TY - CHAP
T1 - A User-Centric Design of Service Robots Speech Interface for the Elderly
AU - Wang, Ning
AU - Broz, Frank
AU - Di Nuovo, Alessandro
AU - Belpaeme, Tony
AU - Cangelosi, Angelo
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - The elderly population in the Europe have quickly increased and will keep growing in the coming years. In facing the elder care challenges posed by the amount of seniors staying alone in their own homes, great efforts have been made to develop advanced robotic systems that can operate in intelligent environments, and to enable the robot to ultimately work in real conditions and cooperate with elderly end-users favoring independent living. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a user-centric speech interface tailored for the elderly. The speech user interface incorporating the state of the art speech technologies, is fully integrated into application contexts and facilitates the actualization of the robotic services in different scenarios. Contextual information is taken into account in the speech recognition to reduce system complexity and to improve recognition success rate. Under the framework of the EU FP7 Robot-Era Project, the usability of the speech user interface on a multi-robots service platform has been evaluated by elderly users recruited in Italy and Sweden through questionnaire interview. The quantitative analysis results show that the majority of end-users strongly agree that the speech interaction experienced during the Robot-Era services is acceptable.
AB - The elderly population in the Europe have quickly increased and will keep growing in the coming years. In facing the elder care challenges posed by the amount of seniors staying alone in their own homes, great efforts have been made to develop advanced robotic systems that can operate in intelligent environments, and to enable the robot to ultimately work in real conditions and cooperate with elderly end-users favoring independent living. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a user-centric speech interface tailored for the elderly. The speech user interface incorporating the state of the art speech technologies, is fully integrated into application contexts and facilitates the actualization of the robotic services in different scenarios. Contextual information is taken into account in the speech recognition to reduce system complexity and to improve recognition success rate. Under the framework of the EU FP7 Robot-Era Project, the usability of the speech user interface on a multi-robots service platform has been evaluated by elderly users recruited in Italy and Sweden through questionnaire interview. The quantitative analysis results show that the majority of end-users strongly agree that the speech interaction experienced during the Robot-Era services is acceptable.
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-28109-4_28
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-28109-4_28
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9783319281070
VL - Part VI
T3 - Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies
SP - 275
EP - 283
BT - Recent Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing
A2 - Esposito, Anna
A2 - Faundez-Zanuy, Marcos
A2 - Esposito, Antonietta M.
A2 - Cordasco, Gennaro
A2 - Drugman, Thomas
A2 - Solé-Casals, Jordi
A2 - Morabito, Francesco Carlo
PB - Springer
ER -