Age-adapted psychoacoustics: Target group oriented sound schemes for the interaction with telemedical systems

Abstract

For the interaction of elderly people with IT systems, an ergonomic and intuitive design as well as self-explanatory handling processes are particularly relevant. Herein adequate acoustic feedback, which accounts for the specific needs and experience of the target group, provides high efficacy and acceptance of technology with regard to Human-Computer Interaction. In this study, five different types of sound schemes are evaluated on their intuitive understanding and memorization by older users. The participants assign audible feedback to typical applications of telemedical monitoring and have to reminisce given classifications. This approach makes it possible to elicit the homogeneity of psychoacoustic models of elderly people and give recommendations for the design of acoustic feedback mechanisms for this audience. As a result, the use of familiar sounds from everyday situations has been found significantly better in terms of the consistency of the intuitive mapping and memorization for use cases in a telemedical context, in comparison to synthetic sounds that obtain their semantic denotation just by convention. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.