Some remarkable advances in mobile technologies have been made on the past fifteen years, especially the adoption of direct input on the screen. Since aging is now a worldwide demographic phenomenon, several studies have been carried on to investigate and improve the interaction between older-aged adults and these new technologies. These studies are important because mobile devices are often equipped with touchscreen and they can help to improve quality of life for older adults (health care, social life, serious games). Understanding interaction of this group of users with touchscreen can facilitate the adoption of interactive technologies and their future use by older populations. This literature review analyses thirty six studies that evaluated interaction techniques for older users using touchscreen devices. This review intends to 1) analyze the situation of thirty six studies (population, apparatus, tasks and interaction techniques) and 2) identify situations of use of touchscreen devices and interaction techniques that need to be further studied. As results, a descriptive analysis of the populations included, the chosen apparatus, executed tasks and interaction techniques are presented, so as a summary of relevant parameters to consider for studies of tactile interaction techniques. On each topic, we discuss about the results, the authors' recommendations and we provide cues for future work.
In this article, we propose an architecture of a socio-affective Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). The different computational models of the architecture enable an ECA to express emotions and social attitudes during an interaction with a user. Based on corpora of actors expressing emotions, models have been defined to compute the emotional facial expressions of an ECA and the characteristics of its corporal movements. A user-perceptive approach has been used to design models to define how an ECA should adapt its non-verbal behavior according to the social attitude the ECA wants to display and the behavior of its interlocutor. The emotions and the social attitudes to express are computed by cognitive models presented in this article.
This paper presents a study on the usability of a new prototype system for managing personal information on the Internet (PIMI). The objectives are to assess its ease of use, and assess user modification as an evaluation technique. Thirty users participated in the experiment: the first part was a classical usability test (TUC) and a second part was a usability test with user modifications (TUM). A total of 51 usability problems were diagnosed. Among them, 32 with TUC, and 19 with TUM. Part of the latter (11) adds to those identified with TUC, and those previously diagnosed during a usability inspection (IU with Ergonomic Criteria). The active participation of users through customization scenarios seems to provide additional clues for evaluating usability and for design (new generic usability recommendations).
This paper presents an exploratory empirical study on the user's context in mobile videoconferencing in order to improve the user interface of mobile video devices. Through the rich exchange of information, mobile video communication can provide a better sense of presence than other means of communication. Yet the current mobile interfaces lack the flexibility required to be creative and more meaningful in a videoconference exchange. We conducted observations with 16 participants in three activities where their conversations, reactions and behaviours were observed. Two focus groups were used to identify habits formed from regular use. Results suggest an important difference between the use of the front-facing or back-facing camera and the importance of offering tools that provide more control over the video exchange. From theses results, the study proposes several design recommendations for mobile video communication interfaces in order to support the construction of the user's mobile context.
