The Effect of Cognitive Load on Gesture Acceptability of Older Adults in Mobile Application The use of gesture to interact with technology is widely gaining the popularity since they are not only easy to use but also easy to learn and remember. Moreover, gestures are very natural since they are used by human in their day to day life to communicate and interact with each other. Hence those gesture does not put greater cognitive load on human mind. The cognitive capabilities of older adult are less than of younger adults as older adults have low learnability and memorability. To carter this problem we have analyzed the impact of gesture usage on the cognitive load of older adults and how this cognitive affect the acceptability of those gestures. In addition to this, we have compared different types of gestures to understand which gestures are more accepted by the older adult. The types of gestures included were single finger gesture, multiple finger gesture, bimanual gesture, metaphoric gesture, complex gesture and simple gestures. To compare the usability, affordance, acceptability and cognitive load of these gesture we have developed seven hypotheses. After operationalizing the variable of these hypothesis, the experiment was conducted on the older adults. The results of experiment showed that gestures which are mapped to a metaphor had low cognitive load as compare to gesture that are not mapped. Moreover, the results also showed that performance of single figure gesture was better than multiple finger gesture. However, one handed gesture does not have better performance than bimanual gesture. Finally results showed that gestures with higher cognitive load have low acceptability rate among the older adults.

Tabletop Human Computer Interface to Assist Elderly with Tasks of Daily Living Old age is associated with declines in vision, hearing, sensory function, motor function, and cognition. These declines make managing activities of daily living harder. Computer mobile devices could help, but many elderly people find the interface too small and navigation too complex. A larger computer interface in a natural setting, such as a tabletop, could provide a more usable interface and be able to provide better assistance for some elderly people. The purpose of this project was to develop a prototype human computer interface that projects images onto a tabletop, uses an imaging system to identify hand position over the tabletop in relation to the projected image, detects menu selections of the hand over projected buttons, and takes actions, such as displaying the selected next menu. A prototype was developed using custom LabView programs for generation of images of menu selections to be projected, image processing and control of the system. Hand recognition was simplified by having the user wear a white glove with a black square on the back for the imaging system to search for. Button selection was recognized by holding the hand over a projected menu button for several seconds. The prototype function showed promise. Further testing and development will be necessary toward wider implementation. Such a projected tabletop human computer interface may improve computer derive assistance for elderly people compared to mobile or computer display interfaces.