Miming navigation pages with a personal remote control device for the aged Maria Teresa SEGARRA 1 and André THEPAUT Institut Telecom Telecom Bretagne Technopôle Brest-Iroise CS 83818 Brest Cedex 3 - France {mt.segarra,andre.thepaut}@telecom-bretagne.eu Abstract. The demographic development leads to an increasing number of elderly people with limited mental and physical capabilities and who demand for services that emphasize their comfort during every day life. This growth in population ageing have lead to increase efforts on using information and communication technologies in order to provide services that help elderly people to live in their own home as long as possible by making their life as healthy, save, and comfortable as possible. However, accessing such services can be challenging as the aged are not familiar with the traditional keyboard and mouse interaction devices. In this paper, we present our work on an interaction device based on a TV set and a touch screen based smart phone. When an old person wants to access a service, she uses the touch screen of the smart phone which mimics the navigation pages of the system, the content itself is only presented on the TV. Moreover, the smart phone embeds a RFID tag that identifies its owner so that the content presented on the TV set is the one concerned by her. Keywords. Multimedia services on TV set, services co-design for the aged, services customization. Introduction The growth in population ageing in most industrialized nations is posing several problems at different levels of our society (political, social, and familiar/personal levels). Statistics data provide a clear picture of the problem dimensions. According to recent results of a survey funded by the European Commission [1], in 2050 the share of the above 60 age group will be around 37% in Europe and even more in Japan, and slightly lower in North America (27%). Some ambient assistive living (AAL) applications are intended to allow the aged to stay at the place they live (home, nursery home) while connected to their relatives and medical staff [2]. Such applications include health-care services, communication between the aged and their relatives, infotainment, entertainment, etc. Using a computer with keyboard and mouse to access these services and the information they manage is not a satisfying approach as much of our aged are not familiar with such devices and would represent a barrier for services acceptance. 1 Corresponding Author.
The S.I.D. research group, from Institut Telecom-Telecom Bretagne, aims to federate existing and new assistive technologies and services in a generic yet customizable framework so that it better suits users' needs and requirements. Elderly people, sociologists, and ergonomists are actively involved all over the services design phase in order to identify services and design interfaces that improve elderly performance when interacting with them. Interaction devices in our platform mainly consist on a TV set and a simplified remote control device, both, familiar devices for our aged. A first evaluation of our prototype have revealed the difficulties of the elderly people when navigating on graphical interfaces presented on the TV by using the simplified remote control device. In this paper, we propose the solution we adopted in the Companymages/AIPA project. It is essentially based on a touch screen based smart phone that mimics the navigation graphical interfaces of our services. Moreover, the smart phone embeds a RFID active tag that identifies its owner so that the content presented on the TV set is the one concerned by her. Services proposed on this project will be deployed in twelve rooms in Kerlevenez nursery home (Brest, France), by June 2009 2. The paper is organized as follows. The next section introduces the SID platform, its main components and the main navigation problems raised by end users when using it. Section 2 presents our solution to these problems and gives implementation details. Finally, Section 3 gives some concluding remarks. 1. SID Platform Since 2001, the SID research group of the Computer Sciences Department of Telecom Bretagne works on proposing a service-oriented platform intended to help people with disabilities to improve their quality of life. The platform is composed of a set of servers and interaction devices to access available services. These devices have been advocated by the end users' themselves and concern the TV set and its remote control. In order to identify services, we have actively worked with sociologists and the end-users themselves by following a design-implementation-evaluation iterative methodology. This has lead to a set of services mainly concerning comfort, infotainment, entertainment, and communication-oriented services and a first evaluation by a set of end-users. In this section, we present the SID platform, its main components and interaction devices as well as the problems raised by users when evaluating the platform and its services. 1.1. Platform architecture The SID platform is composed of a set of servers that provide multimedia content, interaction devices to access services, and a central server that makes content available to its users. The SID platform has been used and evaluated by several types of users, mainly disabled children and elderly people at home and all of them have demanded non health-oriented services. According to this, SID services include sending and receiving messages/photos from relatives, receiving news from the places the users 2 The authors of the Companymages/AIPA project would like to thank the aged and the professional caregivers of the Kerlevenez nursery home (Brest, France) involved in the deployment and evaluation of the platform.
know, using a video-conference system, and being able to play games with friends. In order to provide such services, the architecture of the platform is depicted in Figure 1. High-level services concern the previously mentioned services while the base services include functionalities that may be used by several services such a text-to-speech server. Services (base or high-level) can be accessed by different interfaces depending on the user profile: a simplified interface so that end-users are able to access services on their TV connected to the network by a set-top-box and a remote control device, a web-based interface used by the relatives to send messages and photographies, and a web-services interface that may be used in order to access base services. Figure 1. Architecture of the SID platform 1.2. Interaction devices and navigation problems All end-users have advocated the use of the TV, connected to a set-top-box, and a simplified remote control device to access services as they are well-known devices. TV interfaces are a set of simplified menus (see Figure 2) so that only four actions are available for each of them: next/previous page, validate, and starting page. On the other hand, the simplified remote control device is shown in Figure 3. Some adaptations have been done for some disable children that were not able to use the device by taking it directly in the hand. Using two arrows, the OK, and the green buttons of the remote control, users were able to navigate among menus on the TV interface. Figure 2. TV interface In order to improve our platform, the Companymages/AIPA project [3] aims at proposing, deploying, and evaluating a set of services for elderly people in institution.
