Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2015

User behaviour analysis requires defining experimental sessions with numerous participants. In this context, the specification of experiments is a demanding task, as several issues have to be considered such as the type of experiment, the type and number of tasks, the definition of questionnaires and the user interaction data to be gathered. The analysis of collected data is also complex and often requires repeatedly examining recorded interaction videos. In order to deal with these tasks, we present a platform called RemoTest which assists researchers to specify and conduct experimental sessions as well as to gather and analyse the interaction data. This platform has been applied to define different formal user studies on the web and has assisted researchers in detecting the main interaction characteristics of different user profiles and settings.

As a consequence of the National Policy on Special Education on the Perspective of Inclusive Education in Brazil, established in 2007, mainstream schools have begun receiving a greater number of Deaf or Hard of Hearing (D/HH) students that previously attended specialized schools. However, data point to the declining number of D/HH students enrolled from primary school to secondary school; i.e., there are reasons to believe that educational barriers are imposed on the means these students have of conquering a complete education. In this context, the goal of this work is to propose a technology acceptance model that takes into account constructs that involve aspects of the inclusive education context, as well as performing a pilot test on the interaction of 16 D/HH users with a mobile application, called SESSAI, to evaluate the model. SESSAI consists of a technology-mediated form of communication, which allows hearing persons and D/HH individuals to interact through an automatic recognition system. Among the constructs of the model, one of them refers to the potential educational barriers experienced by D/HH students in inclusive classrooms. With regard to research methodology, the study was developed in cycles of literature review and conduction of tests. The proposed model has shown positive results in capturing factors that influence technology acceptance given the domain specific context, since they incorporate aspects of pragmatic quality and hedonic quality (emotional user experience), and also considers issues related to perceived usefulness in minimizing potential educational barriers, future expectations, and facilitating conditions. We conclude that the model encompasses both users’ personal motivation and context of use aspects, and it can be used for the purpose for which it was proposed. Further investigations need to be conducted in order to adjust the model questionnaire and to recruit a broader number of participants.

Considering users preferences and behaviour is a necessity to develop accessible interaction for blind people. Mainstream mobile devices are widely used by people with disabilities but, despite the growing interest of the research community around accessibility issues of touch interfaces, there is still much to understand about how best to design the interaction of blind people with mobile technologies. To this end, we conducted a preliminary elicitation study (8 participants) to understand how blind people perform touch and motion gestures for common tasks on a mobile phone. We found that blind people do not use motion gestures. We provide a discussion of our results according to the type of gestures performed.

The touch screen of mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, is their primary input mechanism. While designed to be used in conjunction with its output capabilities, eyes-free interaction is also possible and useful on touch screens. One of the several possible techniques for eyes-free interaction is the virtual button method, where the screen is divided into a regular grid of buttons that can be pressed even without looking at the screen.

This paper contains an exploratory study about influence factors on this interaction method. Results indicate, that not only the size of the buttons matter, but also the device orientation and user dependent factors, such as the age or general experience with touch screens. By involving small children in the evaluation we can see the validity of this approach even for the youngest users.

Verbal protocols are widely used in user studies for evaluating websites. This study investigated the effectiveness and efficiency of concurrent and retrospective verbal protocols (CVP and RVP) for both blind and sighted participants, as well as participant workload and attitudes towards these methods. Eight blind and eight sighted participants undertook both protocols in a website evaluation. RVP was more effective as measured by problems encountered for both groups, although it was no more efficient than CVP. The severity of problems identified by both protocols was equivalent. As measured on the NASA TLX, participants found RVP found more demanding than CVP. Sighted participants found rating problems during CVP more disruptive than blind participants. These results show that RVP is a more useful protocol for practitioners and researchers even though it takes more time and is more demanding for participants. It is equally applicable for both blind and sighted participants.

