Human-Computer Interaction. Human Values and Quality of Life

One of the biggest challenges in Group Therapy is to track each patient’s experience and feeling without him/her noticing. Altering the familiarity of the mutual support group routine may weaken the therapeutic efficacy of the intervention. It must be avoided the “Elephant in the room’s Effect”: everyone knows is being observed and acts consequently. Therapists struggle and spend years of training on developing the skills they need to “silently” monitor all patients at the same time. From our perspective, we wonder whether and how technology can be a support for therapists in such a challenging task. More precisely, how to provide them with a non-invasive support tool that is invisible to the end-users, but at the same time ever-present for the caregivers. Basically, we asked ourselves: Can we deceive “the Elephant in the room”? Therapists may benefit from automatic measures indicating how the participants perceive the session and gathering the participants’ feedback is one path to develop valuable mutual support interventions. Our work describes the design, development and assessment of a non-invasive tool to monitor a Group Session.

The population of people age 65 or over is increasing especially in Europe [3]. Granting to this target population a longer and healthier life is paramount for the European Community. In the context of the H2020 EU funded project “NESTORE” [11], an embodied and ubiquitous e-coach is being developed seeking to change the lifestyle of seniors in different domains of wellbeing. NESTORE e-coach is known as a personalized embodied and ubiquitous e-coach that plays three essential roles in elderly’s wellbeing: a coach, a friend and a companion. As a coach, NESTORE will give trainings and advice following a wellbeing path that is proposed by experts in wellbeing. As a friend, this e-coach knows and understands the user. As a companion, this e-coach has the ability to detect the user’s emotion and aims at building empathy with the user based by providing support throughout their daily training. The NESTORE e-coach is based on three different intervention medium: a mobile application, a chatbot and an embodied vocal assistant. These interfaces have different forms, different capabilities and different visions. Users can communicate with the NESTORE e-coach through different interfaces exclusively, sequentially, concurrently and synergistically. The interaction can be initiated from the user side to different interfaces and/or from the e-coach side. In this paper, we present the NESTORE’s full vision for building the three essential roles of this e-coach which are: a coach, a companion and a friend for seniors. Furthermore, we explain the NESTORE system design, architecture, capabilities and how the different interfaces of this E-coach contribute to make a multi-modal system. Finally, we conclude our work with the state of this H2020 project.

Aging population implies an increase in demand for health care services. This hopefully could be solved by e-health, even if some issues arise about technology acceptance and adoption among the elderly. In this article, the authors illustrate HomeCare4All project as a case study to apply Human Centered Design (HCD) process in the field of digital health services, aiming at design trustworthy mobile applications for elderly people to book healthcare services at home. Starting from the results achieved from the early step of design, this paper describes the following steps of the creation of a design solution by identifying use cases, defining information architecture and prototyping an app mockup. The prototypes are then evaluated through a double usability test sessions with users, implementing an iterative design process. In conclusion authors advance suggestions for designing trustworthy mobile interactions for elderly people or people unaccustomed to technology, showing the importance of involving end users in the various stages of the design process.

User-centred evaluation of brain-training and coaching applications is discussed, with a focus on dementia. A brief outline of outcomes measures used for cognitive training is presented. The design of a set of four patient and public involvement workshops is described which are intended to examine user aspects of relevance to brain-training, including motivation, attitudes to learning, trust in technology and cultural relationships to the playing of games and their content. The groups involved researchers, facilitators, three people living with dementia and three care-givers, two of these being dyads. Data was audio recorded and field notes were taken. Initial results are given from the ongoing qualitative study.

The current development of telemedicine and m-health services has changed the way in which individuals monitor their health information. These services offer the possibility to receive and consult health data through computers or mobile devices at home, without medical support at any time. Could this new way of approaching our health data have an impact on our psychophysiological state? This study investigated with an experiment individual reactions to health data visualization on an interface. These reactions were investigated in terms of perceived emotion and stress, behavior and physiological changes (cardiac and electrodermal activities). This study compared individual responses to the visualization of different types of data: health data of the user, health data of another person and weather data. The statistical analysis was performed, based on ultra-short-term features for the physiological responses. The results confirmed that the visualization of personal health data entails the most important responses in terms of perceived stress, duration of data visualization and heart rate variability. Therefore, this study suggests that the conception of health interfaces would require particular attention concerning their content, their design, and their accessibility, in order to limit stress elicited by remote health data consultation.

Dialogue control for health-oriented smartwatch apps is a multi-dimensional task. In our application scenario, the intended purpose of the smartwatch app is the prevention and detection of health hazards jeopardizing the smartwatch wearer (e.g. exsiccosis because of insufficient drinking); the designated target group of the app are elderly people. The dimension of a potential simultaneity of health hazards and ethical considerations how to position the wearer always in control of the app have been presented before. In this paper we focus on the third dimension of the mandatory acceptance conditions of the app. The intended assistance functionality of the app can be only realized, if the interventions of the app occur only in daily life situations, when the wearer will accept such interventions. We present a machine learning approach, by which the app will learn from the wearer over time, when such interventions are appropriate and accepted - and when the app will be expected to remain silent. Of course, this decision has to take into account also the urgency of the intervention with respect to the severity of the threating health hazard.

