Health Informatics Study of Smart Human-Computer Interaction Devices for Elderly Patients

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Purpose: To analyze the elderly patients' demand in the field of language emotional attributes which is different from the particularity of the general population, and then used it to design the Smart Voice Assistant for elderly patients. Methods: The types of character are called the experts, assistants, family members and pets according to two evaluation scales which are 'friendly–unfriendly' and 'dominant–submissive.' Professional Mandarin Chinese broadcasters were invited to record their voice of a neutral sentence respectively. With differences in pitch, volume, tone color and sound quality, varied types of characters were simulated and eight pieces of voice record were generated. Twenty old people were selected to participate in the measurement test to grade these eight pieces of voice based on their acceptability of these voices. Results: Experiment shows that the male test group's preference value to the male voice is 4.4250, a little higher than their preference value to the female voice which is 3.9000. But the Independent Samples T Test shows that the significance of F Test is 0.345 > 0.05, while that of corresponding T test is 0.051, a little higher than 0.05. Hence it can be assumed that the male test group has almost no difference in the preference for voice gender. And the average of the female test group's preference value is 3.9500 for the male voice and 4.9750 for the female voice. Therefore, the female test group prefer female voice. In Independent Samples T Test, the significance of F Test is 0.909 > 0.05, while that of T Test is 0.000 < 0.05. Hence the female test group's voice gender preference has statistically significance difference. In terms of the individualization of voice type with different voice characters, the average grades from male test group to expert, assistant, family and pet type is 4.75, 4.85, 3.9, 3.15, while male test group is 3.65, 4.40, 5.40, 4.41. Conclusion: Based on the experimental results and verification, voice interaction among the elderly patients in the home environment, family-female type is the best choice.