Multi-modal interactive maps can provide a useful aid to navigation for blind people. We have been experimenting with such maps that present information in a tactile and auditory (speech) form, but with the novel feature that the map’s orientation is tracked. This means that the map can be explored in a more ego-centric manner, as favoured by blind people. Results are encouraging, in that scores in an orientation task are better with the use of map rotation.

In this article a collaborative workstation for creating audio-tactile graphics is presented. The system is based on a common open source office suite and supports a transcriber for tactile graphics with several tools. In addition the system allows a blind reviewer to get involved at every stage of the creation process. This is achieved through a refreshable two-dimensional tactile display. The blind participant can independently manipulate graphical objects and make annotations in parallel. As a result, a tandem team of a sighted graphic creator and a blind partner may create a tactile graphic with better quality.

We raise a question whether it is possible to build a large-scale navigation system for blind pedestrians where a blind person navigates another blind person remotely by mobile phone. We have conducted an experiment, in which we observed blind people navigating each other in a city center in 19 sessions. We focused on problems in the navigator’s attempts to direct the traveler to the destination. We observed 96 problems in total, classified them on the basis of the type of navigator or traveler activity and according to the location in which the problem occurred. Most of the problems occurred during the activities performed by the navigator. We extracted a set of guidelines based on analysis of navigation problems and successful navigation strategies. We have partially mapped the problem of tele-assistance navigation to POMDP based dialogue system.

With the daily problem of social isolation comes an aggravation of older adults’ general health. Social Network Services like Facebook have the potential to ameliorate the social connectivity of this segment of the population. However, they are still not fully adopted by them, whether because of age-related limitations or the lack of appropriate technological skills. In this paper we argue that the development of SNSs based on technology already used by older adults, like Television, or technology which has proven to be more accessible to them, like Tablets, can improve the ability of older adults to use these systems. We report findings from a study composed of semi-structured interviews and focus groups which aimed at the development of two Facebook-based prototypes for TV and Tablet. Results show good receptiveness from older adults to perform social tasks on TV and Tablet-based applications, for interacting using alternative modalities like speech, or back-of-device tapping, and for the use of adaptation mechanisms. Informed by the study results the main contributions are the two prototypes, and a collection of recommendations regarding the design of TV and tablet based interfaces for this population.

Population is aging. With it comes social isolation which leads to drastic health degrading situations. Facebook has the potential to assist older adults in maintaining relationships. Still problems like unclear purposes, design complexity and privacy issues have contributed to a lower uptake. We conducted a study to understand how to draw Facebook closer to older adults, investigate the main difficulties and motivations towards its use and adoption, and inquire about the possibilities of using Tablet and Television as alternatives to the traditional PC for accessing this kind of services. Findings show correlations between self-belief in technical skills, motor limitations, and tablet use and the use of Facebook. It also shows that the complexity of Facebook’s user interface limits its use by the older adults that use it and works as a barrier for its adoption by the seniors who still don’t. We also identified distinct groups and distinct feelings about the use of Television as a vehicle for social interaction. We derived a set of recommendations to consider when designing solutions for tackling social isolation.

Older adults encounter numerous barriers to mobility, many of which are in the built environment. Technological solutions may enable them to mitigate these barriers and promote physical activity. To design appropriate technological solutions, it is crucial to understand the specific barriers to mobility older adults face from their perspectives. Photo diary studies allow older adults to autonomously document their experiences to support generation of user needs and requirements. We investigate the methodological appropriateness of photo diaries for exploring experiences of older adults and eliciting their requirements for new technologies. A photo diary study was conducted with 26 older adults, who were given disposable cameras to document things that affect their mobility. As well as presenting a selection of the mobility barriers identified in this study, the paper outlines a number of methodological issues relating to the use of photo diaries for eliciting the needs and requirements of older adults.