This paper explores the idea of the human body as an interface between self- and outside perception as well as verbal and nonverbal communication. Based on this perspective, the visual appearance can be viewed as a display of personality which indicates certain traits or even hidden potentials to a significant point. It allows the individual as well as other individuals to develop a deeper understanding, acceptance, and even tolerance for each other, if those individual traits and potentials are recognized. The concept behind this is an integrated approach, FaceForward, which is based on an analog face reading system. It is combined with as well as supported by the possibilities of AI within an interactive prototype. It intertwines the historical, but still applied integrated knowledge of human nature by face/body reading with a combination of algorithms and AI-based learning. The main goal is to analyze face and body based on their expression, structures, and, most of all, geometric shapes. Portraits of individuals are selected and pass through two different pipelines. One operates as a pre-processing module. The other for training the AI based on the principles of the face reading system. In the end, the results achieved with the AI approach shall be compared to a survey outcome of self- and outside perception based on psychologic concepts.

During the latest years, mental health disturbances related to anxiety have become more and more widespread. Among them, panic disorder is fairly common and affects a significant percentage of people in the U.S. and in Europe, regardless of their instruction level, social state and culture, with obvious consequences to the health and social care systems. Many approaches exist to the treatment of panic disorder, and all of them share the requirement of making the patient feel actively involved as the main responsible of the success or failure of the therapy. This has led to increasing interest among specialists in developing strategies based on pure or assisted self-help. Mindfulness-based psychotherapy, which has been proved to be particularly effective with anxiety disorders, is often delivered in self-help formats. Many mobile applications exist which guide users through step-by-step training programmes and provide general information about this kind of practice, but the supervision of a psychotherapist, although advisable, is seldom provided. In this paper, we introduce the prototype of a mobile application based on the key concept of self-efficacy, whose goal is to help users prevent and cope with panic and anxiety disturbs under the guidance of mental health professionals. We will describe the theoretical background we relied upon and the different phases involved in the design of the application. Preliminary results, future work, and open issues will also be discussed.

Media is rife with articles regarding smartphone addiction and how digital overload may be harming the mental well-being of children and young adults. As a response to the negative backlash about digital overload, Apple and Google released ScreenTime and Digital Wellbeing on iOS and Android devices to help users make informed decisions about their smartphone app usage. However, we expect that reminding users about their digital overload may have a negative effect, especially in undergraduate students, who are avid users of smartphones, and maybe also struggling with mental health issues. We conducted a survey among 230 undergraduate students to understand whether they use the ScreenTime feature on their iOS devices to manage app usage and if so, how the tool affected their emotions. We discovered that ScreenTime was effective in changing smartphone usage behavior, but also triggered negative emotions in undergraduate students who are avid smartphone users and also struggle with mental health issues. We expect the tools can be improved by changing the way users are warned about increased phone usage, by incorporating positive mindfulness techniques. We also emphasize the need to have more studies, like ours, to understand the effectiveness of digital overload reminder tools.

Aging of the workforce is a growing problem for many developed and developing countries. In Europe, the current demographic trend is towards an increasingly aged workforce [1]. This happens while, industry appears increasingly dependent on the knowledge of their older workers [2]. For this reason, companies are pushed to explore ways to keep older workers employed for a longer period of time [3].On the other hand, work is undergoing technological upgrading and innovation driven by digitization, the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution [4]. The technological advancement makes possible to achieve higher levels of work and total factors productivity [5, 6].In this context, the challenge is how smart technologies, particularly AI innovations and IOT technologies, can meet the needs of a growing number of older adults at workplaces, and how these technologies can be introduced to enable aging-workforce good health, aging labour market participation, and aging-worker security known as active aging in the workplace [7]. (AAiW)This paper presents the result emerged at IDEE Lab (Innovation in Design & Engineering Lab), of University of Florence, based on the methodological approach of design sprint and design thinking, through the exploration of the opportunities offered by smart technologies (AI and IoT) for the design of digital coaches and tangible interfaces, aimed at active aging in the workplace, and able to help people stay healthy for longer at work and to promote them smart aging.

