Designing an Assistive Dialog Agent for a Case of Spinal Cord Injury

In this study, a case of spinal cord injury needs to communicate with other people through text-voice conversation and control the home appliances effectively. An assistive dialog agent was therefore designed for the case using a dialog agent requirements modeling methodology with the support of PTK CASE tool. The methodology is composed of three models. The dialog agent society model was applied to establish the conceptual and linguistic ontologies of spoken dialog. It was demonstrated that the scenario-based dialog agent requirements model and the dialog agent PAC model in this study can help to elicit requirements from a service oriented and human-computer interaction point of view, especially useful for the case of special needs. The usability testing during development was also conducted to experience the case, correct usability problems, and evaluate the used methodology and its effectiveness.