Many older adults are interested in smartphones. However, most of them encounter difficulties in selfinstruction and need support. Text entry, which is essential for various applications, is one of the most difficult operations to master. In this paper, we propose Typing Tutor, an individualized tutoring system for text entry that detects input stumbles using a statistical approach and provides instructions. By conducting two user studies, we clarify the common difficulties that novice older adults experience and how skill level is related to input stumbles with a 12-key layout for Japanese. Based on the study, we develop Typing Tutor to support learning how to enter text on a smartphone. A two-week evaluation experiment with novice older adults (65+) showed that Typing Tutor was effective in improving their text entry proficiency, especially in the initial stage of use. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of Typing Tutor to other keyboards and languages with the QWERTY layout for Japanese and English.
We propose a novel probabilistic keyboard that takes into account the distance between a gaze point and a touch position in order to improve typing efficiency. The proposed keyboard dynamically changes the size of the search space for predicting candidate words based on a model that estimates the magnitude of touch position errors according to the distance between the gaze point and the touch position. This makes it possible for users to type intended words even when they glance at different areas on the screen. Performance was evaluated in terms of input accuracy in total error rate (TER) and of typing speed in words per minute (WPM). The results showed that the proposed keyboard successfully reduced the TER by 18.2% and increased WPM by 12.7% compared to the conventional keyboard.
Smartphones offer new opportunities to improve the lives of older adults. Although many older adults are interested in smartphones, most of them face difficulties in self-instruction and need support. Text entry, which is essential for various applications, is one of the most difficult operations to master. Therefore, we propose an assistive typing application that detects input stumbles and provides instructions for typing presented sentences, instead of having human tutors help older adults resolve the input stumbles by themselves. First, we investigated the ways that novice older adults have problems with text entry on smartphones. Next, we confirmed the acceptability of being provided with instructions for text entry by Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ). Then, we constructed an assistive typing application based on the collected data from two user studies. An evaluation with novice older adults (60+) showed that the assistive typing application increased typing speed by 17.2% and reduced input stumble incidence by 59.1% compared with the users' initial performance. Improvement rates were almost the same as those achieved with human tutors.
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