Virtual consultation (VC) can be simply referred to as a telemedicine service that enables patients to access doctors remotely. Many patients still have uncertainties regarding the consultation process and results, which mostly concern communication with doctors. This motivated us to explore the answers to the following question: How do media naturalness and mental model alignment influence patients’ uncertainties in virtual consultation and how do these uncertainties affect patient satisfaction towards the consultation?A two (naturalness: low vs. high) by two (mental model alignment: low vs. high) field experiment was conducted to answer this question. For each group, participants were asked to answer corresponding questions regarding their uncertainties and their satisfaction towards the consultation. 327 valid questionnaire was obtained at the end.The results show that during patient-doctor communication, more natural the VC system is, the less uncertainties patients will have during their communication with doctors. Meanwhile, higher level of mental model alignment the VC system has, the less uncertainties patients will have during the communication. The results suggest that healthcare providers should select systems which are more natural to patients, and design them to align with patients’ mental models of visiting doctors to reduce patients’ uncertainties. The results also show that higher level of uncertainty leads to lower level of patient satisfaction towards the consultation.The findings of this study will redound to the benefit of academic society in virtual consultation considering that naturalness and mental model alignment play important roles in reducing patients’ uncertainties during their communication to doctors.

This paper aims to explore the design of intelligent products based on the needs of elderly users. Based on the existing literature results, the possibility of design intervention in the management of chronic diseases of the elderly was proposed, and the general characteristics and behavioral characteristics of the elderly users were studied by questionnaire method, the acceptability and subjective attitude of the elderly in using intelligent products and services were found, and the survey results were analyzed by mathematical statistics. The results showed that older people who considered it necessary to record physical data were higher than those who did not. With the increase of education, the proficiency of using mobile phone also increases; According to the elderly’s score of functional needs, the function with the highest score is automatic detection, followed by automatic analysis, remote consultation, diet therapy and community communication. Finally, based on the questionnaire survey results, this paper developed the design practice of intelligent medical products for hypertension, a common chronic disease of the elderly, and proposed the design strategy of intelligent products and services for chronic disease management of the elderly.

Fear of falling down is common among older people because it occurs on average in 50% of those who have fallen in the previous year. Our main aim was to investigate the reduction of FOF in elderly fallers using a virtual reality exposure therapy. To pursue this aim we developed a virtual reality exposure therapy system to clarify the following two experiments, let the subject wear it and watch it, collect various vital data of the subject, and confirm the effectiveness of our VR exposure therapy. In this study, we conducted a preliminary study on two elderly people who had fallen previously effect of reducing fear of falling by VR exposure therapy is confirmed.

Keeping fit has always been the focus of public attention, so the emergence of fitness apps has been highly sought after. However, after the outbreak, updates to fitness apps often disappoint their users. Therefore, it is eager for developers to learn about the real requirements and opinions to their apps. To investigate users’ requirements, we take data mining on user reviews, and apply sentiment analysis to obtain users’ evaluations and suggestions on the attributes and functions of fitness apps. The users of fitness apps have a high follow-up, and usually have been using these apps for a long time, leaning to treat them as daily applications, and can clearly perceive the experience brought by apps during the process. Therefore, users are very serious when evaluating the apps, and the reviews include user requirements, ideas for improvements, positive and negative sentiments about specific features, and descriptions of experiences with these features. Based on the characteristics of the reviews, we use the P-N deep analysis method to perform sentiment analysis on user reviews. For each review, we extract the active and negative evaluations of the corresponding features separately to avoid errors in evaluating features of apps only based on the star rating of the reviews. And when extracting sentiment words in sentiment analysis, verbs are added as features words and adverbs are added as emotion words because users of fitness apps use more adverbs than that of other apps to express their feelings and many nouns can be expressed by verbs in Chinese.

A large study published in THE LANCET in 2014 showed that the number and proportion of obese and overweight people in the world have been increasing in the past 30 years. The problem of high obesity rate has attracted people’s attention. At the same time, the frequency of people eating out shows a rapid increase, and eating out often will increase the risk of overweight and obesity. Because of changes in the ordering methods of restaurants, the electronic ordering system affects people’s food choices and also has an important impact on obesity. Therefore, how to design an electronic ordering system that can effectively promote consumers’ healthy diet is a key issue. In this research, the authors use factorial experiments and laboratory experiments to explore the impact of calorie labels on the electronic menu and the perceptual fluency of calorie labels on users. Studies have found that electronic menus presenting calorie labels would guide people to choose foods with lower calorie values, and calorie labels with low perceptual fluency would better guide people to choose foods with lower calorie values. The results can complement the research in the field of electronic menus and calorie labels, and provide a theoretical basis for the menu design of restaurants using electronic menus. Through this study, more people and restaurants will focus on dietary health issues, thereby effectively reducing the obesity rate in China.