This work aims to identify the main aspects of Web design responsible for eliciting specific emotions. For this purpose, we performed a user study with 40 participants testing a Web application designed by applying a set of criteria for stimulating various emotions. In particular, we considered six emotions (hate, anxiety, boredom, fun, serenity, love), and for each of them a specific set of design criteria was exploited. The purpose of the study was to reach a better understanding regarding what design techniques are most important to stimulate each emotion. We report on the results obtained and discuss their implications. Such results can inform the development of guidelines for Web applications able to stimulate users’ emotions.

When people from different language backgrounds communicate, they need to adopt a common shared language, such as English, to set up the conversation. In conversations conducted over text-only computer-mediated communication (CMC) mediums, mutual exchange of socio-emotional information is limited to the use of words, symbols and emoticons. Previous research suggests that when message receivers share the same native language with the authors, they are more accurate at detecting the emotional valence of messages based on these cues compared to non-native speaking receivers. But is this still true when the messages are written by non-native speakers? Moreover, what message properties influence the accuracy of emotional valence detection? In this paper, we report on an experiment where native English speakers and Japanese non-native English speakers rate the emotional valence of text-only messages written by Japanese non-native English speaking authors. We analyze how three message properties, grammatical correctness, fluency of language and use of symbols and emoticons, influence emotional valence detection for native and non-native speakers. Based on our results, we propose theoretical and practical implications for supporting multilingual socio-emotional communication in text-only CMC.

As information systems become more integrated into everyday use, people generate and store significant data through their lifetimes. Only recently have researchers and companies started to pay attention to digital legacy issues. Google has been one of the first companies to support users in planning the future of their digital assets through Google Inactive Account Manager (IAM). In this work, we present a systematic analysis of IAM and discuss how it structures users’ digital legacy decision space and deals with challenges regarding future impact of these decisions.

Changing behaviour related to energy conservation is not an emotionally neutral task. People have to deal with individual and group interests, contextual constraints, eventually trading-off between their values and effective actions in terms of savings. This paper presents a set of dynamics and artefacts for families to raise and share their energy awareness, and transform it into sustainable behaviour. This method based on human values was applied with 7 families to identify critical factors that must be in play when promoting energy conservation within a social group. Preliminary results confirmed that bringing families’ values into discussion and establishing shared commitments and responsibilities are promising approaches for technology design with the purpose to raise awareness collectively and promote effective changes in behaviour towards protecting the natural environment.

Online surveys are an important means of data collection in marketing and research, but conventional survey designs are often perceived as dull and unengaging, resulting in negative respondent behavior. Gamification has been proposed to make online surveys more pleasant to fill and, consequently, to improve the quality of survey results. This work applied gamification to an existing survey targeted at teenagers and young adults. The gamified survey was evaluated in a study with 60 participants regarding the psychological and behavioral outcomes of gamification. Results indicate that gamification successfully increased the users’ perceived fun, the average time spent, as well as their willingness to use and recommend the survey, without introducing a strong bias in survey results, albeit with a lower overall response rate.

User experience (UX) is typically measured retrospectively through subjective questionnaire ratings, yet we know little of how well these retrospective ratings reflect concurrent experiences of an entire event. UX entails a broad range of dimensions of which human emotion is considered to be crucial. This paper presents an empirical study of the discrepancy between concurrent and retrospective ratings of emotions. We induced two experimental conditions of varying pleasantness. Findings show the existence of a significant discrepancy between retrospective and concurrent ratings of emotions. In the most unpleasant condition we found retrospective ratings to be significantly overestimated compared to concurrent ratings. In the most pleasant condition we found retrospective ratings to correlate with the highest and final peaks of emotional arousal. This indicates that we cannot always rely on typical retrospective UX assessments to reflect concurrent experiences. Consequently, we discuss alternative methods of assessing UX, which have considerable implications for practice.

