Controlled natural language sentence building as a model for designing user interfaces for rule editing in assisted living systems --- a user study

As part of the web-based services developed within the WebDA-project the Action Planner was implemented to allow care givers of people with dementia to support them in accomplishing activities of daily living and counteract restlessness amongst others. In order to define rules that include a description of situations indicating e.g. restlessness as well as an action that should be undertaken in such situations, a user interface was designed enabling care givers to express these rules in a controlled natural language setting. Here, rule expressions were offered in preformulated natural sentences that could be manipulated by changing (pre)selected notions as "daily" in pop-up menus embedded in the sentences. A user study was conducted with 24 test participants (12 65 years) proofing that this approach can be understood as intuitive and well usable also for test participants beyond 65 years of age.