An Android Launcher with Hand Tremor Filter Capabilities for the Elderly

Abstract

This paper proposes an easy-to-use smartphone launcher for senior citizens. The launcher has two goals. This first goal is to extend the elder's connection to his or her family members and friends by cloud services. The second goal, influenced by reminiscence therapy, is to provide photo album. Thus, four major functions are supported in a single view: phonebook, album, calendar, and short message. The former three functions are cloudbased. In addition, tremor filtering is supported. This research first adopted a heuristic evaluation method to find potential problems. Second, 20 volunteers, aged over 65 years, tested the proposed new interface. Third, we refined the launcher and then invited 36 senior volunteers. The time required for making a phone call was improved by 5.6 seconds. The t value obtained using a paired t-test for the dialing time was 10.388 (p＜.01). This result implies that there are significant differences between standard launchers and the proposed launcher.