This paper reports an experiment for stress recognition in human-computer interaction. Thirty-one healthy participants performed five stressful HCI tasks and their skin conductance signals were monitored. The selected tasks were most frequently listed as stressful by 15 typical computer users who were involved in pre-experiment interviews asking them to identify stressful cases of computer interaction. The collected skin conductance signals were analyzed using seven popular machine learning classifiers. The best stress recognition accuracy was achieved by the cubic support vector machine classifier both per task (on average 90.8 %) and for all tasks (Mean = 98.8 %, SD = 0.6 %). This very high accuracy demonstrates the potentials of using physiological signals for stress recognition in the context of typical HCI tasks. In addition, the results allow us to move on a first integration of the specific stress recognition mechanism in PhysiOBS, a previously-proposed software tool that supports researchers and practitioners in user emotional experience evaluation.

This article presents the design and evaluation of novel types of pictorial scales for assessing emotional response based on LEGO Minifigures. We describe the creation of two pictorial scales (LEGO Face Scale and Stylized LEGO Face Scale) through the use of a semi-automatic process. We report on the results of two evaluation studies conducted to assess the validity of the proposed pictorial scales. The first study evaluated the rating of emotions expressed by other humans; the second focused on rating one’s own emotional state when looking at expressive stimuli. We investigate the validity of the two pictorial scales by comparing them to ratings given on a conventional Likert Scale. Results show that assessing expressive faces using the proposed pictorial scales can differ from using a Likert scale; however, when rating one’s own emotional state there is no difference. Finally, we assembled a physical version of the LEGO Face scale and discuss future work.

To explore the notion of User Experience in regard to motivation and affect in the context of e-commerce, a preliminary research model was developed. According to this model, customers’ motivations influence their experience of using e-commerce systems. A pilot study with 12 participants was designed to evaluate this hypothesis. The results suggested that customers’ emotional experiences were associated with their motivation to visit an e-commerce website. Our future research will investigate the validity of this model with more thorough evaluation methods.

Most presentations are given with supporting visuals and driven by specialized presentation software. Today, this software either follows the classic slideware metaphor, presenting a series of discrete screens—or it implements the more recent canvas presentation metaphor, using a zoomable free-form canvas to arrange information. Both paradigms were previously evaluated with presentation authors and audiences. In this paper, we extend our understanding to how they impact the presenter herself during delivery of a talk. In a lab study participants gave presentations with slideware and canvas tools, and we measured their emotional state through self-reporting. We find that a recommendation for a tool depends on the experience of the presenter or their spatial ability.

Gathering health-related data is quite easy, but visualizing them in a meaningful way remains challenging, especially when the application domain is very complex. Research suggests that empathy can facilitate the design process and that narratives can help to create an empathic encounter between designers and the prospective users. We conducted an exploratory quasi-experiment in order to explore whether narratives in form of online reviews are able to evoke designer’s empathy when developing an online platform for a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service. The results suggest that the narratives can help designers to engage with and take the perspective of the prospective user, who is then represented in more detail. Lacking narratives from real people leaves the designers to their own imagination, which can lead to the use of rather abstract stereotypes that do not enable an understanding of the user, but affect the subsequent design decisions.

This paper presents a psychophysical experiment using a multi-fan device to communicate information to the user via air intensity and direction. We describe the implementation of a prototype, the AirDisplay. We identify the most effective configuration at which users can discern different air patterns by manipulating the fans’ speed, the distance between the fans, and the different air patterns. Experiment results support the use of air to communicate information.

In this paper, we present the first systematic user study exploring the user experience and perceptions towards different natural materials – water, ice, stone, sand, fire, wind and soup bubbles. By trying out different materials, participants (n = 16) expressed their associations and perceptions, rated different qualities of the materials, and described their impressions through product reaction cards. Our findings reveal for example that light weight and ease of movement are perceived as central qualities when inspiring and fun elements are sought for. This exploratory study shines light on user experiences with natural elements, and provides an experimental grounding for naturalistic tangible user interface design. Material qualities in tangible user interface design create a subtle, but critical part of the user experience.

