User interface system of an assistive kitchen for aging people

Performing the daily living activities (dla) without anybody's aid becomes challenging for aging people. The ones in the kitchen among dla plays a crucial role. Despite serious research efforts and well-documented progress in user interface systems for human machine interface; comparatively small amount of work has been reported on designing an user interface system for aging people to perform the dla in the kitchen. This paper reports the development of an user interface system to provide aid in overcoming planning, initiation and attention which the user may experience while performing dla in the kitchen. The system is comprised of an electrically isolated virtual switch based user interface module and a finite state machine based decision making unit (DMU). The user interface generates cues and prompts in the form of texts and graphics as visual feedback of the status of interaction by the user and facilitates to select the items to be used for a desired activity. The DMU seek to understand the user's intention, derive the decision for the intended activity and accordingly generate a command for the assistive systems in real time.