Intuitive community digital assistant user interfaces based on wireless devices

We present the concept, implementations and capabilities of Community Digital Assistant (CDA) a wireless home infrastructure supporting easy interaction. Our goal was to explore input and output devices to CDA that eliminate the standard computer-like interface which can be difficult to use for the elderly or small children. Another idea was to use physical objects to allow a user to interact wirelessly and enable this way an intuitive and seamless interaction of users with the communication computer (CDA). We experimented with and integrated into the CDA commercial devices such as digital pen, digital notepad, handheld scanner and also developed a prototype of a novel interface device “fridge magnet” using RFID tags to enable physical objects to act as computer interface.