Traditional technical education exhibitions for high-school or elementary school students used static posters, demo tools or oral presentation ways to introduce different kinds of professional technical education. For Mechanical engineering and product design fields, limits by learning space, budget, safety issues that hadn’t similar industrial level machines for them to operate and experience those real-world technologies. Normally those exhibition results did not as their prediction, still had a gap between schools and industries. For solving this issue, we introduced how to implement an industrial level plastic injection machine to be education applications for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). By a small machine structure and simple UI/UX design of HMI (Human-Machine-Interface) control panel indication, the visitors could operate the table type plastic injection machine and produces toys by themselves via play experience. This innovation STEAM teaching model could enhance learning interesting and motivation for younger students before them entrance the technical colleges or universities, let them understand the latest technology trends and assist them chose appropriate development fields and found career plan directions in the future.

Mu.SA. - Museum Sector Alliance [1], is an EU funded project that aims to fill the gap between formal education and training and the Museums’ need of competencies to drive digital transformation in order to be competitive in the digital era. The project will reach its goal building new European profiles of emerging job roles in museums, creating a training program and delivering a pilot, that will be used to test the methodology and the contents developed.In this paper, we will present the result of the evaluation of MOOC, that represents the first part of the course that has been delivered, trying to understand the strengths and weaknesses in order to improve it.The results of the evaluation of the MOOC were generally positive indeed and the level of interest shows that this strategy is considered particularly useful at sectoral level and as an opportunity for employment growth. The number of participants involved highlights the ability of the MOOC tool to attract and interest a wide audience of a heterogeneous age group covering several professional fields.

Interactive artifacts and environments that involve more aspects of life other than work (e.g., social relations, entertainment, art etc.) are gaining more attention within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field. This includes interactive art and installations. Do-It-Yourself (DIY) technologies, such as Arduinos with sensors and actuators, are often used in interactive installations. These technologies, however, are often oriented towards hobbyists and engineers. Moreover, easy-to-use commercial kits have a relatively high cost and a lack of flexibility. In this paper, we present Pincello: an affordable electronics kit for prototyping interactive installations. Pincello is not a commercial product, but rather a recommendation of components accompanied by meaningful hands-on documentation. We present and discuss the main components of the kit, including suggestions on how they can be used to allow different forms of interaction. We also present three case studies in which Pincello was used, involving 105 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) students. Considering how the kit received positive feedback in the three case studies, and how it was successfully used to create 18 installations of varied themes, Pincello has shown to be a promising tool for the design and construction of interactive installations.

With the continuous improvement of parents’ educational level in China, parent has been paid more and more attention to the early education of their children. There is only visual and tactile interaction between traditional crawling blankets and infants. The value of early education is small. The application of thinking and intelligent information technology to the design of infant crawling blankets can develop greater potential for early education for infant crawling blankets and solve a certain waste of resources. Therefore, it is very important to fully consider the development characteristics of all aspects of the baby and comprehensively consider the application of sustainable design thinking in the intelligent crawling blanket, so as to design a growth intelligent crawling blanket that enhances the infant’s early education experience. This article takes the intelligent crawling blanket of infants 0–3 years old as the research object, and adopts a combination of qualitative research and quantitative research to summarize the design principles and design strategies of infants and young children’s intelligent crawling blankets based on the development characteristics of infants and the needs of parents. Intelligent crawling blanket for infants not only meets the development needs of infants but also achieves product sustainability.

To solve the problems of inefficient learning caused by the complexity, fragmentation and lack of personalization of traditional handicraft learning resources. Based on the method of pattern configuration extraction and reuse, this paper takes the innovative design of Canton Porcelain pattern as an example. For the first time, sorting the knowledge of Cantonese Porcelain according to different cultural attributes (labels), to establish the knowledge base and pattern sample base of Canton Porcelain, and build a semantic relationship between the them, recommend Cantonese Porcelain elements that meet users’ needs through semantic search. Then, shape context was used to extract patterns of Cantonese Porcelain, and topological methods was combined to establish the configuration rules of patterns. Shape grammar based on character encoding were improved in the process of generation of personalized customization patterns of Cantonese Porcelain, used to describe the transformation of shapes during pattern filling, thereby generation of personalized customization patterns of Cantonese Porcelain based on element extraction will be completed. Develop a personalized customization system for Cantonese Porcelain crafts, and tests the method feasible through an application example.

Time Machine is an immersive Virtual Reality installation that explains – in simple terms – the Striatal Beat Frequency (SBF) model of time perception. The installation was created as a collaboration between neuroscientists within the field of time perception along with a team of digital designers and audio composers/engineers. This paper outlines the process, as well as the lessons learned, while designing the virtual reality experience that aims to simplify a complex idea to a novice audience. The authors describe in detail the process of creating the world, the user experience mechanics and the methods of placing information in the virtual place in order to enhance the learning experience. The work was showcased at the 4th International Conference on Time Perspective, where the authors collected feedback from the audience. The paper concludes with a reflection on the work and some suggestions for the next iteration of the project.

