Adaptive workspace interface for facilitating the knowledge transfer from retired elders to start-up companies

This paper proposes an adaptive workspace interface customized to the elders' specific needs to bring their valuable experience to start-ups and small companies, addressing intergenerational knowledge transfer of skills and competencies. The approach is based on monitoring elders' interaction with the workspace to adapt the interface layout and contents to their cognitive conditions by applying the necessary changes for providing increased usability as well as to engage and motivate them in optimal collaboration for a prolonged period of time. Collected data is represented in a semantic manner aiming at inferring information about the cognitive abilities and engagement levels such as potential impairments that decrease the interaction quality, problems with screen focus, screen reading difficulties, problems to manage the keyboard or the items on the screen, etc. A genetic algorithm is used to automatically decide and select the best configuration (both layout and content) for presenting the information to the elders.