SI-Screen / elisa project meeting in Barcelona
From 13th to 16th December all partners of the EU research project Social Interaction Screen (SI-Screen) met in Barcelona, Spain. The meeting focused on the preparations for the final field-tests of the third elderly interaction & services assistants (elisa) prototype. The overall goal of the project is fostering social interaction of elderly people with their family and friends as well as encouraging them to take part in local activities.
In the beginning of the field-test, elderly people in Spain and Germany will receive personalized elisa tablet computers in order to interact with their family and friends. Furthermore, the elisa user can choose between articles of different topics and discover daily updated local activity suggestions according to their interests. More information about the proceeding can be found in the AAL Special Issue of the i-com magazine.
Our pre-studies in Germany and Spain revealed that standard user interfaces of computers requiring respective technical skills form a technical barrier for elderly people. Because of this technical barrier our target group currently only has limited access to benefits of the Internet and the Social Web. We conducted a creative concept-finding workshop in order to find holistic solutions lowering the technical barrier for elderly people. Therefore we called the effectiveness of classic user interaction concepts as well as the qualification of hard- and software components into question. In the end we decided for a novel concept of a dedicated tablet computer which focuses on fostering social interaction of elderly people by lowering the technical requirements.
Based on our findings of the first prototype evaluation, we realized a first functional tablet prototype. This second prototype comprised of a newly designed hardware case and an interactive graphical user interface replacing the classic App desktop of common tablet computers. In our recent user studies in Germany and Spain, test participants were offered to select their favorite color-, form and material design variant for the hardware case of the tablet computer. An additional user study in Spain evaluated the usability of the interactive user interface and hardware design of the second prototype. The goal of this test was to find out if the elderly people can use the interactive graphical user interface independently, without assistance of another person.
For the third and final prototype, we integrated dynamic content from various Social Networking Services by using the CommunityMashup solution developed at the CSCM Cooperation Systems Center Munich. CommunityMashup supports elderly elisa users to stay in contact with their family and friends via their preferred communication channel, including e-mail and Social Networks. The advantage for elderly people is that they are able to communicate with participants of Social Networking platforms whereas they do not require a membership.
The technical administration of the device and the Social Web integration is opaque to the elderly person. An appointed person-of-trust can serve as a proxy and perform the administrative tasks by using the elisa Profile Admin UI website. These administrative tasks include the maintenance of contacts or adjusting system settings of the tablet computer. In case the elisa user encounters a problem he can contact his person-of-trust via elisa. And if no person-of-trust is available, an additional hotline with personal and technical support is available.
Apart from the elisa Profile Admin UI, we introduced the elisa Channel UI website. The purpose of the elisa Channel UI is to support family and friends to give elderly elisa users access to their activity and content streams of their Social Networking Service (SNS). Available SNS include Social Networks like Facebook or Google+, photo sharing communities like Flickr and Picasa, personal blogs (WordPress) or website feeds (RSS).