A digital/physical installation part a series of pilots developed for Habo Municipality, Sweden, in the context of a public co-design effort aimed at creating a shared understanding of the possibilities offered by digital transformation and the development of a connected city framework, “Read Ahoy!” provides children with a simple game-like challenge: find books randomly distributed in a number of locations by matching conceptual, spatial, aural, and verbal clues.Built as an embodied experience for library spaces, “Read Ahoy!” is narratively centered on a Viking crew in need of help after they have lost much of their precious cargo of books in a storm, on their way back after a trade expedition. The story grounds the challenge in tropes familiar to Swedish culture and gives children a playful setup and well-defined goals as they search for books. “Read Ahoy!” explores how children entering the school system search and make sense of information in a blended space, structurally recreating the way they customarily mix action in digital and physical space.Theoretically anchored in Benyon’s conceptualization of blended spaces, in Bates’ information seeking theory and information search tactics, and in Resmini and Lacerda’s formalization of information-based experience ecosystems, “Read Ahoy!” was designed and implemented as a low-budget end-of-year project for the students in the Master’s in Information Architecture and Innovation at Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden, under the supervision of the authors. It was framed to meet the UN SDG4’s sub-targets on “Early childhood development” and “Universal Youth Literacy” and installed in Habo Library from June through August 2019 where it was used extensively by local children under the supervision of librarians during the summer. A full description of the installation and preliminary post-mortem reflections are offered in the paper.

Tangible programming toolkits are widely used to nurture computational literacy in the young generation. However, novice learners with visual impairment have been neglected as these toolkits are primarily designed for sighted students, and mostly rely on visual cues in the whole manipulation process. To fill this gap, we present CodeRhythm (Fig. 1), a tangible programming toolkit for engaging blind and visually impaired (BVI) students to learn basic programming concepts by creating simple melodies. In this paper, we describe the design features of CodeRhythm and discuss the feedback and future improvement based on the preliminary user study. Fig. 1. CodeRhythm is a tangible programming toolkit for engaging blind and visually impaired (BVI) students to learn basic programming concepts by creating simple melodies.

This paper focuses on creating custom plug-ins for guitar augmentation with the Gen~ Max/MSP environment. The plug-ins are utilised in performance and compositional settings with electronic or electro-acoustic music. The author has programmed and used such plug-ins in various settings. Such plug-ins offer a unique and flexible aesthetic solution for music performances and studio recording.

In recent years, more and more organizations and institutions sell the product of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) to inherit ICH culture and promote local economy in E-commerce. Cantonese Porcelain (CP) is one of ICH in China, and it has gradually shifted sales channels from offline to online. However, it is found that the sales volume has been decreasing steadily through the previous research, which is a challenge for promoting CP’s product design and extending CP’s market. To address this question, this paper proposes a design model for CP’s E-commerce products based on the model of user perceptual image, and proves a adaptive model with a cases study. Literature research of user perceptual image is useful with transferring ICH taxonomy to the related product design, which provide enterprises and designers with the development model and reference of product design. This paper is also conducive to the development and promotion of CP’s E-commerce industry.

Computer code has entered our society in contexts ranging from medical to manufacturing settings. The current study expanded previous literature by examining the effects of three between-subject factors (i.e., reputation, organization, and readability) on various trust-related outcomes. Participants (N = 54) were computer programmers recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We used a 2 (reputable or non-reputable source) × 3 (high, medium, or low organization) × 3 (high, medium, or low readability) between-subjects design to examine how the independent variables interact to predict the trustworthiness perceptions of the code. The results show that programmers perceive code differently when coming from reputable sources. Thus, it is important to highlight whether or not any open source code comes from a reputable source and make this information readily available to programmers. Another trend we found is that programmers tend to prefer conspicuously high or low organization, particularly when readability is low. Thus, a medium level of organization could obfuscate the goals of the original programmer, which may undermine the programmer’s intent and reduce code trustworthiness.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into different areas of our lives. AI has the potential to increase productivity and relieve workload on staff in high-pressure jobs such as healthcare. However, most AI healthcare tools have failed. For AI to be effective, it is vital that users can understand how the system is processing data. Explainable AI (XAI) moves away from the traditional ‘black box’ approach, aiming to make the processes behind the system more transparent. This experimental study uses real healthcare data – and combines a computer science and psychological approach – to investigate user trust and understanding of three popular XAI algorithms (Decision Trees, Logistic Regression and Neural Networks). The results question the contribution of understanding towards user trust; Suggesting that understanding and explainability are not the only factors contributing to trust in AI. Users also show biases in trust and understanding – with a particular bias towards malignant results. This raises important issues around how humans can be encouraged to make more accurate judgements when using XAI systems. These findings have implications in relation to ethics, future XAI design, healthcare and further research.

Inclusion pays off, but how to make that happen? Inclusive design describes a widely acknowledged approach combining user centered design principles and accessibility demands. Recent studies show a strong positive impact of accessibility on the overall user experience. This article provides a brief overview on accessibility regulations and requirements. We will go beyond these regulations to achieve design recommendations that enable efficient product design. Also, we will introduce prerequisites for a large-scale adoption of these principles.

