During the pre-design phase of supportive intelligent systems, interviews with future users, such as people with dementia, aim to explore the problems for which technology may present a solution. However, interviewing someone with dementia in this unstructured design phase is reported to be challenging resulting in systems that are not truly addressing the needs of the people with dementia. Existing guidelines on creating engaging interviews are often based on post-hoc reflections of researchers and participants. In this study we performed line-to-line sequential in-depth analyses on transcripts of 10 interviews conducted to co-design an interactive intelligent gaming system. Both interviewers and interviewees were subsequently asked to reflect on their experiences. Results show that information exchange with people with dementia can be supported by carefully constructed questions, well-designed probes, and an appropriate length of the interview. To create a pleasant atmosphere during the interviews, researchers should design the interview as a fulfilling experience, be prepared to respond respectfully to negative responses and be able to adapt to different signs of consent. Improving the engagement with people with dementia during interviews can enhance the design and development of intelligent systems that cater to their unique challenges and requirements.

What is it like to hear another person’s heartbeat during communication? How would direct access to a person’s skin conductance influence our sense of interpersonal intimacy or trust? Can biosignal...

As robots may take a greater part in our moral decision-making processes, whether people hold them accountable for moral harm becomes critical to explore. Blame and punishment signify moral accountability, often involving emotions. We quantitatively looked into people’s willingness to blame or punish an emotional vs. non-emotional robot that admits to its wrongdoing. Studies 1 and 2 (online video interaction) showed that people may punish a robot due to its lack of perceived emotional capacity than its perceived agency. Study 3 (in the lab) demonstrated that people were neither willing to blame nor punish the robot. Punishing non-emotional robots seems more likely than blaming them, yet punishment towards robots is more likely to arise online than offline. We reflect on if and why victimized humans (and those who care for them) may seek out retributive justice against robot scapegoats when there are no humans to hold accountable for moral harm.

Our moral conscience as the “inner light” that guides us shines brighter during moments of ethical conflicts, when we notice a tension between our many oughts and/or wants. We present the first analyses on speech related stress and affect in accounts of moral conflicts. For our exploratory study, we started with interviews on moral and immoral events at work with entrepreneurs. Qualitative analysis revealed that interviewees do share personal moral conflicts without researchers probing for them. Quantitative analysis showed quiet and even toned voice features when discussing moral conflicts, and speech was laced with emotively positive and negative words, though more negative words were used. Moreover, we find promising results on our automatic classification experiment using speech features. How and what moral conflicts people deliberate on in real-life may be pertinent to future research in affective computing, as well as applications for decision-making support, ethical competences coaching, therapy, and healthy moral selfhood.

The number of people with dementia is increasing rapidly. As a result, care has to be extended towards the home context. This increases the burden on both informal caregivers and persons affected by dementia. To support these people more effectively, technology could play an important role. However, it proves to be challenging to involve them in user-centred research with this purpose. Therefore, there is a need for more research approaches that gather first-hand experiences with technology from people with dementia directly. This research presents a personal evaluation game method, used in the home context to study assistive technology as experienced by its users. In parallel, a questionnaire was applied to explore the difference in data and experiences between both methods. In the study, 12 households participated, each with a person diagnosed with dementia and a partner still living with them as their informal caregiver. During a period of 3 weeks, participants experienced a dynamic lighting armature designed to improve the sleep–wake cycle and evaluated it through one of these methods. The results show that the newly developed method manages to capture the first-person perspective, and is a more appropriate research tool for people with dementia. The information gathered with the tool allowed the researchers to capture the daily lives of the participants in detail, mainly due to the diverse types of input. The personal evaluation game shows a first step towards an ecologically valid tool that includes people with dementia directly. As such the method proved to be qualitative and explorative, and able to provide insights into both the technology and the daily lives of people living with dementia.

Social connectedness, i.e. the experience of belonging and relatedness between people, is a central concept in understanding and evaluating communication media, in particular awareness systems. A generic measure based on this construct an support the design of such systems. The current paper describes the construction of two questionnaires for the measurement of this concept. These questionnaires were subsequently applied in survey studies in order to establish the structure of the concept and to identify the items that are suited for the measurement of its dimensions. One questionnaire was subjected to an initial validation. We conclude with some preliminary suggestions regarding (design) approaches to foster social connectedness.

Recent ethnomethodological work in context and location awareness has indicated that location cues hold many socially meaningful cues for interaction. Location-aware technologies are therefore expected to bring about a shift in social life. Yet little is known about underlying psychological effects and the role of specific design decisions. The present research aims to experimentally test some of these effects. In a laboratory experiment participants' location in a virtual game world was shared. The effects of location Cueing frequency and Cueing mode (explicit or inferred closeness) on affinity, social presence, awareness, and game experience were explored. Higher cue frequencies resulted in higher perceived challenge and flow experienced in the game. The data also showed trends of heightened awareness and more behavioural engagement. A trend towards more psychological involvement was found when cues explicitly communicated that players shared a location in the game.