The current research evaluates user experience and preference when interacting with a patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) healthcare application displayed on a single tablet in comparison to interaction with the same application distributed across two tablets. We conducted a within-subject user study with 43 participants who engaged with and rated the usability of our system and participated in a post-experiment interview to collect subjective data. Our findings showed significantly higher usability and higher pragmatic quality ratings for the single tablet condition. However, some users attribute a higher level of presence to the avatar and prefer it to be placed on a second tablet.

Any active entity that shares space with people is interpreted as a social actor. Based on this notion, we explore how robots that integrate functional utility with a social role and character can integrate meaningfully into daily practice. Informed by interviews and observations, we designed a zoomorphic floor cleaning robot which playfully interacts with care home residents affected by dementia. A field study shows that playful interaction can facilitate the introduction of utilitarian robots in care homes, being nonthreatening and easy to make sense of. Residents previously reacted with distress to a Roomba robot, but were now amused by and played with our cartoonish cat robot or simply tolerated its presence. They showed awareness of the machine-nature of the robot, even while engaging in pretend-play. A playful approach to the design of functional robots can thus explicitly conceptualize such robots as social actors in their context of use.

Robots are predominantly thought of as monolithic, unitary actors: they are almost always designed as having a clearly defined body. We rethink this concept of a unified and coherently embodied robot with the example context of elderly care. We explore alternative design spaces for robots in care that open up new modes of interaction for residents and caregivers. We present design studies that explore this notion based on the development of a plant-watering robotic ensemble. The ensemble consists of various elements that inform interacting persons about the robot’s task and its role in a storytelling or poetic way. We show how we further explored this idea of a ‘robot as theatre’ in two different configurations – one agentic and one diorama – and a version that integrates feedback from focus groups with care experts.

Air traffic control officers (ATCOs) are specialized workers responsible to monitor and guide airplanes in their assigned airspace. Such a task is highly visual and mainly supported by 2D visualizations. In this paper, we designed and assessed an application for visualizing air traffic in both orthographic (2D) and perspective (3D) views. A user study was then performed to compare these two types of representations in terms of situation awareness, workload, performance, and user acceptance. Results show that the 3D view yielded both higher situation awareness and less workload than the 2D view condition. However, such a performance does not match the opinion of the ATCOs about the 3D representation.

In this booth on fine grain reconfigurable architectures, several research groups demonstrate their joint work on operating concepts for managing dynamic and partial reconfiguration, visualization of bitstreams and routing, presenting an application applying dynamic reconfiguration for video engines as well as work on minimization of reconfiguration data. Unique is that all the above four projects present their work using the same reconfigurable FPGA-based fabric called Erlangen slot machine that has also been built within one project just the purpose of experimenting with dynamic fine grain reconfiguration as an interdisciplinary platform.

Graphical modeling languages allow to specify structure and behavior of mixed hardware-and software-systems on high abstraction level and can be automatically rendered into deployable implementations. In this paper we extend a model-based development process by means to debug functionality specified using Matlab Stateflow models in its hardware- and software-implementation on the target system. The user can control and view the system state graphically from the model's level. We introduce an Eclipse based software-tool based on our approach and apply it to a dynamically reconfigurable slot-based FPGA runtime environment.