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Title: Empowering elderly-centric smart home control via multimodal interaction: designing for enhanced user experience

Authors: Yilin Sun; Shufan Li

Addresses: College of Art, Zhejiang Shuren University, Hangzhou, 310015, China ' School of Art Design and Fashion, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, 310015, China

Abstract: To address the usability challenges faced by elderly users when operating smart home systems in the context of an aging population, this study proposes a smart aging-friendly home control algorithm framework based on multimodal interaction. The core of this framework lies in the innovative design of three key algorithms: a multimodal fusion decision-making algorithm that integrates speech recognition, simple gesture understanding, and touches intent analysis; an aging-friendly interaction optimisation algorithm; and a context-aware intelligent assistance algorithm. The proposed algorithms were validated through user simulation and comparative experiments. The results indicate that the algorithm framework effectively improves elderly users' operational efficiency and task completion rates while significantly reducing cognitive load and operational error rates. This study provides core algorithmic support and practical design guidelines for constructing truly elderly-friendly smart home interaction systems.

Keywords: multimodal interaction; age-friendly home; context awareness; smart home.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2025.150948

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2025 Vol.26 No.48, pp.23 - 39

Received: 07 Jul 2025
Accepted: 15 Aug 2025
Published online: 05 Jan 2026 *