3 research outputs found
Universal Communication model and evaluation with the Elderly Society
Telecommunication uses today various devices, operating systems, network
technologies and applications. The multiplicity and diversity of these items are expected
to increase due to the development of new technologies. As a result communication
becomes a challenge. Communication is according to the World Health Organization a
basic requirement for participation of elderly people in the society. In this thesis the
architecture model ¿Universal Communication Model¿ (UCM) for the unified application
of these items is developed and investigated. The future society will merely be 60+ and
lowered physical abilities for communication need to be compensated. Two hypotheses
that represent challenges of the UCM are provided and investigated: First, ¿Elderlies have
difficulties in stress and ad-hoc situations to cope with ICT solutions¿ (H 1), and second
¿Elderlies have problems to reach destinations¿ (H 2). Both hypotheses are divided into
sub-hypotheses without and with UCM support.
Two use cases are applied to the UCM: Elderly father at home called by his daughter
from her car, and disoriented grandma walking to her appointment at the medical clinic
using the public transportation system.
The two use cases are detailed with scenarios and corresponding prototypes. 24
tasks for elderly probands are developed and executed in a laboratory setting with 30
elderlies (including a questionnaire): Half of the tasks, namely twelve, are designed
without the UCM and the other half with the application of the UCM. The time
measurements to solve the tasks are evaluated using two statistical methods: The
Euclidean distance and the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the measured data
distributions and the corresponding Gaussian distributions are computed.
The experiments demonstrate that the task execution durations were reduced by a
factor of up to six due to the application of the UCM (compared to the situation without
UCM). And the (qualitative) satisfaction factor of the probands increased by a factor of up
to four for all tasks due to the seamless and multimodal UCM. These results show that the
UCM supports communication for the elderly society in a seamless and intuitive way.Ingeniería, Industria y Construcció