Supporting elderly people by ad hoc generated mobile applications based on vocal interaction

Mobile devices can be exploited for enabling people to interact with Internet of Things (IoT) services. The MicroApp Generator [1] is a service-composition tool for supporting the generation of mobile applications directly on the mobile device. The user interacts with the generated app by using the traditional touch-based interaction. This kind of interaction often is not suitable for elderly and special needs people that cannot see or touch the screen. In this paper, we extend the MicroApp Generator with an interaction approach enabling a user to interact with the generated app only by using his voice, which can be very useful to let special needs people live at home. To this aim, once the mobile app has been generated and executed, the system analyses and describes the user interface, listens to the user speech and performs the associated actions. A preliminary analysis has been conducted to assess the user experience of the proposed approach by a sample composed of elderly users by using a questionnaire as a research instrument.