Access for all. HEPHAISTOS - a personal home assistant

In this paper, we describe a demonstrator which was developed in the course of the European project TIDE 1004: HEPHAISTOS (Home Environment Private Help AssISTant fOr elderly and diSabled). The demonstrator constitutes a hand held personal home assistant capable to control a selected range of electronic home devices. Its multimodal user interface is based on a coloured high resolution touch screen extended with speech input/output. The development process focused on taking into account requirements of elderly people and people with special needs. The usability of the personal assistant was evaluated in a series of user tests with subjects from this particular demographic groups.