Designing Speech and Multimodal Applications for Seniors Deborah Dahl Conversational Technologies SpeechTEK 2009

Why Design for Seniors? The social reasons: The business reasons: Make it possible for seniors to fully benefit from technology Use technology to assist seniors in their daily lives The business reasons: Take advantage of a big and growing market Reduce health care costs technology-based rehab aging in place Improve containment in call centers

Kinds of Senior Applications Call center applications that provide value primarily to older users Call center applications that need to be used by a demographic that includes older users Assistive technologies that help older users in everyday life Rehab applications that help senior users improve functions that have been compromised by aging or a disease

Why do Seniors Need Special Design Considerations? Changes due to aging are familiar to everyone These changes can affect how well someone can use an application Many kinds of changes in all areas of life Physical, cognitive, social, psychological… Physical and cognitive changes may be most relevant to speech and multimodal applications Effects of physical changes may be more significant than cognitive changes

Physical Changes Perceptual – vision (presbyopia, macular degeneration, cataracts), hearing loss Motor– manual dexterity, physical mobility Effects of chronic diseases – for example, diseases that affect breathing Speaking ability

Cognitive Cognitive changes tend to not be as dramatic as physical changes Working memory Attention -- difficulty in focusing, distractability Learning – learning may take longer Processing speed– processing new information may be slower Language comprehension– may be slower because of general slowdown in processing new information Language production – slower word retrieval

All of these factors may be relevant to design for seniors Everyone is different! Does the application have to accommodate people of all ages and abilities, or is it just focused on seniors?

Some Specific Considerations

Speech-only applications User has to be able to hear and comprehend prompts Speech volume, rate, vocabulary, syntactic and semantic complexity of prompts can affect comprehension and memory for choices User has to be able to respond within the timeout period Speaking ability doesn’t necessarily degrade with age, but people may speak more slowly Length of speech timeout may need to be adjusted DTMF responses may be slowed by limited dexterity or ability to see the keypad Recognizer may need to be trained on older voices

Multimodal Applications GUI and speech modalities can complement each other Text display of prompt can assist users who are hard of hearing and it can also provide a memory aid by persisting Spoken prompts can be useful for users who can’t see well Touch screen can assist users who can’t use a mouse Speech input can be used when using a keyboard is too difficult

Summary To accommodate senior users, designers must take into account the physical and cognitive changes related to aging

Discussion