International audience

This article describes a tangible interface for an e-coach, co-designed in four countries to meet older adults’ needs and expectations. The aim of this device is to coach the user by giving recommendations, personalized tasks and to build empathy through vocal, visual, and physical interaction. Through our co-design process, we collected insights that helped identifying requirements for the physical design, the interaction design and the privacy and data control. In the first phase, we collected users’ needs and expectations through several workshops. Requirements were then transformed into three design concepts that were rated and commented by our target users. The final design was implemented and tested in three countries. We discussed the results and the open challenges for the design of physical e-coaches for older adults. To encourage further developments in this field, we released the research outputs of this design process in an open-source repository.

Practical simulation is increasingly used to develop reasoning skills during learning. The analysis of the scene and the correct execution of actions require an awareness of the situation and the activities performed by the student. Eye-tracking feedback (i.e., a video recording of the practical simulation with an overlay of the gaze point) can allow students and teachers to enhance the skills of analysis and execution of the practical activities performed. In this article, we present the implementation of an innovative pedagogical process for nursing students in Switzerland. It involves the use of eye-tracking glasses to improve learning through the enhancement of metacognition after a simulation. The results of a first test session done with 15 undergraduate students are reported.

In conditionally automated driving, drivers do not have to constantly monitor their vehicle but they must be able to take over control when necessary. In this paper, we assess the impact of instructions about limitations of automation and the presentation of context-related information through a mobile application on the situation awareness and takeover performance of drivers. We conducted an experiment with 80 participants in a fixed-base driving simulator. Participants drove for an hour in conditional automation while performing secondary tasks on a tablet. Besides, they had to react to five different takeover requests. In addition to the assessment of behavioral data (e.g. quality of takeover), participants rated their situation awareness after each takeover situation. Instructions and context-related information on limitations combined showed encouraging results to raise awareness and improve takeover performance.

T e-Coaches are promising intelligent systems that aims at supporting human everyday life, dispatching advices through different interfaces, such as apps, conversational interfaces and augmented reality interfaces. This workshop aims at exploring how e-coaches might benefit from spatially and time-multiplexed interfaces and from different communication modalities (e.g., text, visual, audio, etc.) according to the context of the interaction.

In the context of highly automated driving, the driver has to be aware of driving risks and to take over control of the car in hazardous situations. The goal of this paper is to categorize and analyze the factors that lead to such critical scenarios. To this purpose, we analyzed limitations of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) extracted from owner manuals of 12 partially automated cars available on the market. A taxonomy with 6 macro-categories and 26 micro-categories is proposed to classify and better understand the limitations of these vehicles. We also investigated if these limitations are conveyed to the driver through Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) in the car. Some suggestions are made to better communicate these limitations to the driver in order to raise his/her situation awareness.

This paper presents the decision support system that has been defined and developed under the umbrella of the NESTORE project. The main goal of the proposed system is to help users in selecting coaching plans by proposing personalised recommendations based on their behaviours and preferences. Recognising such behaviours and their evolution over time is therefore a crucial element for tailoring the interaction of the system with the user. A three-layer system composed of pathways, coaching activity plans, and coaching events, constitutes the so-called coaching timeline on which the analysis is grounded. Various techniques are used to model and personalise the recommendations and feedback. Firstly, the indicators are extracted from disparate data sources, then these are modelled through a profiling system and, finally, recommendations on the pathways and coaching plans are performed through a scoring and a tagging system.

Current interactions for the Internet of Things are often constrained behind a screen. With the Internet of Tangible Things (IoTT) we aim at promoting the design of richer interactions, embodied in physical IoT objects. To this purpose, we propose a card set for the design of tangible interaction with IoT objects, which contains 8 cards for tangible interaction properties and 8 for IoT properties, in order to explore how tangible properties can be exploited for enhancing the interaction with IoT objects. We tested the card set in a dedicated workshop, observing that participants were able to explore most of the tangible and IoT properties. To complement the IoT card set, a hardware prototyping toolkit with examples for each of the 8 tangible properties is currently under development.

