Investigation of adaptation dimensions for age-differentiated human-computer interfaces

Abstract

An important issue of the demographic change in the German population is the maintenance and promotion of the employability of aging workforces. However, there are hardly any suitable concepts or usable tools available to realize this goal. Possible approaches should push the individual strengths of the aging workers to the foreground and intercept the possible physical and cognitive losses in ability that occur with an increase in age. A model of age-differentiated adaptation of the human-computer interface, in which automatic adaptations are conducted based on individual user characteristics, is presented in this article. First connections between user characteristics and adaptation dimensions were analyzed in a study with 90 subjects ranging from 20 to 73 years of age. Results indicate a significant influence of graphical layout on memorization as well as interpretation performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.