Care quality improvement systems (CQIS) allow hospitals to monitor and improve their care by analysing performance data. However, many CQIS fail at helping clinicians improve as they see decreased use and stagnating care quality. In this paper, we investigate the use of one CQIS through ten qualitative activities carried out across five years. We synthesize and present our results regarding specific problems various stakeholders face, exact data visualization tasks that clinicians struggle with, and concrete solutions described by clinicians. Our research proposes steps that designers can take towards integrating data analysis interfaces and automating tasks in CQIS to assist with concrete data visualization problems identified by the 74 clinicians who participated in our study.

Underneath their compelling audiovisual surface, games require players to carry out mundane interaction work, such as pointing, typing, or steering. However, many of these underlying building blocks are not defined rigorously, hampering synthesis and analysis. We elaborate on the origin of tasks within human-computer interaction (HCI) and define tasks' relationship to game terminology (game mechanics, goals, and actions). Our proposed framework draws on systemic-structural theory of activity to aid systematic analysis and exploration of game design by mapping gameplay to abstract core tasks. The framework contains four task tools, applicable when 1) uncovering design properties, 2) designing experimental manipulation, 3) creating behavioral measurements, and 4) describing gameplay in literature reviews of game genres and design techniques. We evaluated our framework as a lens to design purposeful games in three case studies within a scientific education. We invite researchers and practitioners to employ the framework as a microscope, to describe and design games rigorously.

This paper investigates the efficacy of a passive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) in enabling a robot tutor to adaptively respond to a user's engagement level in real-time. The BCI system extracted EEG Engagement Index from the user's electroencephalography (EEG) signals as an indicator of engagement during Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). A within-subjects study was conducted in which the robot performed attention-recapturing behavior during a learning task under two conditions; either in an adaptive manner whenever a lapse in the user's engagement level was detected by the BCI system (Adaptive condition) or at random intervals regardless of the user's mental states (Random condition). In both conditions, users completed an information retention test following the interaction. The study found no significant difference in the postinteraction test results or mean EEG Engagement Index values between the Adaptive and Random conditions. However, analysis of 10-sec time windows following robot interventions showed that adaptively timed gestures were significantly more effective in restoring user engagement to optimal level compared to randomly timed gestures. This finding provides evidence for the potential of passive BCIs in improving user experience in pedagogical HRI settings.

Upper limb exoskeletons (ULEs) are robotic devices that can mobilize a severely disabled individual's arm and help the user perform some activities of daily living independently. Despite advancement in the mechanical design of ULEs, a versatile control interface that enables full and continuous control of a ULE with multiple degrees of freedom for a user with disability in both arms and legs (tetraplegia) still requires further research and development. In this study, ten individuals with tetraplegia used a tongue-based interface to fully control a five degrees of freedom ULE for a drinking and a snacking task. This required moving the ULE hand from a wheelchair armrest position to grasp an object (bottle or strawberry) placed on a table in front of the participant, moving the object towards them until it touched a face shield, and placing the object on the table. All participants successfully controlled the exoskeleton and completed the tasks. The drinking task lasted 149.6 s on the first day and 122.9 s (median) on the second day of using the exoskeleton. The participants performed the snacking task only on the first day of ULE use and achieved a median task time of 167.0 s. The study showed that the tongue interface could provide effective, efficient, and safe control of the exoskeleton.

To ensure safe passage blind travellers utilize mobility aids such as the white cane to preview the space their body will move through. Augmented white canes (AWC) have increased this preview range to reduce collisions, but consequently incurred lower walking speeds. The literature has blamed the slowdown on the AWC provided alerts that are additional to white cane feedback, unnecessary, too complex, and the anticipatory slowdown of their users. Two within-subject studies with six visually impaired and ten blindfolded people compared the white cane to two different AWC preview types (See Figure 1) combined with two ranges to investigate the causes of the slowdowns. The cognitive cost from processing AWC additional and unnecessary alerts and their complexity slowed users down and should be kept to a minimum as they neither helped reduce collisions nor physically detecting obstacles with the cane.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide users with a means to control external devices or applications using only voluntarily produced brain activity. Controlling a BCI through motor imagery is a skill that must be acquired, however, little evidence is available on how the user's agency and frustration are affected by different types of feedback during an interaction with a BCI. This was investigated during a virtual reality interaction where 14 naive participants controlled an avatar with a BCI while receiving either continuous or discrete feedback on their performance. The agency, frustration, ownership and BCI performance were assessed after each of the two conditions (continuous and discrete feedback). There was no statistical difference between the conditions although the participants generally rated agency higher for the continuous feedback which was also uncorrelated to the BCI performance. This suggests that continuous feedback can be useful for increasing agency for users with poor BCI performance by providing them with some knowledge of performance.

