# Supporting Elderly People by Ad Hoc Generated Mobile Applications Based on Vocal Interaction
## 2 Related Work  
Ambient intelligence provides healthcare facilities for elderly and healthy people. Each person has specific needs and lives in a specific environment and requires smart home applications customized on his/her lifestyles. The automatic generation of mobile applications is a growing research area. Several proposals have been oriented towards end-user development exploiting service composition for general application [1; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12] and mobile application generators for specific domains, including health and tourism/culture [13; 14]. In [15], the development methodology for generating mobile applications exploiting mobile service composition has been evaluated through an empirical analysis that revealed that, in spite of the reduced size of the screen, the use of the MicroApp Generator tool improves the effectiveness in terms of time and editing errors with respect to the use of the MIT App Inventor [6]. App Inventor adopts a jigsaw programming approach and provides support for Web services. It is composed of two tools: _(i)_ the _Designer_, a Web application that enables the user to select the widgets for the user interface; and _(ii)_ the _Blocks Editor_ running on PCs, for the visual programming language OpenBlocks [16]. Support to speech (i.e., speech-to-text, and text-to-speech) is provided through suitable block components. Microsoft TouchDevelop [7] is a programming environment running on smartphones. It offers built-in primitives, making it easy to get the data provided by the mobile device sensors and by the cloud (via services, storage, computing, and social networks). The language is not graphical, variables and assignment statements are used for programming. Support to speech (speech-to-text, text-to-speech) is provided. The code has to be inserted by the developer. In our case, the vocal interface is automatically generated. The \"If This Then That\" system, IFTTT [12] enables the user to use icons for generating simple apps based on triggering and actions (e.g., \"_When I was tagged in a picture send me an alert_\"). IFTTT has been integrated with Apple Siri. It is possible to execute IFTTT apps by pronouncing \"hashtag\" before the app name. Atooma [11] is a mobile application running on both Android and iOS which allows the user to create basic applications performing one or more simple commands when a specific triggering event occurs. The triggering components have been developed for a variety of contexts, including ambient intelligence and, more detailedly, it supports safety and cross device notifications. Speech functionalities are available and have to be specified by the programmer. [PERSON] et al. [17] present a system that allows browsing the Internet by using a standard voice only, with the development of a Vocal User Interface. The browse takes vocal commands as input, translates them into Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP requests to the web server that processes it. The HTTP response is then speeched to the user. In order to allow an effective comparison, we classify the main features of each tool in Table 1 depending on the following characteristics:  
* _Components_. The kind of components that the tool can use for generating apps are classified as follows: _Service Components_ (SC) to access Web and Internet services; _Sensor and Domotics Components_ (SDC) to handle sensor data and networks; _Native Components_ (NC) to exploit the functionalities available on the mobile device (e.g., phone call, camera, etc.). * _Language_. The tool uses one of the following interaction metaphors to specify the applications: _Visual_ (Vis), the user interacts by means of a visual/graphical language; _Template-Based_ (TB), the user interacts by exploiting predefined forms; _Template-Based and Textual_ (TBT), only simple apps can be programmed by using the template-based metaphor, whilst the others need textual programming.