Personal Assistant for Improving the Social Life of Mobility-Impaired Citizens

We began to interact with personal computers using keyboards and mouse. But nowadays we can speak to computers, we can touch them and even transmit commands using gestures. These alternative modalities can however have some problems when working alone, and so, by combining them, into multimodal systems, we are removing weaknesses and possibly improving usability, especially for disabled users. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether multimodal interfaces offer advantages in enhancing mobility-impaired users ‘ experience with communication and entertainment applications. This was achieved by studying alternative methods of human-computer interaction, encompassing multiple input and output interaction modalities, specially targeted for mobility-impaired users. A user study was made in order to study their limitations with current software and hardware interfaces, regarding services like, email, agenda, conference and audio-visual information access (media center). After that study, guidelines and alternatives were proposed, based on a clear set of user requirements, and based on that, a multimodal prototype was made to verify or not those assumptions