Omnipresent Care: Voice Commander

The elderly undergo a problem of social and technological exclusion and there has been an increase of the elder population due to the enlargement in the average life span, creating more elders. Therefore, this problem is in need of higher attention.A modular architecture is presented, designed to help resolve the identified problem, consisting in the modification of human-computer interaction by the means of voice command recognition, focused on senior citizens.A system has been developed based on that architecture and tested with a group of subjects from the targeted population. The tests demonstrated that the tested subjects could easily use it the developed system, all of whom where seventy years of age and had no previous computer knowledge. Therefore, the system and architecture successfully permit elder users to interact with the computer.The system design was focused on communication, allowing synchronous and asynchronous communications with the aid of e-mail and VOIP technologies; however, it has been designed with the modularity of the architecture, permitting the addition of new functionalities in real time execution.The system can be considered an optimal solution for the presented problem, if applied with the correct hardware equipment.