Sustainable Development Goals are currently universal objectives in all domains of engineering. Nevertheless, design for this global mission is exceedingly intricate and nearly surpasses the limits of human capability. Industrial and academic communities have devoted considerable of effort to developing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), as new design tools. Generative AI is the latest advancement among these tools, which can empower human designers with its capability to process massive amount of data from diverse sources and recast it in a comprehensible form. Despite the heated discussion on the relationship between creative innovation and frontier technologies, little attention has been paid to empowering young designers with the new skills of the AI era. Therefore, this study conducted a two-week design workshop to explore the interaction between generative AI tools and novice designers, especially in shaping their AI self-efficacy and design thinking process of novice designers.

While virtual reality (VR) enables emotional engagement in cultural heritage (CH) context, its real-time effects on emotional responses throughout the experience and their potential influence on heritage identity remain unexplored. In this study, we present a case of Azheke Village at Hani Rice Terraces in China, co-designing a CH experience in VR with multi-stakeholders, and evaluate how it evokes emotional responses during the whole experience and enhances heritage identity among young local residents and visitors. Our findings reveal that the VR experience effectively evoked emotional responses and enhanced heritage identity across all groups, with changes of emotional arousal showing the strongest relationship with social-value-based heritage identity enhancement among the local residents. This research contributes to human-computer interaction (HCI) and heritage research field by offering empirical findings, which also provides rich design reflections and implications for future research practices to develop interactive experiences to engage young generations in CH inheritance.

Visitors to Urban Cultural Heritage (UCH) often encounter official narratives but not the imaginations and relationships shaping its intangible aspects. Existing immersive experiences emphasize historical realities, overlooking personal and collective imaginations that shift with rapid development. To address this, we designed an Extended Reality (XR) experience around eight Hong Kong landmarks, enabling transitions between virtual and mixed-reality environments where users explore UCH narratives across past, present, and future. These narratives integrate (1) historical documentation with 360° visualizations and (2) images created in workshops supported by Generative AI tools. A mixed-method study with 24 participants examined their experiences and reflections. Results revealed deep immersion in both real and imagined worlds, as well as personal reinterpretations of UCH. This work demonstrates how XR can blend reality and imagination within one immersive experience and highlights design implications for archiving human imagination as an intangible form of cultural heritage.

Currently, few unpowered exoskeletons are used in the actual rehabilitation of patients. For individuals after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction, they usually exhibit abnormal gait characteristics, and this abnormal gait increases the likelihood of osteoarthritis (OA) in the long term. For these individuals, considering that the knee joint may be unstable due to insufficient muscle strength especially during the weight acceptance phase, this paper proposes a knee-extension-assisted unpowered exoskeleton for knee protection as well as gait rehabilitation training. This lightweight exoskeleton, weighing only 450g, holds promise for enhancing gait stability and lowering the risk of joint osteoarthritis. Custom-designed miniature gas springs contribute to energy storage and provide specified stiffness support to the human knee joint. Gait experiments conducted on six subjects (after ACL reconstruction nearly 1 month) indicated that walking with this exoskeleton significantly reduced peak rectus femoris (RF) muscle activity by 36.4% in weight acceptance phase. The results demonstrated the potential of this exoskeleton to relieve stress on the knee extensor muscles, safeguard patients during recovery, and assist in early gait training.

Pomegranate harvesting remains a challenging task due to the fruit's tough stem, dense canopy, and sensitivity to mechanical damage. Traditional harvesting robots rely on vision-based stem localization, which increases computational complexity and reduces robustness in unstructured orchard environments. This paper presents a dual-shear ring end-effector designed to eliminate the need for precise stem detection, utilizing a self-locking shear mechanism that allows the stem to naturally align between the cutting blades. The system integrates a vision-assisted robotic manipulator for fruit detection and a torque regulation mechanism for optimized cutting force application. Experimental validation demonstrates a success rate of over 90% for stems up to 8 mm in diameter and robust performance even under partial and full occlusion conditions. The results confirm that the proposed system achieves efficient, adaptable, and damage-free harvesting, providing a viable solution for autonomous pomegranate harvesting.

Accurate gait phase estimation and recognition of lower limb movements are crucial for wearable assistive devices in medical rehabilitation. Due to the complexity of movement scenarios, obtaining precise motion modes and gait phases in real-time is particularly challenging. This is especially true for tasks that require high responsiveness, where algorithms need to recognize gait phase and movement mode simultaneously with or even ahead of the motion to inform further decisions by wearable devices. To address this issue, we proposed a novel cascaded multimodal information fusion approach for stable real-time lower limbmotion recognition based on a lightweight lower limb sensor system integrating shank-mounted IMUs and foot pressure sensors. Furthermore, an adaptive extended Kalman filter (AKEF) was employed to enhance the accuracy of movement mode recognition. In experimental settings, the continuous gait phase estimation error in mixed movement scenarios was as low as 2.12%, with errors of 1.43% in the stable gait phase and 2.51% in the transition phase. The movement mode recognition accuracy in mixed movement scenarios improved from 98.42% to 99.21%. This study will be applied to subsequent research in human motion analysis and real-time control of lower limb exoskeletons.

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) laparoscopy simulation is emerging to enhance the attractiveness and realism of surgical procedural training. This study analyses the usability and presence of a Virtual Operating Room (VOR) setup via user evaluation and sets out the key elements for an immersive environment during a laparoscopic procedural training.In the VOR setup, a VR headset displayed a 360-degree computer-generated Operating Room (OR) around a VR laparoscopic simulator during laparoscopy procedures. Thirty-seven surgeons and surgical trainees performed the complete cholecystectomy task in the VOR. Questionnaires (i.e., Localized Postural Discomfort scale, Questionnaire for Intuitive Use, NASA-Task Load Index, and Presence Questionnaire) followed by a semi-structured interview were used to collect the data.The participants could intuitively adapt to the VOR and were satisfied when performing their tasks (M=3.90, IQR=0.70). The participants, particularly surgical trainees, were highly engaged to accomplish the task. Despite the higher mental workload on four subscales (p <; 0.05), the surgical trainees had a lower effort of learning (4 vs 3.33, p <; 0.05) compared to surgeons. The participants experienced very slight discomfort in seven body segments (0.59-1.16). In addition, they expected improvements for team interaction and personalized experience within the setup.The VOR showed potential to become a useful tool in providing immersive training during laparoscopy procedure simulation based on the usability and presence noted in the study. Future developments of user interfaces, VOR environment, team interaction and personalization should result in improvements of the system.

The project “Factory-in-a-day” aims at reducing the installation time of a new hybrid robot-human production line, from weeks or months that current industrial systems now take, down to one day. The ability to rapidly install (and reconfigure) production lines where robots work alongside humans will strongly reduce operating cost and open a range of new opportunities for industry. In this paper, we explore a method of collaborative fabrication planning with the help of Augmented Reality as part of the concept Augmented Fabrication. In order to plan a new production line, two co-located workers at the factory wear a Microsoft Hololens head-mounted display and thus share a common visual context on the planed position of the robots and the production machines. They are assisted by an external remote expert connected via the Internet who is virtually co-located. We developed three different visualizations of the state of the local collaboration and plan to compare them in a user study.