This paper presents the advancement of the PRIM project that aims at giving the power to non-computer experts to create digital and interactive scenarios. For this purpose, we explored the strengths and limitations of the visual programming languages and the mulsemedia editors chosen for their ease of use. Results led to a criteria list that our final solution should meet, named the ICAMUS criteria for Interface, Combinatorics, Affordance, Modularity, Ubiquity, and Synoptic. This paper proposes a scale based on the ICAMUS criteria that may assess the Interactive and Multisensory Authoring Tools (IMAT scale). Last, this paper discusses how to compute a score based on three metrics (presence/absence of elements, number of clicks to do an action, and time needed to do this action) and the visual representation of this score that has to give a complete profile of the tool. We hypothesize that this scale will be able to highlight the complementarities of visual programming languages and mulsemedia editors as well as the challenges to face.

This demonstration aims at presenting ScenaProd, a tool that allows people to produce multisensory scenagrams (multisensory exercises or interactive media). All participants can create their own scenagrams with that tool or test a more complete one that is already created. A scenagram can be defined as an interaction between a human being and different devices. For example, a robot asks a question while displaying a visual clue on a screen. Then, the participant can respond by pressing a large and colored contactor. In case of a correct answer, the robot would play a short victory song and a light would light up green. If a wrong answer were given, the system would have a different reaction.

Multisensory Interaction (M.I.) is a promising research field acting on both perception and cognition. Among benefits, including the "design for all" approach, it is expected to increase humans’ cognitive performance (such as learning and cognitive stimulation) as well as user's experience. To our knowledge, there is no convincing tool allowing researchers to create easily multisensory scenarios, exercises or experimental interaction situations. This paper introduces the PRIM project which aims at designing a new and original tool for designing multisensory interactive interaction situations.

Abstract User-centered design (UCD) facilitates the creation of technologies that are specifically designed to answer users’ needs. This paper presents the first step of a UCD using a persona, a fictitious character representing the targeted population, which in this case is people having sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The persona is used to better understand the possible interactions of a TBI population with a prototype of a technology that we wish to develop, namely the Cognitive Orthosis for coOKing (COOK). COOK is meant to be an assistive technology that will be designed to promote independence for cooking within a supported-living residence. More specifically, this paper presents the persona’s creation methodology based on the first four phases of the persona’s lifecycle. It also describes how the persona methodology served as a facilitator to initiate an interdisciplinary collaboration between a clinical team and a computer science team. Creation of personas relied on a clinical model (Disability Creation Process) that contextualized the needs of this population and an evaluation tool [Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) Profile] that presented a wide range of cognitive assistance needs found in this same population. This paper provides an in-depth description of some of the most frequent everyday difficulties experienced by individuals with TBI as well as the persona’s abilities, limitations and social participation during the realization of IADL, and an evaluation of the manifestations of these difficulties during IADL performance as represented through scenarios. The interdisciplinary team used the persona to complete a first description of the interactions of a persona with TBI with COOK. This work is an attempt at offering a communication tool, the persona, to facilitate interdisciplinary research among diverse disciplines who wish to learn to develop a common language, models and methodologies at the beginning of the design process.

This paper presents MulseBox, a new multisensory interactive device, which can simulate real-life situations in order to help learning and transfer of learning in daily-life. Indeed, multisensory interaction is known to improve learning performances. MulseBox can easily be enriched with real objects and virtual objects. It is evolving. MulseBox was designed because the literature highlighted the lack of a unique multisensory device to work on common problematics. Indeed, six disciplines at least are investigating multisensory with the shared secondary objectives to increase users’ Quality of Experience and to design for all (that is taking disabilities into account). MulseBox may also be a test-bed for researchers to solve identified problematics. An exploratory evaluation of acceptability showed promising results which make us think that MulseBox is relevant.

This paper presents an experiment which evaluated the added value of a robot in a memory game in three conditions: tablet and robot, robot alone, and tablet alone. Results show that robots may increase game interest. In our experiment, the presence of a robot did not imply additional workload. It seems that people judged themselves more positively when they interacted with the robot. Moreover, people displayed more positive facial expressions with the robot.

Robots will be more and more present in our daily life. Even if we guess that they will help us doing our tasks, their future roles remain unclear. Thus, it is important to explore how robots implicitly influence people, in order to design their future roles. This paper investigates human's behaviors in three game conditions: game with a robot alone, a tablet alone, and both robot and tablet. Results show that the presence of the robot induces no stress. Participants feel more pleasure when they play with the robot alone. Results also highlight that interacting simultaneously with a tablet and a robot could be experienced as a negative situation by people.

The field of human-centered computing has known a major progress these past few years. It is admitted that this field is multidisciplinary and that the human is the core of the system. It shows two matters of concern: multidisciplinary and human. The first one reveals that each discipline plays an important role in the global research and that a collaboration between everyone is needed. The second one explains that a growing number of researches aims at making the human commitment degree increase by giving him/her a decisive role in the human-machine interaction. This paper focuses on these both concerns and presents MICE (Machines Interaction Control in their Environment) which is a system where the human is the one who makes the decisions to manage the interaction with the machines. In an ambient context, the human can decide of objects actions by creating interaction scenarios with a new visual programming language: scenL.

This article presents ArCo which is an architecture for managing a digital environment in a context of ambient intelligence. ArCo can integrate all kinds of objects and is totally configurable. Moreover it proposes a visual programming interface, AmbiProg, which allows controlling each digital object which composes an environment. The objective of this paper is to appraise AmbiProg. An experiment was realized with 16 children around 10 years old. They were asked to realize exercises in a limited period of time. The objective was to determine if programming was easy and how many times they needed to learn scenarios creation. It appeared that they succeed tasks and were able to use AmbiProg. Programming an environment was easy as pie.

In this paper we present StimCards: an interactive game for cognitive training exercises. To increase the impact of this game we experiment four kinds of interfaces: a basic computer, an embodied conversational agent and a robot with two different appearances. The report of these experiments shows that the robot is the best positive feedback for cognitive game.

This article presents the next experiments we will conduct on the interaction model of EmotiRob project. It describes the first experimentation we had done, the experimental protocol and the evaluation grid.

This paper presents our work on the therapeutic robotics project EmotiRob which is the continuity of the MAPH (Active Media For the Handicap) project in emotion synthesis. Our aim is to maintain emotional interaction with children. For this, word, movement, and emotion synthesis are used. After defining a face for our robot, which is a compromise between the richness of expression and simplified mechanics, we propose the internal model of it in order to achieve and maintain emotional interaction.

This paper presents our work on the therapeutic robotics project EmotiRob which is the continuity of the MAPH (Active Media For the Handicap) project in emotion synthesis. Our aim is to maintain emotional interaction with children. For this, word, movement, and emotion synthesis are used. Here, we strive to define a robot face which is a compromise between expressive richness and mechanical simplicity. We propose a method for modeling and dynamizing a face able to express emotions.

This paper presents our work on the therapeutic robotics project EmotiRob which is the continuity of the MAPH (active media for the handicap) project in emotion synthesis. Our aim is to maintain emotional interaction with children. For this, word, movement, and emotion synthesis are used. Here, we strive to define a robot face which is a compromise between expressive richness and mechanical simplicity. We propose a method for modeling and dynamizing a face able to express emotions.