Towards a Proximity-Aware, Accessible and Personalized Public Digital Terminal An Initial Study

Public Digital Terminals (PDT) play a vital role in providing essential services ubiquitously to users belonging to different target groups. There is a wide array of PDTs that a common person uses frequently including Automated Teller Machines (ATM), interactive kiosks, self-service kiosks and so on to accomplish numerous day-to-day tasks. Improving the usability of PDTs has been targeted from various aspects by Human Computer Interaction researchers. Research in this area has spanned from using multimodal approaches, revised guidelines for kiosk construction, navigation restructuring, to alternative methods of user authentication to provide an improved and enhanced user-experience. The main issue with the solutions provided to this day is that they all target improving the device. Providing a personalized solution remains unanswered. The widespread use of smartphones and tablets has given rise to the next generation of e-commerce commonly known as m-commerce. Although m-commerce have made huge strides in the areas of mobile payments, the area of making use of mobile technology with public access terminals is still limited. As technology edges towards cardless and contactless transactions, we propose to provide an accessible and scalable solution to the use of PDTs using proximity-aware technology. The main objective of the work presented in this paper is to identify and discuss the feasibility of using proximity-aware solutions to address the security, privacy and accessibility concerns when using PDTs.