Development of a Privacy-By-Design Speech Assistant Providing Nutrient Information for German Seniors
Andreas Seiderer, Hannes Ritschel, Elisabeth André · 2020
Elderly people could take benefit of speech assistants since they provide the most natural way to interact with assistive technology. Nevertheless, current speech assistants are mainly based on cloud-systems which are non-functional without a stable internet connection or introduce severe privacy-concerns. In this work we provide an overview of state-of-the-art available components for developing a privacy-by-design, open source speech assistant for seniors, as well as a fully functional implementation. We chose the health related task of getting nutrition information of packaged foodstuff for which we rely on an open data database. Our prototype was used in a workshop with two German seniors to gather further insights into the special requirements of elderly people, which can be taken into account for future speech assistants.