The elderly interacting with a digital agenda through an RFID pen and a touch screen

ABSTRACTAmbient Assisted Living (AAL) aims to enhance quality of life of elder and impaired people. Thanks to the advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), it is now possible not only to support new home services to improve their quality of life, but also to provide them with more natural, simple and multimodal interaction styles. It enables introducing new better-suited interaction styles for performing tasks according to user need, abilities and the usage conditions. In this paper, a digital agenda application is described and tested by a group of elderly users. This customized personal agenda allows elders to create agenda entries, to view calendar entries and a person's telephone without typing any letter or number. Through observation and the capture of data we studied how six participants (ages from 66 to 74) interacted with the personal agenda through a touch screen and an RFID-based interface. The RFID interaction consisted of a sheet-like physical object' the RFID board', and a pen-like object 'the IDBlue pen' that the users used to choose the desired option in the board. Beside the users' satisfaction, interesting results have been found that make us aware of valuable information to enhance their interaction with the digital world, as well as, their quality of life. Moreover, it is shown how a pen-like object and a sheet-like one can be used by the elderly to interact with the digital world.