Control it by gestures: Results from a Wizard of Oz experiment in a smart home environment

A Wizard of Oz experiment (WOz) [7][10] with elderly people and people with special needs (PSN) controlling a smart home system only by gestures is presented. The home control system is a prototypical system which is based on the former development of the HEPHAISTOS system [1] and which has been extended in the HOME-AOM project [2][13]. The user trial was divided into four phases with varying restrictions regarding the user's freedom of choosing gestures. It focused on using a one-camera gesture recognition system (GR) [12], which led to some limitation of the characteristics of the potential gestures. The goal of this experiment was to define a gesture vocabulary with which users can perform navigation tasks on a graphical user interface (GUI) for an integrated multimodal home control system. Results of this study include a categorisation of task classes in respect to the use of free gestures, a recommendation of an alphabet for GUI navigation gestures, and the overall acceptance expressed by the users participating in this study.