To this end, we have identified a set of interested elderly people at Kerlevenez, a nursery home in Brest (France), and allowed them to perform some simple actions. As on our previous work, the aged advocate the use of ICT for communication, infotainment, and entertainment services. However, the experiment has revealed the difficulties of the elderly people to use the remote control device to access services. The most important of them concerns navigation on graphical interfaces presented on the TV. We have identified two main reasons for this difficulty: 1) information presentation to the aged, and 2) the elderly people mode of interaction with TV and remote control device. In order to better understand these reasons, consider a service that allows the aged to visualize photographies made available by relatives. Concerning the way into which photographies are presented to the aged, we have considered two approaches: a flat organization and a tree-based organization. The first one lets the elderly people directly access all of them but prevents people from organizing photographies depending on a subject. The latter, uses photo albums but adds new navigation graphical interfaces which is also a barrier for the elderly. Figure 3. Remote control device On the other hand, the aged use the same mode of interaction when watching TV programs as when using it to access our services, i.e., the aged tend to concentrate their attention on the remote control device when navigating on the services graphical interface. As a result, failures on the navigation process are detected by the aged at its end which leads them to be lost on the interface. We are investigating solutions to this problem, mainly based on replacing the remote control device by a touch screen that mimics navigation pages. We describe such solution in the next Section. 2. Touch screen based RFID remote control device Our solution to the navigation problems is essentially based on the utilization of a Figure 4. Synchronization architecture
touch screen based PDA that mimics the navigation graphical interfaces of our services. As a result, the elderly people are able to follow the navigation process and are immediately aware when failures occur. Our technical solution to synchronize the PDA and TV pages, is based on a two modified web browsers, one on the set-top-box and one on the PDA. Indeed, as mentioned in Section 1.1, the aged access services using a web interface, i.e., a web browser is available on the set-top-box which interacts with our central server in order to obtain the pages presented in the TV set. Synchronization can then be achieved by allowing the PDA to force the set-top-box browser to obtain a particular page. The resulting architecture is presented in Figure 4. The PDA and the set-top-box run a modified version of the WebKit browser[4] so that when a new page has to be presented on the TV set, the WebKit on the PDA asks the browser on the settop-box to look for the same page on the central server. The chosen PDA is the Nokia N810 as it offers a WiFi connection and works under a Linux-based operating system, Maemo[5], which eases our developments. Messages between browsers are ensured by the DBUS middleware[6] as it is already available in the Linux and offers a high-level interface to send/receive messages. Moreover, we have added the necessary mechanisms to customize services to each old person depending on her needs. These mechanisms include a RFID system composed of a reader on the set-top-box, and a RFID active tag on the PDA. When the owner of the PDA approaches the set-top-box, she is automatically detected and the TV set presents a customized version of the subscribed services, e.g., one may directly read the news on the screen while another may need their vocalization. 3. Conclusion In this paper, we have presented the SID services-oriented platform that aims at improving the quality of life of people with disabilities by using ICT embedded on familiar devices such as a TV set and its remote control device. Services are identified and evaluated by end-users themselves and concern communication, infotainment, and entertainment. We have also presented our work on proposing a touch screen based PDA extended with an active RFID tag, that mimics navigation pages of services presented on the TV set in order to simplify navigation. Other works exist in the literature that propose the utilization of 1) RFID tags, on one hand, 2) a PDA to control a TV set. However, we think that combining both mechanisms into one device is a promising solution to simplify the use of multimedia services by the aged. References [1] A. Börsch-Supan and H. Jürges, The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe Methodology, Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging,( 2005). [2] OASIS European Project Home page. http://www.oasis-project.eu. Last visited may 2009. [3] Companymages Project Home Page. https://www.companymages.eu. Last visited may 2009. [4] The WebKit Open Source Project. http://www.webkit.org. Last visited may 2009. [5] The Maemo Open Source Project. http://www.maemo.org. Last visited may 2009. [6] Introduction to the DBUS Middleware. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/software/dbus. Last visited may 2009. [7] A. Thépaut, A. Perennou, J.P. Glesser. Badge personnel interactif. Brevet FR 06 02604, publishing number 2 899 046, Telecom Bretagne and Lagassé.