We report results from a systematic literature review on the topic of reward systems for older people engaging with serious games, involving an analysis of 121 scientific articles identified from multiple bibliographic databases. Our analysis, employing various taxonomies of game type, genre and challenges, reward types and features, and interaction devices and feedback modalities, reveals preponderant attention on visual feedback, sports games, and time pressure/reaction challenges, but limited scientific research on unlocking mechanisms, achievement, item-granting rewards, haptic feedback modalities, or multi-player scenarios in serious games designed for older adults. These findings reveal reward mechanisms as a distinct type of interactive media featuring some, but ignoring many design possibilities. Based on our findings, we propose several recommendations for future research on designing reward mechanisms in serious games that adapt to users’ varying abilities, favor a diversity of input and output modalities, and expand to multi-player and multi-genre setups.

We introduce GearWheels, a software tool for studies about gesture input with wearables, including smartwatches, rings, and glasses. GearWheels features an event-based asynchronous software architecture design implemented exclusively with web standards, communications protocols, and data formats, which makes it flexible to support many wearables via HTTP and WebSocket communications. GearWheels differentiates from prior software tools for gesture acquisition, elicitation, recognition, and analysis with its web-based, wearable-oriented, experiment-centered architecture design. We demonstrate GearWheels with a device affixed to the index finger, wrist, and the temple of a pair of glasses to illustrate touch stroke-gesture and motion-gesture input acquisition. We also perform a technical evaluation of GearWheels in the form of a simulation experiment, and report the request-response time performance of the software components of GearWheels with off-the-shelf wearables. We release GearWheels as open source software to assist researchers and practitioners in implementing studies about gesture input with wearables.

We employ the ISO/IEC 25010 standard for systems and software quality requirements and evaluation to present a proposal of a software architecture design for gesture input with two types of wearables: smartwatches, which have already entered mainstream, and smartglasses, forecast to become a growing market due to increased adoption of augmented reality applications. We present the technical details of our software architecture and describe practical implementation aspects that employ web standards.

Abstract Software architecture and applications for the connected car can process and share a variety of digital content, among which high-definition video and augmented reality (AR) content, toward enhanced driving assistance, navigation and infotainment systems and services. However, several technical challenges need to be overcome to make such systems and services viable and efficient, including dealing effectively with a variety of types of systems, devices and platforms, either installed inside the vehicle or represented by the personal mobile and wearable devices of the drivers and passengers. In this paper, we outline these technical challenges and propose a software solution in the form of an event-based middleware layer by modeling the smart, connected car as a specific type of a smart environment. We employ an adapted version of Euphoria, a recently introduced software architecture for general-purpose smart environments, to implement asynchronous communications among heterogeneous input/output devices inside the vehicle. We also adapt Euphoria to fit into the four-layer infrastructure model of the connected car. We conduct a technical evaluation of the request-response time performance achieved with the Euphoria middleware for streaming digital content from 1 Mbps (360p@30fps) to 32 Mbps (4K@30fps) on various devices, either integrated in the vehicle, not integrated but used inside the vehicle and devices outside the vehicle (the control condition). Our results show effective live streaming achieved for 2K content at 30fps with the 600 Mbps network (i.e., the connected car) and for 4K content at 30fps with the 1.7 Gbps network envisioned for hyper-connected vehicles. These results open up opportunities for high-definition video and AR applications in the automotive industry.

We present SAPIENS, a software architecture designed to support engineering of interactive systems featuring peripheral interaction in the context of smart environments. SAPIENS introduces dedicated components for user and device tracking, attention detection, priority management for devices, tasks, and notifications, context-awareness inference, user interruptibility prediction, and device interchangeability that can be instantiated at will according to the needs of the application. To implement these components effectively, SAPIENS employs event-based processing by reusing the core engine of a recently introduced software architecture, Euphoria (Schipor et al., 2019), that was specifically designed for engineering interactions in smart environments with heterogeneous I/O devices, and relies entirely on web standards, protocols, and open data-interchange formats, such as JavaScript, WebSockets, HTTP, and JSON. This inheritance makes SAPIENS flexible and adaptable to support implementation of diverse application scenarios for peripheral interaction and for a wide variety of smart environments, devices, platforms, data formats, and contexts of use. We present our design criteria for SAPIENS regarding (1) event handling techniques, (2) quality, (3) contextual, and (4) attention-related properties, and describe its components and dataflows that make SAPIENS a specialized software architecture for peripheral interaction scenarios. We also demonstrate SAPIENS with a practical application, inspired and adapted from Bakker's (2013) classical example for peripheral interaction, for which we provide an online simulation tool that researchers and practitioners can readily use to consult actual JavaScript code implementing the inner logic of selected components of our architecture as well as to observe live JSON messages exchanged by the various components of SAPIENS.