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PhD Position in Embedded Task Modeling and Interaction Design
Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
Delft, The Netherlands

Background:

The primary project goal of Independent@Home, a new 4- year research project funded by SenterNovem, is to develop an integrated user interface for elderly in need of care, who want to remain living independently in their own house. A central interactive agenda will be developed that links personalized services for domestic care to home rituals. Services and dialogs will be activated at the appropriate time by monitoring user activities. The project will be in close collaboration with industry and home care institutions. More info can be found online: www.studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/independentathome.

A Ph.D. project, as part of the Independent@Home work, will aim to develop an integrated user interface for pro-active task-level control of communication and domotica, facilities, instead of a reactive functional based integrated system. The elderly-targeted interface and interaction concepts will be used to create personalized assisted living services that fit into everyday life, in close collaboration with industry and home care service providers (thuiszorginstellingen), and will be extensively tested in users' homes.

The Ph.D. will focus on the user interface design, including mechanisms for managing collaborative multimodal dialogs for an aware calendar and linked services, based on: (a) user preferences, (b) task models and (c) events in the environment. Task models, including representations in the interface, will be developed with a PostDoc working on the project.

The researcher will also investigate system adaptation to the interaction styles by the elderly over time, including task delegation and issues related to trust. The Ph.D. will build upon TU Delft, research work conducted by DeKoven [2004-2] towards considering how a collaborative interface can integrate information from the environment (e.g., localization and time sensing), embedded system task models, and user preferences, towards creating a seamless form of interaction with the aware calendar. The Ph.D. will consider how caretakers can interact with the calendar and setup services.

Candidate Requirements:

The PhD candidate should hold a Masters degree in computer science, including experience in user interface design. Non-computer science graduates can be considered, if the candidate is able to demonstrate programming and software architecture design skills. A strong affiliation with the challenges in terms of designing interactive systems for non-experienced computer users, task modeling and product usability issues is a must.

Start date: 01-01-2007

Contact:

Dr. MSc David Keyson,
Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
d.keyson@io.tudelft.nl
tel. 31-(0)15-278-3029
studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/scid/

Received: 04-Oct-06

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