A middleware architecture for designing TV-based adapted applications for the elderly

Abstract

The elderly are begining to use more and more new technologies, although several times they find these are difficult to interact with, especially when they are accessed by a keyboard or the screen is too small. This work proposes a middleware architecture for TV-based applications for the elderly, with a focus on social interaction services like webmail. The elderly feel very confident with their TVs since it is something they use on a daily basis, and the screen is sufficiently large. The architecture contains a Context Manager with an Ontology that models the elderly user impairments and actual context information collected from sensors located at the user's home, and an Interface Adaptation Engine which generates the adapted interface for a particular user, according to his profile and context of use. This architecture is part of an ongoing EU funded project: MyUI and a first prototype is expected by mid 2011. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.