We introduce PrintPut, a method for 3D printing that embeds interactivity directly into printed objects. PrintPut uses conductive filament to offer an assortment of sensors that an industrial designer can easily incorporate into their 3D designs, including buttons, pressure sensors, sliders, touchpads, and flex sensors. PrintPut combines physical and interactive sketching into the same process: seamlessly integrating sensors onto the surfaces of 3D objects, without the need for external sensor hardware.

ReservoirBench

is an interactive workbench for educational geological science and engineering tasks. It is designed to facilitate education of novice audiences to teach them basic concepts of reservoir modeling and simulation workflow. Traditional training using lectures and software practice can lead to information overload, and retainability is questionable. As an alternative, we propose a physical workbench that is coupled with digital augmentation for the purpose of learning. We take advantage of the crucial role that spatiality and 3D representations play in petroleum reservoir modeling and allow basic domain concepts to be introduced and explored in a tangible and experiential manner. We describe the design of our prototype and reflect on the findings from our preliminary design critique.

Tangible sliders are successfully used as they do not need visual attention. However, users need to balance between opposite concerns: size and precision of the slider. We propose a resizable tangible slider to balance between these concerns. Users can resize the on-screen representation of the slider by resizing the tangible slider. Our aim is to benefit from both tangibility and flexible control, and balance between precision and minimum size. We measured the pointing performance of our prototype. We also assess the potential drawback (additional articulatory task for deformation) by evaluating the impact on precision of the additional articulatory task for deformation: for pursuing a target, we show that our resizable prototype supports better precision than its small counterpart as long as users do not need to resize it more often than around every 9 s.

With eye gaze tracking technology entering the consumer market, there is an increased interest in using it as an input device, similar to the mouse. This holds promise for situations where a typical desk space is not available. While gaze seems natural for pointing, it is inherently inaccurate, which makes the design of fast and accurate methods for clicking targets (“click alternatives”) difficult. We investigate click alternatives that combine gaze with a standard keyboard (“gaze & key click alternatives”) to achieve an experience where the user’s hands can remain on the keyboard all the time. We propose three novel click alternatives (“Letter Assignment”, “Offset Menu” and “Ray Selection”) and present an experiment that compares them with a naive gaze pointing approach (“Gaze & Click”) and the mouse. The experiment uses a randomized, realistic click task in a web browser to collect data about click times and click accuracy, as well as asking users for their preference. Our results indicate that eye gaze tracking is currently too inaccurate for the Gaze & Click approach to work reliably. While Letter Assignment and Offset Menu were usable and a large improvement, they were still significantly slower and less accurate than the mouse.

We characterise foot movements as input for seated users. First, we built unconstrained foot pointing performance models in a seated desktop setting using ISO 9241-9-compliant Fitts’s Law tasks. Second, we evaluated the effect of the foot and direction in one-dimensional tasks, finding no effect of the foot used, but a significant effect of the direction in which targets are distributed. Third, we compared one foot against two feet to control two variables, finding that while one foot is better suited for tasks with a spatial representation that matches its movement, there is little difference between the techniques when it does not. Fourth, we analysed the overhead caused by introducing a feet-controlled variable in a mouse task, finding the feet to be comparable to the scroll wheel. Our results show the feet are an effective method of enhancing our interaction with desktop systems and derive a series of design guidelines.

Numerous techniques have been developed for text entry by gaze, and similarly, a number of evaluations have been carried out to determine the efficiency of the solutions. However, the results of the published experiments are inconclusive, and it is unclear what causes the difference in their findings. Here we look particularly at the effect of the language used in the experiment. A study where participants entered text both in English and in Finnish does not show an effect of language structure: the entry rates were reasonably close to each other. The role of other explaining factors, such as calibration accuracy and experimental procedure, are discussed.