There is an increasing interest in the HCI research community to design richer user interactions with the Internet of Things (IoT). This studio will allow exploring the design of tangible interaction with the IoT, what we call Internet of Tangibles. In particular, we aim at investigating the full interaction-attention continuum, with the purpose of designing IoT tangible interfaces that can switch between peripheral interactions that do not disrupt everyday routines, and focused interactions that support user's reflections. This investigation will be conducted through hands-on activities where participants will prototype tangible IoT objects, starting by a paper prototyping phase, supported by design cards, and followed by an Arduino prototype phase. The purpose of the studio is also establishing a community of researchers and practitioners, from both academy and industry, interested in the field of tangible interaction with the Internet of Things.

This paper presents EmotiPlant, a system that aims to facilitate the nurturing of indoor plants for older adults. The proposed concept exploits the idea of a plant that is able to express emotions and display its status in relation to the environmental conditions. Thanks to the humanized behavior and the possibility to interact through the touch, the augmented plant can be seen as a companion for older adults. In this article, we present a first prototype of the system and we discuss the challenges to obtain a final product that older adults could use easily at home.

This workshop aims at discussing the rich possibilities that the body offers to experience the external world and the prospects that arise for interaction designers when these often-neglected abilities are taken into account. In particular, the workshop will focus on the rediscovery of the five senses, either alone or in a multimodal combination, and of the perceptual-motor abilities of our body. The one-day workshop is divided in two steps: first, participants will have the possibility to briefly present and discuss with the other attendees their research. Workshop candidates are requested to send a position paper, including a short biography and detailing their research interests and background. Second, participants will have the possibilities to explore and rediscover their sensorimotor abilities through several exercises and games abilities using a critical design approach. Interdisciplinary groups will be challenged to design and develop new interaction experience concepts using our natural 'tools' as prototyping tools.

This paper presents the concept of a lamp that allows displaying and collecting user's emotional states. In particular, it displays the emotional information changing colors and facial expressions; in fact, the lamp is characterized by anthropomorphic form and behavior in order to make the interaction more natural and spontaneous. The user can interact with the lamp through tangible gestures typically used in social interactions by humans. Two different scenarios involving the use of the lamp as a companion and for computer-mediated communication are presented.

More and more objects of our everyday environment are becoming smart and connected, offering us new interaction possibilities. Tangible interaction and gestural interaction are promising communication means with these objects in this post-WIMP interaction era. Although based on different principles, they both exploit our body awareness and our skills to provide a richer and more intuitive interaction. Occasionally, when user gestures involve physical artifacts, tangible interaction and gestural interaction can blend into a new paradigm, i.e., tangible gesture interaction [5]. This workshop fosters the comparison among these different interaction paradigms and offers a unique opportunity to discuss their analogies and differences, as well as the definitions, boundaries, strengths, application domains and perspectives of tangible gesture interaction. Participants from different backgrounds are invited.

"Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel" is a crucial principle to be taken into account designing interactions for current in-vehicle interfaces. Gesture interaction is a promising modality that can be implemented following this principle in order to reduce driver distraction and increase safety. We present the results of a user elicitation for gestures performed on the surface of the steering wheel. We asked to 40 participants to elicit 6 gestures, for a total of 240 gestures. Based on the results of this experience, we derived a taxonomy of gestures performed on the steering wheel. The analysis of the results offers useful suggestions for the design of in-vehicle gestural interfaces based on this approach.

Social awareness streams limit the expressivity of emotions in computer mediated communication. In this demo, we present a system that allows sharing emotional states in a social group with multimodal ambient feedback in order to provide a more immersive and natural interaction experience.

In this paper, we present a novel opportunistic paradigm for in-vehicle gesture recognition. This paradigm allows using two or more subsystems in a synergistic manner: they can work in parallel but the lack of some of them does not compromise the functioning of the whole system. In order to segment and recognize micro-gestures performed by the user on the steering wheel, we combine a wearable approach based on the electromyography of the user's forearm muscles, with an environmental approach based on pressure sensors integrated directly on the steering wheel. We present and analyze several fusion methods and gesture segmentation strategies. A prototype has been developed and evaluated with data from nine subjects. The results prove that the proposed opportunistic system performs equal or better than each stand-alone subsystem while increasing the interaction possibilities.