Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2018

Abstract

With app-based interaction increasingly permeating all aspects of daily living, it is essential to ensure that apps are designed to be inclusive and are usable by a wider audience such as the elderly, with various impairments (e.g., visual, audio and motor). We propose Empath-D, a system that fosters empathetic design, by allowing app designers, in-situ, to rapidly evaluate the usability of their apps, from the perspective of impaired users. To provide a truly authentic experience, Empath-D carefully orchestrates the interaction between a smartphone and a VR device, allowing the user to experience simulated impairments in a virtual world while interacting naturally with the app, using a real smartphone. By carefully orchestrating the VR-smartphone interaction, Empath-D tackles challenges such as preserving low-latency app interaction, accurate visualization of hand movement and low-overhead perturbation of I/O streams. Experimental results show that user interaction with Empath-D is comparable (both in accuracy and user perception) to real-world app usage, and that it can simulate impairment effects as effectively as a custom hardware simulator.

Keywords

empathetic design, accessibility, mobile design, virtual reality, multidevice, distributed user interfaces

Discipline

Hardware Systems | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

MobiSys '18: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Munich, Germany, June 10-15

First Page

123

Last Page

135

ISBN

9781450357203

Identifier

10.1145/3210240.3210331

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3210240.3210331

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