The emergence of various digital channels, the development of different devices and the change in the way we communicate and carry out various types of services have quickly grown and continues to grow. This may offer both new opportunities for inclusion and risks for creating new barriers in the society. In a recent study we have explored the questions: Is the society digitally accessible for persons with mental disabilities? How do persons with mental disabilities cope with their situation? What are the benefits and obstacles they face? Based on the answers to these questions we wanted to explore if there is a digital divide between the citizens in general and the citizens with mental disabilities. And if so; what is the nature of this divide? Methods used in the study were Participatory action research oriented with data collection via research circles. In total over 100 persons participated. The results show that a digital divide is present. Persons with mental disabilities differ from citizens in general in how they have access to digital resources. The result also indicates that services and systems on a societal scale do not deliver the expected efficiency when it comes to supporting citizens with mental disabilities. And finally the results indicate that the special needs this group might have are often not identified in wider surveys on the citizen’s use of Internet, digital services and use of different technical devices. Several of the participants describe this as being left outside and not fully participate in a society where digital presence is considered a prerequisite for a full citizenship.

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of culturally specific mobile learning applications, designed as a tool to encourage social interaction in autistic children. These applications were designed for Pakistani children keep their cultural context in mind. We performed longitudinal evaluation (around eight weeks) of these applications at an autistic school in Pakistan. Our initial results, based on pre and post evaluation questionnaires and video analysis of social interactions, showed that the applications had a positive effect on the development of socio-emotional skills of children and were appreciated not only by children but also by the teachers.

In this work-in-progress we present a computer-based method to design German reinforcement exercises for children with dyslexia. From different schools, we collected more than 1,000 errors written by children with dyslexia. Then, we created a classification of dyslexic errors in German and annotated the errors with different language specific features, such as phonetic and visual features. For the creation of the exercises we took into account the linguistic knowledge extracted from the analyses and designed more than 2,500 word exercises in German that have been integrated in a game available for iOS. The game and the resource of dyslexic errors are available online (

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dyseggxia/id534986729?mt=8

) and they are, to the best of our knowledge, the first contributions of this kind for German.

Two technology trends address the rising costs of healthcare systems in aging societies: Serious Games for Healthcare and Ambient Assisted Living Environments. Surprisingly, these concepts are rarely combined and the users’ perception and use of Serious Games in Ambient Assisted Living environments is insufficiently understood. We present the evaluation of a serious game for stimulating cognitive abilities for elderly with regard to technology acceptance (based on the UTAUT2 model), performance and preference for an interaction device (tablet, table, wall). The results suggest that acceptance of serious games is independent of gender, technical expertise, gaming habits, and only weakly influenced by age. Determinants for acceptance are perceived fun and the feeling that the users can make playing the game a habit. Performance within the game is explained by age and previous gaming experience. All investigated interaction devices were rated as useful and easy to learn, although the wall-sized display had lower approval levels. The article concludes with guidelines for successfully introducing serious games for healthcare to residents in ambient assisted living environments.

Designing 3D User Interfaces (UI) requires adequate evaluation tools to ensure good usability and user experience. While many evaluation tools are already available and widely used, existing approaches generally cannot provide continuous and objective measures of usability qualities during interaction without interrupting the user. In this paper, we propose to use brain (with ElectroEncephaloGraphy) and physiological (ElectroCardioGraphy, Galvanic Skin Response) signals to continuously assess the mental effort made by the user to perform 3D object manipulation tasks. We first show how this mental effort (a.k.a., mental workload) can be estimated from such signals, and then measure it on 8 participants during an actual 3D object manipulation task with an input device known as the CubTile. Our results suggest that monitoring workload enables us to continuously assess the 3DUI and/or interaction technique ease-of-use. Overall, this suggests that this new measure could become a useful addition to the repertoire of available evaluation tools, enabling a finer grain assessment of the ergonomic qualities of a given 3D user interface.

