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.

Design and Evaluation of HumanFriendly HandHeld Gaming Interface for RobotAssisted Intuitive Telerehabilitation A testbed gaming interface operated through a handheld mobile device is designed and developed for robotassisted telerehabilitation. In the developed gaming interface, a patient needs to wear sensors (position and forcepressure sensors) at different body parts that measure kinematics and kinetics data during rehabilitation practices through some gamelike activities. The extent of rehabilitation progress is reflected through the magnitudes, patterns and expressions (such as the graphical expressions) of the kinematics and kinetics data. To do so, the kinematics and kinetics raw data are processed in realtime, expressed in different ways and displayed through the interface (e.g., mobile phone) held in the patientxe2x80x99s hand. The patient can monitor the rehabilitation progress through the graphical data expressions via the interface, interact with the display device and the rehabilitation results, and communicate the results to the healthcare providers and the patient community. To make the gaming interface humanfriendly, prior knowledge of human factors involved in the interface is considered when the interface is designed. The assessment method for each human factor is developed, and the interface is implemented and evaluated in a pilot study. The evaluation results show that the handheld gaming interface designed and developed through addressing the human factors is effective to satisfy the human factor requirements in the humandevice interaction, and to make the interaction more humanfriendly. The results can be used to optimize and benchmark the performance of the interface and of the rehabilitation system.