Utterance Rate Feedback for Enhancing Mealtime Communication

The purpose of this research is to support users´ mealtime communication by changing their utterance rate during meals. By logging and analyzing the utterance rate, or the ratio of utterance length to mealtime length, we determined the relationship between the utterance rate and the distribution of the community to which each meal companion belonged. Using this relationship, we developed a real-time feedback system that presented a pre-estimated utterance rate with rate at the present time during a meal. This utterance rate was estimated according to logged utterance rate data and input data about members at the table. In order to evaluate our system, we asked six users to use it. As a result, we found out that users almost always wanted to increase the utterance rate and users´ utterance rates increased as they wanted after using our feedback system.