The significant role of the interaction between a service provider and a user in service production has been pointed out by a number of studies. While interpersonal service interaction has been studied mostly from the perspective of traditional services, based on the dichotomy of a service provider who plays a more active role in service production and a user who is viewed as a recipient of a service. This paper explores interpersonal service interaction from the perspective of service ‘co-production’ that has drawn attention as a potential strategy for public service innovation and social innovation. In particular, this study pays attention to relational interaction as a pillar and object of a collaborative service tackling social challenges. The nature and characteristics of interpersonal interaction in the production of a collaborative service, and the implication for service design are discussed based on literature review, and a case study of a service design project aiming at connecting people who temporarily move to Niguarda in Milan for medical treatment of their sick family member at the Niguarda Hospital and the locals who will be their ‘neighborhood friends’ is presented.

The rapid advancement of technology has changed the human and AS interactions, blurring the boundaries of what must be a human or automation action. The successfully implementation of human-in-the-loop is essential for the new relationship between humans and AS, in which control is shared and a team-mate collaboration arises. We believe that only through the best understanding of human factors and individual differences it will be possible to work towards the formation and calibration of trust in human and AS interactions. Therefore, this study conducted an online questionnaire to investigate the influence of personality traits, culture orientation, and individual differences on dispositional trust, as an effort to map out humans’ baseline trust in autonomous systems. We found that while some factors presented significant relation with trust in autonomous systems when analyzed as an isolated variable, such as agreeableness trait, they do not have significant results when investigated concomitantly to other factors. Thus, we were able to identify that some individual differences – cultural values, extrovertion trait, and age – presented stronger influence on the dispositional trust in automation. Thus, our study provides valuable information about human factors that mediate trust, which supports the optimization and improvement of the overall interaction between humans and autonomous systems.

Humans routinely overestimate the reliability of automated systems. Given people’s different experiences in using automated systems, their schemas regarding the performance of those systems may be more or less developed. Extant research has assessed people’s automation schema using the Perfect Automation Schema (PAS) scale, a self-report scale comprising two facets (i.e., high expectations and all-or-none thinking). We used item response theory to determine the extent to which two populations (the public versus computer programmers) responded to self-report items similarly. Computer programmers (n = 245) and members of the public (n = 285) completed the PAS scale in the laboratory and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, respectively. Results showed that items of the high expectations facet functioned differently across the two subgroups. In addition, we observed that the high expectations facet as a whole functioned differently across the two groups. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

With the advent of novel neurotechnologies, existing ethical frameworks run the risk of falling behind. It is important to identify these shortcomings and address them in a manner that will stand the test of time. We help address this problem by identifying ethical issues that are relevant to the industry and subjecting them to existing prominent frameworks to illuminate the gaps for further ethical discussion and to help structure a more robust ethical framework. In our systematic literature review, we explain the selection criteria for both the ethical issues and frameworks obtained from multiple other papers. In total, 25 ethical issues are treated to 7 frameworks and gaps are identified where current research is lacking. The goal of this paper is to inform future development in the area and provide a springboard for further research. To that end, we hope to raise awareness of the need for the spotlight on ethics to keep up with BCI advancements.

One of the fundamental goals of user recommendations is to drive higher user engagement with applications and ecosystems. However, there is a lack of clarity for the user on how end user data is used to create these recommendations. This paper explores a framework that explains and gives control to a user, on how their usage data was utilized to generate recommendations. It will shed light on how a system recommendation could be more transparent from the user’s perspective. The framework aims to expose the relationship between recommendations and contextual user activity, thereby leading to transparency. This framework would also allow users to finetune how usage data from their activity, can be better utilized to generate recommendations. The adoption of this framework could lead to higher user engagement with the application and a better user experience for the user.

Today, most democratic countries adopt the election system based on the notion of “one vote for one voter”. The winner will be determined by the total number of votes that s/he obtained. But will it be the optimal voting method considering the occurrence of the cracked vote? If there are two opposite sides and there are only two candidates one for each side, it would be adequate. But if there is only one candidate on one side and more than one candidate on other side, the latter votes will be cracked, thus the former side may win. Because of this phenomenon, each side strives to coordinate the candidate just to one.This paper proposes another way of voting method based on the rating method where the basic notion is “onetime ratings for one voter”. In this method, each voter gives ratings to all candidates, for example, from 1 to 5 where 1 is negligible and 5 is the most preferable. The default rating value for each candidate is 1 and voters can change the point for the preferable candidate to 5 or 4. After the vote, all the rating points will be summed up and the candidate who won the maximum summative rating point will win.

