Cyber Physical Privacy for Independent Living and Ageing

Project Overview

Smart home technologies offer significant benefits for older adults and vulnerable populations, enabling independent living through remote monitoring and automated assistance. However, privacy concerns and complex interfaces deter adoption, particularly among older adults and people with learning disabilities who find traditional privacy settings difficult to navigate. This project addresses these challenges by developing multimodal privacy assistants that combine voice commands, visual feedback, and symbol-based interaction to make smart speaker privacy configuration accessible. The research produced two systems: MPA (Multimodal Privacy Assistant), which pairs voice interaction with synchronised visual cues to help older adults manage privacy settings on Amazon Echo devices, and EchoEase, which extends this approach to people with learning disabilities through video-based Makaton signing, simplified symbols, and accessible response mechanisms on Amazon Echo Show. Both systems were co-designed with community partners including Innovate Trust and evaluated through mixed-methods studies with real users, demonstrating that multimodal interfaces can enable independent privacy management for populations typically excluded from conventional privacy controls.

The project investigates how multimodal interaction can make privacy management accessible to populations typically excluded from conventional interfaces. MPA combines Alexa voice commands with synchronised on-screen visual feedback to help older adults manage voice recording, location, and payment privacy settings without navigating complex app menus. EchoEase extends this approach to people with learning disabilities, offering three interface modalities — voice with text, video with Makaton signing, and simplified symbols — enabling users to independently configure their privacy settings on Amazon Echo Show.

Both systems were developed through iterative co-design with community partners and evaluated in mixed-methods studies with real users. The research demonstrates that accessible, multimodal privacy interfaces can bridge the gap between users’ privacy concerns and their ability to act on those concerns, contributing design guidelines for building privacy tools that accommodate diverse cognitive abilities, digital literacy levels, and communication preferences.

Team

Reem Aldhafiri

Omer Rana

Georgina Powell

Liz Smith

Charith Perera

Partners

Innovate Trust Supports disabled, elderly, and vulnerable people across the local community.

PETRAS 2 PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity explores privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, and security issues across connected systems.

Outcomes