Experiments with Adaptable Interfaces for Elderly People

摘要

The demographic change in European societies has led to raise attention for the needs of elderly people. Many of elderly people suffer from cognitive as well as from physical restrictions. This impacts their ability to participate and to communicate in their social environment. This could be substituted by constructing a virtual social environment based on services like videoconfer-ences, chat rooms, e-mail and so on. However, elderly people often have difficulties to use IT technology because they encounter restrictions caused by their age. Thus, they need specific and adaptable human computer interfaces to be able to interact with IT systems. We present here some ideas how such interfaces can be constructed with reasonable effort and discuss some results from an evaluation of these ideas for an implementation of an interface to a personal information system for elderly and handicapped users.