Otoma - Elderly Transport
This is a project I worked on a while ago at University. This concept enables elderly people to arrange their own transport through a voice assistant. This way the process would be more automated, reducing waiting times for the users while keeping their end of the process similar from their perspective: making a phone call. You can read a bit about the process below!
This project was requested by the municipality of the IJssel area of Rotterdam, who asked to look into ways to improve elderly transport. They also wanted us to look into the possibilities of applying Blockchain in the new process.
After talking to our client and users, my team and I formulated the following objective: “How can we make the process of elderly transport more efficient, transparent and user friendly for users?”
Our target audience didn’t really want much change, they liked the proces of calling, but had some problems with tardiness of the drivers. We wondered what would be a good way to help these people, some with a hearing impairments or visual impairments to solve these problems while still enabling them to independently arrange their trips.
We came up with a voice assistant that works through telephonic connection, combined with an app that’s available for those with a smartphone.
By using the telephonic connection we would make the service accessible to the largest part of the audience, anyone with a fixed phone as well as mobile users.
We chose a voice assistant that would replace the telephonist of the current situation, to automise the processing of data. This way, when a taxi would be ten minutes late, the user would be notified instantly and would get a chance to cancel the ride. Such cancellation would get the taxi’s schedule closer on track again, decreasing delay for other users.
During our testing sessions we discovered that many people would like to be able to read back what has been discussed, as many have hearing impairment or find it hard to process information. So we added a transcript function to the mobile application.
At first, we incorporated Blockchain technology, each step of the process would be saved in the municipality’s blockchain network, but after some research we discovered this wasn’t just difficult, but also not needed. At the time, the technology was quite new and in development, making it unpredictable. Aside from that it would become more expensive than the budget of our client. The data safety that blockchain promises, wasn’t needed anymore either because only Otoma would process information and no other parties would be able to change this data.
VI
We were lacking a lot of information on how to design a voice assistant, so I did some research. I attended a meetup about VI called Open Voice, where I learnt more about the design process. After hearing voice-assistant experts share their experiences, I asked them for tips and tools to design for VI.
Our team wrote a first script for the main use case we had: Ordering the taxi. We did a lot of tests, which resulted in discovering endless ways in which a taxi could be ordered. Because the possibilities seemed endless, I decided to work with information categories for this prototype. With these information categories, I wrote out an algorithm of all possible orders in which information can be added to the conversation.