A Conversational Personal Assistant for Senior Users

Abstract

Senior users could benefit from computer assistance in managing the details of everyday life and maintaining contact with friends and family; however, current computer interfaces can be difficult to use as a consequence of the physical, sensory, and cognitive changes that accompany aging. This chapter describe a multimodal application, which we have called Cassandra, that provides an extremely natural, conversational way for senior users to perform tasks like managing reminders or appointments, medication schedules, shopping lists, and phone calls. We discuss the implications of the characteristics of the target user population on the application design. In addition to describing the application, we will also discuss end user feedback.