Separating the Content from the Presentation in AAL: The universAAL UI Framework and the Swing UI Handler

When it comes to user interaction elderly and people with special needs have special requirements, that evolve over time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) envisions ubiquitous, intuitive human-machine interaction running on heterogeneous devices (tablets, televisions, smart-phones, etc.) and by means of multiple modalities (graphics, voice, gesture recognition, etc.). This vision often represents a strong technological challenge for any developer of AAL services. In order to relieve the developer from the burden of repeatedly adapting the interfaces, the universAAL platform [6] offers a framework for user interaction that separates the content, that is exchanged between the user and the application, and its actual representation. The main drawback of this solution is that it delegates all the responsibility of the representation of the content to the platform, which, in turn, must be able to adapt to all kinds of showable messages. This paper explains how a so-called

UI Handler

has been designed and implemented to render messages in universAAL, as well as the results of its technical and usability evaluations.