In light of COVID-19, we created a novel simulation game, to explain exponential growth in disease spread. The simulation game is an open educational ressource (OER) for children to reflect on how test and isolation can be applied to stop contagious diseases. The game was reviewed in three classrooms (P3-P5) by a primary school teacher to pilot the applicability of the game in an educational setting. Based on qualitative feedback from pupils, we developed accompanying exercise sheets and website in close collaboration with the teacher.

Researchers have come up with many visual cues that can guide Virtual (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) users to out of view objects. The paper provides a classification of cues and tasks and visual model to describe and analyse cues to support their design.

People with complete tetraplegia who are paralyzed from the neck down require alternative computer and robot interfaces based on the remaining functionalities. The inductive tongue-computer interface (ITCI) consists of two small touchpads that are manipulated by the tongue and can provide individuals with tetraplegia the possibility to control computers, robots, and other electronic devices. The tongue gesture can be used to expand the vocabulary of the ITCI and provide more control commands. In this study for the first time, a tongue gesture recognition method was introduced that can identify a set of six gestures with 94.3% accuracy and a set of 23 gestures with 72.3% accuracy. Furthermore, a robot interface was developed using the tongue gestures and it was compared with a previously tested method based on soft buttons on the ITCI. Four able-bodied participants performed a pouring water task with the two control methods when visual feedback from the interface was presented on a screen and then without the visual feedback. Task completion time for the gesture-based control and the button-based control did not differ. However, gesture-based control provides more control commands that can be used for interfacing other systems.

In the past, human proxemics research has poorly predicted human robot interaction distances. This paper presents three studies on drone gestures to acknowledge human presence and clarify suitable acknowledging distances. We evaluated four drone gestures based on non-verbal human greetings. The gestures included orienting towards the counterpart and salutation gestures. We tested these individually and in combination to create a feeling of acknowledgement in people. Our users preferred being acknowledged from two meters away but gestures were also effective from four meters. Rotating the drone towards the user elicited a higher degree of acknowledgement than without. We conclude with a set design guidelines for drone gestures.

The following topics are dealt with: quality of experience; virtual reality; video streaming; computer games; video signal processing; Internet; rendering (computer graphics); learning (artificial intelligence); visual databases; and video coding.

Dialogic reading, in which the reader prompts the child to speak while listening to the story being read, represents a promising way to boost children's lingual development but it is unclear how content interactivity and agency affect the technique. We used video interaction analysis to investigate the effect of interactive elements on speech production of 12 children between the ages of 16 and 33 months when engaged in individual dialogic reading sessions with a tabletbased ebook. Interaction with interactive elements did not reduce the children's responses to dialogic reading prompts. Spontaneous utterances were longer than prompted ones and the children's engagement with interactive elements or sounds coming from the application most often triggered these spontaneous utterances.

Nowadays television means more than the passive consumption of broadcast content. Television sets are equipped with modern computer technologies and provide manifold opportunities for accessing con...

The migration of media consumption to personal computers retains distributed social viewing, but only via nonsocial, strictly personal interfaces. This article presents an architecture, and implementation for media sharing that allows for enhanced social interactions among users. Using a mixed-device model, our work allows targeted, personalized enrichment of content. All recipients see common content, while differentiated content is delivered to individuals via their personal secondary screens. We describe the goals, architecture, and implementation of our system in this article. In order to validate our results, we also present results from two user studies involving disjoint sets of test participants.

Mobile TV viewers can change the viewing distance and (on some devices) scale the picture to their preferred viewing ratio, trading off size for angular resolution. We investigated optimal trade-offs between size and resolution through a series of studies. Participants selected their preferred size and rated the acceptability of the visual experience on a 200ppi device at a 4:3 aspect ratio. They preferred viewing ratios similar to living room TV setups regardless of the much lower resolution: at a minimum 14 pixels per degree. While traveling on trains people required videos with a height larger than 35mm.