Eye-blink is a sensitive index of cognitive load and some studies have reported that it can be a useful cue for detecting deception. However, it is difficult to apply in the real forensic scenario as very complex techniques to record eye blinking are usually needed (e.g., electrooculography, eye tracker technology). In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically detect eye blinking based on a computer vision algorithm, which does not require any expensive technology to record data. Results demonstrated that the automatic blink detector reached an accuracy similar to the electrooculogram in detecting the blink rate. Moreover, the automatic blink detector was applied to 68 videos of people who were lying or telling the truth about a past holiday, testing the difference between the two groups in terms of blink rate and response timing. Training machine learning classification models on these features, an accuracy up to 70% in identifying liars and truth-tellers was obtained.

Echoing what matters to us, our values pervade the criteria we apply in the judgment of the information we receive on social media when assigning to it a degree of relevance. In this era of “fake-news”, understanding how the values of a social group influence perception and intentions for sharing pieces of (mis)information can reveal critical aspects for socio-technical solutions to mitigate misinformation spreading. This particular study contrasts the reasoning of a group in the United Kingdom and another in Brazil when judging and valuating the same set of headlines. The results confirm the influence of dominant values in the group in the interpretation of the headlines and potential motivations for sharing them, pointing out directions to advance with the human values-based approach to fight misinformation.

In this paper, I address the challenges of doing research into the experiences of disabled participants in a corporate context where disability is not often considered. I conducted research into the experiences of blind and visually impaired riders for Uber, and I discovered a number of transportation challenges these individuals face. However, I argue that making a product such as Uber’s more inclusive is not simply about fixing the many surface-level design flaws I discovered, but about making the service more broadly useful and promoting accessibility within the corporate culture. This paper is a reflection on my attempt to conduct inclusive research as a means to promoting inclusive app and service design, and the obstacles to inclusivity I encountered along the way.

Liver surgery is typically performed to dissect part of the liver to remove a malignant tumor. The role of technology is to assist the surgeon to swiftly navigate to the area of interest. Our work involved the development of a liver surgery navigation system in which a steepest descent liver tracking algorithm is used to accurately track the real liver with a virtual liver. We recently demonstrated that our digital potential function was globally stable at the point at which the virtual liver coincided with its real counterpart. The same stability was achieved for several actual surgeries using 3D printed viscoelastic liver in an operating room with two light-emitting diode (LED) shadowless lamps. Increasing the number of lamps improved the stability of depth-depth matching in the steepest descent algorithm because the lamps did not emit in the infrared wavelength region unlike the depth cameras. Furthermore, the use of the characteristic uneven shape of the liver has greatly improved liver tracking accuracy. The complex and asymmetric shape of the upper part of the liver during surgery plays a key role in the liver in depth and depth matching. In this study, we experimentally investigated the stability of a virtual liver dissection configuration following a real liver in an operating room equipped with two LED shadowless lamps. As a result, deeply incised livers have superior depth-depth matching stability. In addition, even when using occlusion to simulate actual surgery, the convergence stability of the experimental performance is improved.

In an optimally integrated HMS (Human Machine System), human must understand the machine as well as the machine must understand the human user. Same principle applies for car NS (Navigation System) which is a human-in-the-loop system. An ideally integrated NS knows how, when and what navigation information must be provided for the user and create minimal interruption for the primary task. To do the same, NS must hold the behavioral models of the user for providing the guidance information in an effective way. A research framework which uses these principles, is needed to create such models as well as for conducting further analysis for the research problem of “Giving the driver adequate navigation information with minimal interruption”. Until now no such research framework exists and because of that further analysis of the mentioned research problem cannot be conducted. In this paper we present the research framework BeaCON: Behavior-and Context-Based Optimal Navigation that enables detailed analysis of this research problem.

After the fall of the Communist regime, the city of Tirana has been facing a series of social/spatial issues related to a top-down decisional system that could not take into account the new needs of a society shifting from a centralized system to a new one based on private property. The result of this phenomenon is the growth of a series of urban areas, where the poorest citizens have used informal settlements has a way to reclaim their portion of private land. In this paper, starting from original research (Dhamo [20]), we present Tirana as a paradigmatic case of ‘organic city’ (derived from the former Ottoman architecture) and we analyze a peculiar model of urban settlements that are able to grow following complex and fractal structures. The study here presented, structured as an academic class at POLIS University, will be developed through computational design and interactive engaging technologies, with the main aim of creating an interdisciplinary study framework to tackle complexity and evolutionary issues in contemporary urban fabrics. The process will be explained through three didactic cycles where interactive technologies, such as artificial intelligence and engaging human-based tools, can play to set the debate for a deeper understanding of the informal areas reality and foster co-design processes from the perspective that a collective interest is a key to let professionals, institutions, and citizens, work together in a more informed process of city-making.

