Anticipating adverse events among chronic respiratory disease patients may benefit from remote respiratory monitoring. However, capturing granular respiratory features continuously previously required body-worn sensors devices not suitable for long-term wear. Long monitoring periods are required given to the chronic nature of chronic respiratory diseases. This study evaluates adherence to the health tag physiological sensing form factor. This is a class of devices adhered to the inside of a patient's undergarment as an affordance for adherence, but which also provides on-body contact to produce robust respiratory data. 94 individuals with moderate to severe COPD were enrolled in a 9-month remote monitoring study. The mean enrollment period was 5.3 months (SD=3.5 months). The device yielded an overall daily adherence rate of 87% (SD=20%). The presence of two groups of participants emerged, novelty and sustained, providing additional support for a 90-day novelty period for wearable devices, found in prior research. The group that sustained enrollment past the novelty period was characterized by an increased proportion of device wear time. The study indicates that long-term, remote respiratory monitoring of advanced COPD patients is feasible and can produce respiratory features beyond rate alone. Such datasets could be used to train models that potentially identify respiratory deterioration preceding adverse events.

We explore the use of social learning - improving knowledge skills by observing peer behavior - in the domain of Web search skill acquisition, focusing specifically on co-located classroom scenarios. Through a series of interviews, pilot studies, and classroom deployments, we conclude that a peripheral display of Web search activity within a classroom facilitates both social learning and teacher-led discourse. We present the ClassSearch system for shared awareness of Web search activity, which embodies principles gleaned from our iterative design process, and show results from a ClassSearch deployment in twelve middle-school classroom sessions. Finally, we highlight design suggestions and opportunities for future work while taxonomizing the space of co-located search pedagogies.

Web search performance can be improved by either improving the search engine itself or by educating the user to search more efficiently. There is a large amount of literature describing techniques for measuring the former; whereas, improvements resulting from the latter are more difficult to quantify. In this paper we demonstrate an experimental methodology that proves to successfully quantify improvements from user education. The user education in our study is realized in the form of tactical search feature tips that expand user awareness of task-relevant tools and features of the search application. Initially, these tips are presented in an idealized situation: each tip is shown at the same time as the study participants are given a task that is constructed to benefit from the specific tip. However, we also present a follow-up study roughly one week later in which the search tips are no longer presented but the study participants who previously were shown search tips still demonstrate improved search efficiency compared to the control group. This research has implications for search user interface designers and the study of information retrieval systems.

We present the design and evaluation of a technique for influencing user respiration by integrating respiration-pacing methods into the desktop operating system in a peripheral manner. Peripheral paced respiration differs from prior techniques in that it does not require the user's full attention. We conducted a within-subjects study to evaluate the efficacy of peripheral paced respiration, as compared to no feedback, in an ecologically valid environment. Participant respiration decreased significantly in the pacing condition. Upon further analysis, we attribute this difference to a significant decrease in breath rate while the intermittent pacing feedback is active, rather than a persistent change in respiratory pattern. The results have implications for researchers in physiological computing, biofeedback designers, and human-computer interaction researchers concerned with user stress and affect.

A recent trend in interface design for classrooms in developing regions has many students interacting on the same display using mice. Text entry has emerged as an important problem preventing such mouse-based singledisplay groupware systems from offering compelling interactive activities. We explore the design space of mouse-based text entry and develop 13 techniques with novel characteristics suited to the multiple mouse scenario. We evaluated these in a 3-phase study over 14 days with 40 students in 2 developing region schools. The results show that one technique effectively balanced all of our design dimensions, another was most preferred by students, and both could benefit from augmentation to support collaborative interaction. Our results also provide insights into the factors that create an optimal text entry technique for single-display groupware systems.

While there are many ways to develop search expertise, I maintain that most members of the general public do so in an inefficient manner. One reason is that, with current tools, is difficult to observe experts as a means of acquiring search expertise in a scalable fashion. This calls for a redesign of computer-mediated communication tools to make individual search strategies visible to other users. I present a research agenda to investigate this claim, which draws upon theories of social learning. I use design-based research to build novel systems that enable imitation-based learning of search expertise.

Mischief is a system for classroom interaction that allows multiple children to use individual mice and cursors to interact with a single large display [20]. While the system can support large groups of children, it is unclear how children's performance is affected as group size increases. We explore this question via a study involving two tasks, with children working in group sizes ranging from 1 to 32. The first required reciprocal selection of two on-screen targets, resembling a swarm pointing scenario that might be used in educational applications. The second, a more temporally and spatially distributed pointing task, had children entering different words by selecting characters on an on-screen keyboard. Results indicate that performance is significantly affected by group size only when targets are small. Further, group size had a smaller effect when pointing was spatially and temporally distributed than when everyone was concurrently aiming at the same targets.

