Living support system for severe limb disables like ALS

Abstract

In recent years, the number of patients is a tendency has been increasing in Japan with the gain in aged people. ALS patients are unable to move their bodies freely by themselves. So there are gaze- based living support systems have been marketed for some time. However, most conventional systems have a user interface that includes screen transitions, which aged people, who are prone to ALS, tend to have difficulty with. In this study, we focused on dialogue systems, which have been developed and spread in recent years. We believe that an interactive user interface using the Japanese language will eliminate screen transitions and allow even aged people to operate the system smoothly. In this paper, to develop the proposed system, we first developed a virtual home appliance operation simulation system for ALS patients. In addition, we conducted an evaluation experiment of the proposed system by having the participants of the experiment (healthy people) operate this simulation system using a screen keyboard input by gaze and a task-oriented dialogue system.