Assistive Typing Application for Older Adults Based on Input Stumble Detection

Abstract

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.

Typing Tutor: Individualized Tutoring in Text Entry for Older Adults Based on Statistical Input Stumble Detection

“…Accordingly, we have designed Typing Tutor, a tutoring system that automatically detects input stumbles and provides instructions that help users resolve input stumbles independently [8], [9]. We define the word "input stumble" as an occasion when a user makes a mistake or does not know how/what to type next.…”

“…In previous studies [8], we constructed an assistive typing application, which detects input stumbles and provides instructions on the typing of presented sentences. In this study, we clarified the common difficulties that novice older adults encounter in free text entry, and analyzed the relationship between the input stumbles and the user's skill.…”