With the acceleration of the process of globalization, the increase of global online conferences, cross-border tourism, telephone paging services, video communication services, global shopping and so on will correspondingly promote the demand of the translation industry. As one of the traditional industries, the combination of the translation industry and the mobile Internet will usher in a new opportunity for development. How to change the traditional service mode of manual translation and build a new service system to better serve the public is the focus of this paper. First of all, this paper studies the current situation of the translation market, explores the market demand, investigates both translators and translation demanders, establishes a feature user model, and obtains the key elements needed to construct the situation. Secondly, the user usage scenario is constructed, and the invisible needs of users are obtained through the analysis and research of users’ scenarios in the future. Through the construction of the application scenario of the instant translation service, the interaction flow and operation mode of the user under the specific tasks of each function are obtained in the scenario expectation, and a multi-scenario real-time translation service system is formed. In addition, the KJ method is used to sort out and classify the requirement items to make them more organized and independent. Finally, through the AHP analytic hierarchy process, we let professionals compare and evaluate the demand items, use the analytic hierarchy process to express the structure and calculate the weight of the demand items, construct the demand hierarchy model of users, and put forward the overall design strategy from the global perspective of service design.

In this study, we developed a deadlock-free and collision-free liver surgical navigation method by switching potential-based and sensor-based approaches. The potential-based approach selects a near-optimal route from a scalpel tip to an arbitrary neighbor position around a tumor in a 3D organ map converted from digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) data captured by magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography. However, among complex-shaped blood vessels, the approach sometimes loses the route. To overcome this drawback, we switch to the sensor-based approach. This approach always finds a route near a tumor. However, the path becomes longer. Therefore, when the potential-based approach recovers to find another path, we switch the sensor-based approach back to the potential-based approach. The usefulness of this switching method was carefully ascertained in several kinds of allocations of tumor and blood vessels.

In this study, we developed an augmented-reality (AR) navigation system that can assist surgeons during transsphenoidal surgery, including identification of the tumor site. Since transsphenoidal surgery is performed by looking at an endoscopic image, thus requiring situational judgment on the image, transsphenoidal surgery poses greater challenges with regard to grasping the positional relationships between the tumor and the organs compared with normal operations. The proposed system is expected to help surgeons understand the conditions surrounding the operating field, by intraoperatively displaying a real-time overlaid 3D model based on preoperative MRI images of the patient.Markers were used to obtain the data necessary to view the overlaid images, which were attached to the operating table and to the end of the endoscope. The patient’s head was held in a fixed position during the surgery. The relative positions of the maker on the operating table and the feature point on the patient’s head were captured by a camera mounted on top of the operating table. Then, using this information, the positions of the tumor and the organs were estimated, and a 3D model was created using the patient’s MRI scans. Further, by obtaining the relative position of the markers attached to the end and tip of the endoscope, the position of the tip of the endoscope was estimated from the marker at the end even if it could not be seen from outside after inserting it into the patient’s body during surgery. The relative positions of the tip of the endoscope and the tumor site were calculated, and a 3D model was displayed using the MRI images in conjunction with the current endoscopic image. By constantly updating the positional information in accordance with the behavior of the endoscope, the overlaid image of the tumor and the organs could be viewed. In this study, we developed a prototype of the proposed system, and discussed the accuracy of its results.

Due to the digitization of industry and the adaption of Industry 4.0, manufactures have to face considerable challenges. Industrial assembly processes must be as flexible as possible to react to fast-changing customer demands. Today, this is mostly achieved by the use of personnel manually executing the assembly tasks. However, assuring a constant quality of the produced goods is a problem under these circumstances. A possible solution to reduce human errors could be the introduction of assistance systems for highlighting important information and guidance during the assembly process. However, most of the available systems cannot adequately provide the required flexibility and restrict assembly workers. Hence, new and innovative assistance systems for industrial assembly are needed that can overcome these limitations and that allow greater flexibility. This contribution compares different basic concepts for the realization of such an innovative assistance system. It proposes a Pick-by-Local-Light system as a suitable approach to meet industrial requirements. The concept foresees small modules mounted directly to the front side of the individual load carriers. These modules visually highlight the respective carriers. The conceptual work is evaluated with a prototypical proof-of-concept. Also, a questionnaire with industrial experts and assembly workers for hydraulic valve assembly processes verified the suitability of the proof-of-concept assistance system. In summary, the developed assistance system has received widespread approval. This work thus laid the foundation for the implementation of a novel assistance system in industrial assembly.

We believe in the use of urban games to define new enjoyable experiences, change citizens’ unsustainable habits and educate them to new environment-and social-friendly ones. This paper presents MUV, an innovative action that has the power to engage citizens and foster sustainable mobility behaviors. MUV complements engaging HMIs with a participatory method within an iterative innovation process called the virtuous cycle (understand, involve, co-create, implement, experiment). The innovation process has led to a new game dynamic: Mobility as a Sport. It results in a rewarding personal mobility experience; the same rewarding sensations the athletes feel when they improve their results.