Effects of age and gender on remote pointing performance and their design implications

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of age and sex o n remote pointing movements. In addition, an attempt was made to incorporat e possible age-related or sex differences into the design of a remote point ing user interface. The subjects were recruited from three age groups (elde rly, middle-aged, and young) with equal number of both sexes. The participa nts were required to perform cursor positioning tasks using a remote pointi ng device. Their static hand stability and remote positioning time were rec orded and analyzed. The remote positioning time was further separated into two components: initial submovement duration and adjustment submovement dur ation. The results reveal that age-related effects reduced the subjects' ab ility to perform remote pointing tasks and also maintained hand stability. However, sex differences had no significant effect on either performance. M oreover, the results also reveal that remote positioning movements for the young group were mostly completed in their initial submovement phase, while the elderly subjects spent most of their movement time on the fine adjustm ent phase. In light of the fact that different age groups exhibit different kinds of movement behavior patterns, suggestions for the design of signal sensitivity, target features, and display/control gain in remote pointing u ser interface were outlined.