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In this paper an approach to improve the design of every day consumer products for inclusive design with a focus on elderly people with mild to medium physical and sensory impairments is presented. As mainstream manufactures do not have a detailed understanding of the needs of this target group the idea is to use a Virtual Human Model that covers these impairments. A Virtual Laboratory with three design phases is the approach to allow designers to plan and evaluate the user interfaces of their products. The paper gives a state of the art and presents the Virtual User Model as a mixture of human and environment context. In this paper we present results of an detailed ethnographic study. The research carried out on a group of 58 elderly people from the UK, Ireland and Germany who had a range of three mild-to-medium impairments; hearing, vision and manual dexterity

The practical adaption of interface solutions for visual impaired and blind people is limited by simplicity and usability in practical scenarios. Different solutions (e.g. Drishti [1]) focuses upon speech or keyboard interfaces, which are not efficient or transparent in every-day environments. As an easy and practical way to achieve human-computerinteraction, in this paper hand gesture recognition was used to facilitate the reduction of hardware components. Additionally a qualitative user study was performed to compare learning curves of different subjects with and without prior knowledge of gesture recognition devices, interpreting the readings from a sensitive surface by machine learning algorithms. The user study was made using well-known machine learning algorithms applied to recognizing symbols from the graffiti handwriting system [2] and the WEKA data mining software [3] for comparing individual machine learning approaches.

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