Motor-Imagery based Brain Computer Interfaces (MI-BCIs) allow users to interact with computers by imagining limb movements. MI-BCIs are very promising for a wide range of applications as they offer a new and non-time locked modality of control. However, most MI-BCIs involve visual feedback to inform the user about the system’s decisions, which makes them difficult to use when integrated with visual interactive tasks. This paper presents our design and evaluation of a tactile feedback glove for MI-BCIs, which provides a continuously updated tactile feedback. We first determined the best parameters for this tactile feedback and then tested it in a multitasking environment: at the same time users were performing the MI tasks, they were asked to count distracters. Our results suggest that, as compared to an equivalent visual feedback, the use of tactile feedback leads to a higher recognition accuracy of the MI-BCI tasks and fewer errors in counting distracters.

Active Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) allow people to exert voluntary control over a computer system: brain signals are captured and imagined actions (movements, concepts) are recognized after a training phase (from 10 min to 2 months). BCIs are confined in labs, with only a few dozen people using them outside regularly (e.g. assistance for impairments). We propose a “Co-learning BCI” (CLBCI) that reduces the amount of training and makes BCIs more suitable for recreational applications. We replicate an existing experiment where the BCI controls a drone and compare CLBCI to their Operant Conditioning (OC) protocol over three durations of practice (1 day, 1 week, 1 month). We find that OC works at 80 % after a month practice, but the performance is between 60 and 70 % any earlier. In a week of practice, CLBCI reaches a performance of around 75 %. We conclude that CLBCI is better suited for recreational use. OC should be reserved for users for whom performance is the main concern.

Designing a usable checkout process is of paramount importance for both E-Commerce and M-Commerce success. Aiming to understand human-computer interactions during checkout and improve the usability and user experience of checkout tasks, this research work investigates the relation among users’ cognitive styles, and alternative checkout designs in terms of user preference and task performance. A controlled user study with 38 participants was conducted which entailed a psychometric-based survey for highlighting the users’ cognitive styles, combined with a real usage scenario with two variations of checkout designs that were deployed on standard desktop computers and mobile touch-based devices. Results suggest that human cognitive differences could play an important role in designing E-Commerce and M-Commerce checkout processes, and particularly users’ cognitive styles may affect the way users perceive and perform during such tasks.

We introduce the idea of

bilingual reading

, where a document comes in two languages and the reader can choose at will on which language to focus during the reading. Between the complete ignorance of a language (where translation is the only option) and bilingualism (where translation is useless), there exists a variety of contexts of partial bilingualism where bilingual reading interfaces would prove highly useful. We first study through interviews and reviews how the bilingual reading experience is understood today. We provide an analysis framework and highlight design challenges for the design of bilingual reading appliances. We then describe a taxonomy of the different approaches available to address these challenges, analyze them in the light of our framework and show how they can be derived to sketch future bilingual reading interfaces.

Workload is found to be a critical factor driving human behavior in human-machine interactions in modern complex high-risk domains. This paper presents a dynamic workload adjustment feedback loop with a dynamic cognitive load (CL) adaptation model to control workload adjustment during human-machine interaction. In this model, physiological signals such as Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) are employed to obtain passive human sensing data. By analyzing the obtained sensing data in real-time, the task difficulty levels are adaptively adjusted to better fit the user during working time. The experimental results showed that SVM outperformed other methods in offline CL classifications, while Naïve Bayes outperformed other methods in online CL level classifications. The CL adaptation model 1 (average performance is 87.5 %) outperformed the adaptation model 2 during the dynamic workload adjustment.

This paper describes experiments examining the effect of touching interaction with text in active reading through evaluating the impact of the use of a touch-based tablet device. The first experiment compared the performance of proofreading when using paper and when using a touch-based tablet device. Results showed that participants detected more errors when reading from paper than when reading from the tablet device. During reading, when using paper, participants frequently performed the interaction of text touching, such as pointing to words and sliding their fingers or pens along sentences. This fact suggests that touching interaction with text plays an important role in proofreading tasks. To verify this hypothesis, we conducted a second experiment in which participants proofread documents with constrained interaction with paper. Results showed that they detected more errors when they were allowed to interact with text freely than when they were not allowed to interact with text. Considering these results, we discuss practical implications to effectively support active reading with a touch-based tablet device.