Speed and reliability of touch inputs and mouse inputs in visual foraging

Visual attention is usually investigated in a variant of the visual search paradigm with a single search target to find in the scene. However, interactions with the natural environment often revolve around more than searching the environment and then executing a single decision. To alleviate these concerns, visual attention researches have recently started exploring the possibility of using touch-screen based foraging tasks. In these tasks, multiple targets have to be cancelled by tapping them. But the adoption remains poor, possibly because of the non-availability of large touch-screen devices in most research institutions. A viable substitute for cancelling targets in such search affordances could be the computer mouse. In the present study, we aimed at investigating how search performance differs in a visual foraging task depending on the input device (touch versus mouse). We presented a visual foraging task for a known target that had to be found multiple times per search display in several search conditions. We found that responses given via mouse are slightly slower in general, but the variances in responses are comparable in all measurements. We did not find disadvantages in using computer mouse in comparison to using a touch screen. We conclude that the computer mouse is an adequate alternative to touch devices and argue that using the computer mouse in visual attention studies should become better adopted.

A Methodology for Efficient Sketch Based Image Retrievals Based on Correlation Based Matching and Generalized Gamma Mixture Model (GGMM)

The huge developments in touch screen devices and used in Computer vision developed the methodologies for recovering the images based on content. However in certain situations narration is the best suitable way to express and hence in the views of narration sketch based images are thus developed and utilized. These sketch based images are most useful in identifying face in criminal investigations. This paper provides a methodology for retrieving such sketch based images using the correlation based matching and generalized gamma mixture models. Performance is measured using precision and recall.