This study examines the effects of two visual guidance techniques, Visual Enhancement and Visual Suppression, on user perception of contextual information in video content. Visual Enhancement introduces explicit visual cues to highlight target content, whereas Visual Suppression attenuates non-target elements, for example, by reducing their brightness. Both approaches aim to isolate specific objects from the background, directing attention to critical information within complex, dynamic scenes. Despite their growing usage, the relative effectiveness of these approaches in guiding attention and their impact on peripheral context awareness remain underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a controlled user study with 27 participants. The results indicate that Visual Enhancement, through the addition of salient cues, more effectively directs user attention to target information than Visual Suppression. Our findings advance understanding of visual attention in dynamic environments and offer implications for designing visual guidance strategies.

Healthcare personnel suffer from an increased risk of stress, burnout, and depression due to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies show that interactive smart textiles help people alleviate their emotions. In this research, we investigate how to utilise interactive textiles to help healthcare workers mitigate their negative feelings. We have designed a smart t-shirt that encourages its wearers to perform body movements to enhance their positive emotions, stimulated by vibrotactile and audio feedback mechanisms. We demonstrate our smart t-shirt’s utility by asking healthcare workers (including physicians and nurses) to use it for five consecutive days. Our prototype design supports using it anywhere, including work, home, and other places. We evaluated our smart t-shirt prototype for emotion regulations at work for healthcare workers through an in-situ user study conducted at three hospitals. Results show that using the smart t-shirt positively impacts the healthcare workers’ immediate emotion regulation when they experienced emotion fluctuation and provided a more positive attitude towards their work. We conclude by analysing the potential factors that influence emotions and outline the design space of e-textiles for emotion regulation in real-life use.

Textile interfaces are of interest to ubiquitous computing as they are easy to carry and manipulate. However, interesting questions remain about what type of natural gestures people make when interacting with textile interfaces and their emotional response to this interaction. We introduce GesFabri, a set of five interactive textile interfaces with distinct textures, created to investigate the intuitive interaction gestures and accompanied the emotional experience. This research sought to (1) design textile interfaces with intuitive gesture affordance, (2) explore the emotional effects of the developed gesture-based interfaces under four feedback modes (touch-only, visual feedback, audio feedback, multisensory feedback). The experimental results verify our hypotheses that (1) textile texture could provide natural gesture affordances; (2) the GesFabri interfaces' feedback mode was the main factor in the differences of emotional valence, arousal, GSR; and (3) both gesture-based interaction on textiles and the feedback mode had an impact on user emotions. These results highlight the gesture affordances of the e-textile interfaces and contribute to a better understanding of the user experience when interacting with gesture-based textile interfaces.

This article describes tests that have been conducted with Tactile Dialogues, a textile pillow that can react to touch with vibrotactile stimuli and haptic sensations. Tactile Dialogues is designed to stimulate movement and interpersonal contact for patients in the late stages of dementia, their family members and their caregivers. The most recent prototype of the pillow has been tested during 15 separate visits of family members or caregivers with patients. The aim of these tests is to find out whether personalization of the vibrotactile stimuli is appreciated over a mirroring vibrotactile behavior. We propose a three-scale measurement to help family members and caregivers examine the responses of the patient: muscular relaxation, physical movement and interpersonal contact. Through the semi-structured interviews we identified that family members and caregivers do appreciate the opportunity to personalize the vibrotactile behavior and that the pillow mainly functions as a way to establish communication with the patient.

In this pictorial we visualize the growth plan for an inspirational test-bed of smart textile product service systems. The goal of the test-bed is to inspire and inform the Dutch creative industries of textile, interaction and service design to combine their strengths and share opportunities. The pictures exemplify the characteristic tools, approaches and prototypes for three phases of growth: Incubation, Nursery and Adoption.

This paper explores new possibilities for social interaction between a human user and a robot with an abstract shape. The social interaction takes place by simulating behaviors such as submissiveness and dominance and analyzing the corresponding human reactions. We used an object that has no resemblance with human features in its shape or expression mode, in order to exclude the effect of these features on the human behavior. An intelligent walk-in closet was made to behave either dominantly or submissively using lighting effects. The behaviors of the closet were rated by participants using the Bem Sex Role Inventory in a pilot study, resulting in the selection of one submissive and one dominant lighting behavior for the closet. Participants' personality was measured using the Social Dominance Orientation questionnaire. These data were then compared to measurements of user satisfaction and feelings of dominance, arousal, and valence after scenario completion. A surprising effect was revealed as participants with a dominant personality reported feeling submissive to a dominant system, while in comparison, persons with a submissive personality felt more dominant in the same condition. Furthermore, it was found that a submissive system was generally more preferred by users. We draw a careful conclusion that people interact differently with systems that show human-like attitudes, than they would in response to similar attitude expressed by other person. These findings need to be investigated further with dominant/submissive nonverbal behaviors that are then simulated on a humanoid robot.

In our global village, distance is not a barrier anymore for traveling. People experience new cultures and face accompanying difficulties in order to live anywhere. Social support can help these sojourners to cope with difficulties, such as culture shock. In this paper, we investigate how computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools can facilitate social support when living physically separated from loved-ones in different cultures. The goal is to understand the design considerations necessary to design new CMC tools. We studied communication practices of Chinese sojourners living in the Netherlands and the use of a technology probe with a novel video communication system. These results led to recommendations which can help designers to design interactive communication tools that facilitate communication across cultures. We conclude the paper with an interactive communication device called Circadian, which was designed based on these recommendations. We experienced the design recommendations to be abstract enough to leave space for creativity while providing a set of clear requirements which we used to base design decisions upon.

Photographic mementos are important signifiers of our personal memories. Rather than simply passive representations of memories to "preserved" memories, these photos of the past are actively displayed and consumed in the context of everyday behaviour and social practices. Within the context of these settings, these mementos are invoked in particular ways in order to mobilise particular social relations in the present. Taking this perspective, we explore how photo mementos come to be used in the everyday social setting of sharing meal providing a resource that can be mobilised for particular social relations in these settings. Rather than a simple concern with nutritional consumption, the shared meal is a social event and important cultural site in the organisation of family and social life with culturally specific rhythms, norms, rights and responsibilities. We present a system - 4 Photos - that situates photo mementos within the social concerns of these settings. The system collates photo mementos from those attending the meal and displays them at the dining table to be interacted with by all. Through a fieldwork deployment of the system we explore the social work performed by invoking these personal memory resources in the context of real world settings of shared eating. We highlight particular features of the system that enable this social work to be achieved.