On Capturing Older Adults’ Smartphone
Keyboard Interaction as a Means
for Behavioral Change Under Emotional
Stimuli Within i-PROGNOSIS Framework
Stelios Hadjidimitriou
1
, Dimitrios Iakovakis
1
, Vasileios Charisis
1
,
Sofia B. Dias
2(&)
, José A. Diniz
2
, Julien Mercier
3
,
and Leontios J. Hadjileontiadis
1,4
1
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece
stellios22@gmail.com,dimiiako12@gmail.com,
vcharisis@ee.auth.gr, leontios@auth.gr
2
Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Universidade de Lisboa, Cruz Quebrada,
1499-002 Lisbon, Portugal
{sbalula,jadiniz}@fmh.ulisboa.pt
3
Neurolab, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada
mercier.julien@uqam.ca
4
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Khalifa University of Science and Technology,
PO BOX 127788, Abu Dhabi, UAE
leontios.h@kustar.ac.ae
Abstract. The unobtrusive use of smartphone technology, as a facilitator and
as a means of capturing the daily activities, can be seen as a great challenge in
routine monitoring and in promoting behavioural change in older adults. In the
present study, a protocol of a sequence of emotional stimuli database was
combined with a sequence of emotion-free text typing using a dedicated key-
board of a smartphone and used for capturing the users’ patterns of typing, in
terms of hold time (HT), alteration time (AT) and pressure (PR) of each key. Six
older adults (three male/female) were employed in the study and sequences of
images with facial expressions of Ekman’s six basic emotions (with the addition
of the neutral one) were used as stimuli in a three-trial fashion. Statistical
analysis of HT, AT and PR data revealed differences in the typing due to
emotions alteration, setting a new domain for the analysis and behavioural
modeling of older adults’ typing patterns under specific emotional stimuli. This
combinatory approach amongst emotional and physical status could be adopted
in the field of intelligent monitoring of the healthy ageing and could be extended
to elderlies’ pathology cases, such as Parkinson’s disease, as approached by the
i-PROGNOSIS initiative.
Keywords: Older adults Á Healthy ageing Á Emotional states Á Smartphone
keyboard typing Á Key hold time Á Key alteration time Á Key pressure Á
i-PROGNOSIS
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
M. Antona and C. Stephanidis (Eds.): UAHCI 2017, Part I, LNCS 10277, pp. 346–356, 2017.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58706-6_28