Media consumption is an inherently social activity, serving to communicate ideas and emotions across both small- and large-scale communities. The migration of the media experience to personal computers retains social viewing, but typically only via a non-social, strictly personal interface. This paper presents an architecture and implementation for media content selection, content (re)organization, and content sharing within a user community that is heterogeneous in terms of both participants and devices. In addition, our application allows the user to enrich the content as a differentiated personalization activity targeted to his/her peer-group. We describe the goals, architecture and implementation of our system in this paper. In order to validate our results, we also present results from two user studies involving disjoint sets of test participants.

Mobile TV can deliver up-to-date content to users on the move. But it is currently unclear how to best adapt higher resolution TV content. In this paper, we describe a laboratory study with 35 participants who watched short clips of different content and shot types on a 200ppi PDA display at a resolution of either 120x90 or 168x128. Participants selected their preferred size and rated the acceptability of the visual experience. The preferred viewing ratio depended on the resolution and had to be at least 9.8H. The minimal angular resolution people required and which limited the up-scaling factor was 14 pixels per degree. Extreme long shots were best when depicted actors were at least 0.7° high. A second study researched the ecological validity of previous lab results by comparing them to results from the field. Image size yielded more value for users in the field than was apparent from lab results. In conclusion, current prediction models based on preferred viewing distances for TV and large displays do not predict viewing preferences on mobile devices. Our results will help to further the understanding of multimedia perception and service designers to deliver both economically viable and enjoyable experiences.

The growing market of Mobile TV requires automated adaptation of standard TV footage to small size displays. Especially extreme long shots (XLS) depicting distant objects can spoil the user experience, e.g. in soccer content. Automated zooming schemes can improve the visual experience if the resulting footage meets user expectations in terms of the visual detail and quality but does not omit valuable context information. Current zooming schemes are ignorant of beneficial zoom ranges for a given target size when applied to standard definition TV footage. In two experiments 84 participants were able to switch between original and zoom enhanced soccer footage at three sizes - from 320x240 (QVGA) down to 176x144 (QCIF). Eye tracking and subjective ratings showed that zoom factors between 1.14 and 1.33 were preferred for all sizes. Interviews revealed that a zoom factor of 1.6 was too high for QVGA content due to low perceived video quality, but beneficial for QCIF size. The optimal zoom depended on the target display size. We include a function to compute the optimal zoom for XLS depending on the target device size. It can be applied in automatic content adaptation schemes and should stimulate further research on the requirements of different shot types in video coding.

Mobile TV services are available in an increasing number of countries. For cost reasons, most of these services offer material directly recoded for mobile consumption (i.e. without additional editing). This paper reports the findings of a study on the influence of text legibility and quality on the perceived video quality of mobile TV content. The study, with 64 participants, examined responses to news footage presented at four image resolutions and seven video encoding bitrates. The results showed that a simulated separate delivery of a news ticker and other textual information significantly increased the perceived video quality of the entire screen for native speakers. In addition, some automatable changes to the layout of news content resulted in substantial increases in perceived video quality. The results can be used to quantify the perceived quality gains when considering text delivery separately from the video stream and in the development of more accurate multimedia quality models.

In this paper we examine the interaction and delivery requirements for Mobile TV. By comparing the features of traditional TV with current Mobile TV services we outline the design requirements for a future Mobile TV interface. The proposed design is implemented on an iPAQ and evaluated with end-users in a field trial. Preliminary results of the user study suggest that use of the interface is intuitive and successful in giving a TV-like experience. As a secondary study we investigate the bandwidth requirements for different types of TV content on a 3G phone and a PDA. The results reveal marked differences in bandwidth requirements for different content types. The findings are discussed in the context of future Mobile TV services.

Mobile TV services are now being offered in several countries, but for cost reasons, most of these services offer material directly recoded for mobile consumption (i.e. without additional editing). The experiment reported in this paper, aims to assess the image resolution and bitrate requirements for displaying this type of material on mobile devices. The study, with 128 participants, examined responses to four different image resolutions, seven video encoding bitrates, two audio bitrates and four content types. The results show that acceptability is significantly lower for images smaller than 168x126, regardless of content type. The effect is more pronounced when bandwidth is abundant, and is due to important detail being lost in the smaller screens. In contrast to previous studies, participants are more likely to rate image quality as unacceptable when the audio quality is high.