Mischief is a system to support traditional classroom practices between a remote instructor and a group of collocated students. Meant for developing regions, each student in the classroom is given a mouse and these are connected to a single machine and shared display. We present observations of teaching practices in rural Chinese classrooms that led to Mischief's design. Mischief's user interface, with which scores of collocated students can interact simultaneously, supports anonymous responses, communicates focus of attention, and maintains the role of the instructor. Mischief is an extensible platform in which Microsoft PowerPoint slides, used commonly in developing regions, are made interactive. We setup a controlled environment where Mischief was used by classrooms of children with a remote math instructor. The results from the study provided insight into the usability and capacity of the system to support traditional classroom interactions. These observations were also the impetus for a redesign of several components of Mischief and are also presented. These findings contribute both a novel system for synchronous distance education in an affordable manner and design insights for creators of related systems.

Comicboarding is a participatory design method that uses specially created comic books to generate engaging, productive brainstorming sessions with children. By leveraging known plot formats, interaction styles, and characters in comics, researchers can elicit ideas even from children who are not accustomed to brainstorming, such as those from schools were rote learning is the norm. We conducted an experiment using two variants of the comicboarding methodology with 17 children in China, where traditional participatory design may fail in the face of local cultural practices. The results suggest that comicboarding holds promise for co-design with children.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a technique, Direct Pointer, that enables users to interact intuitively with large displays using cameras equipped on handheld devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistant (PDA). In contrast to many existing interaction methods that attempt to address the same problem, ours offers direct manipulation of the pointer position with continuous visual feedback. The primary advantage of this technique is that it only requires equipment that is readily available: an electronic display, a handheld digital camera, and a connection between the two. No special visual markers in the display content are needed, nor are fixed cameras pointing at the display. We evaluated the performance of Direct Pointer as an interaction product, showing that it performs as well as comparable techniques that require more sophisticated equipment.

This paper investigates two methods of improving the user experience of camera-based interaction. First, problems that arise when avatars are designed to mimic a user's physical actions are presented. Second, a solution is proposed: adding a layer of separation between user and avatar while retaining intuitive user control. Two methods are proposed for this separation: spatially and temporally. Implementations of these methods are then presented in the context of a simple game and evaluate their effect on performance and satisfaction. Results of a human subject experiment are presented, showing that reducing the amount of user control can maintain, and even improve, user satisfaction if the design of such a reduction is appropriate. This is followed by a discussion of how the findings inform camera-based game design.

Aural and visual cues can be automatically extracted from video and used to index its contents. The paper explores the relative merits of the cues extracted from the different modalities for locating relevant shots in video, specifically reporting on the indexing and interface strategies used to retrieve information from the Video TREC 2002 and 2003 data sets, and the evaluation of the interactive search runs. For the documentary and news material in these sets, automated speech recognition produces rich textual descriptions derived from the narrative, with visual descriptions and depictions offering additional browsing functionality. Through speech and visual processing, storyboard interfaces with query-based filtering provide an effective interactive retrieval interface. Examples drawn from the Video TREC 2002 and 2003 search topics and results using these topics illustrate the utility of multiple-document storyboards and other interfaces incorporating the results of multimodal processing.

The authors developed a system in which visually dense displays of thumbnail imagery in storyboard views are used for shot-based video retrieval. The views allow for effective retrieval, as evidenced by the success achieved by expert users with the system in interactive query for NIST TRECVID 2002 and 2003. This paper demonstrates that novice users also achieve comparatively high retrieval performance with these views using the TRECVID 2003 benchmarks. Through an analysis of the user interaction logs, heuristic evaluation, and think-aloud protocol, the usability of the video information retrieval system is appraised with respect to shot-based retrieval. Design implications are presented based on these TRECVID usability evaluations regarding efficient, effective information retrieval interfaces to locate visual information from video corpora.

This paper investigates the level of metadata accuracy required for image filters to be valuable to users. Access to large digital image and video collections is hampered by ambiguous and incomplete metadata attributed to imagery. Though improvements are constantly made in the automatic derivation of semantic feature concepts such as indoor, outdoor, face, and cityscape, it is unclear how good these improvements should be and under what circumstances they are effective. This paper explores the relationship between metadata accuracy and effectiveness of retrieval using an amateur photo collection, documentary video, and news video. The accuracy of the feature classification is varied from performance typical of automated classifications today to ideal performance taken from manually generated truth data. Results establish an accuracy threshold at which semantic features can be useful, and empirically quantify the collection size when filtering first shows its effectiveness.