Using wizard of OZ to collect interaction data for voice controlled home care and communication services

This research aims at providing Voice controlled Assistive (vAssist) Care and Communication Services for the Home to seniors suffering from fine-motor problems and/or chronic diseases. The constantly growing life expectancy of the European population increasingly asks for technological products that help seniors to manage their activities of daily living. In particular, we require solutions which offer interaction paradigms that fit the cognitive abilities of elderly users. Natural language-based access can be seen as one way of increasing the usability of these services. Yet, the construction of robust language technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding does require sufficient domain specific interaction data. In this paper we describe how we plan to obtain the relevant corpus data for a set of different application scenarios, using the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) prototyping method. Using a publicly available WOZ tool we discuss how the integration of existing language technologies with a human wizard may help in designing a natural user interface for seniors and how such has the potential to underpin an iterative user-centred development process for language-based applications.