Young children with visual impairments tend to engage less with their surroundings, limiting the benefits from activities at school. We investigated novel ways of using sound from a bracelet, such as speech or familiar noises, to tell children about nearby people, places and activities, to encourage them to engage more during play and help them move independently. We present a series of studies, the first two involving visual impairment educators, that give insight into challenges faced by visually impaired children at school and how sound might help them. We then present a focus group with visually impaired children that gives further insight into the effective use of sound. Our findings reveal novel ways of combining sounds from wearables with sounds from the environment, motivating audible beacons, devices for audio output and proximity estimation. We present scenarios, findings and a design space that show the novel ways such devices could be used alongside wearables to help visually impaired children at school.

The International Workshop on Multimodal Interaction for Education aims at investigating how multimodal interactive systems, firmly grounded on psychophysical, psychological, and pedagogical bases, can be designed, developed, and exploited for enhancing teaching and learning processes in different learning environments, with a special focus on children in the classroom. Whilst the usage of multisensory technologies in the education area is rapidly expanding, the need for solid scientific bases, design guidelines, and appropriate procedures for evaluation is emerging. Moreover, the introduction of multimodal interactive systems in the learning environment needs to develop at the same time suitable pedagogical paradigms. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, including pedagogy, psychology, psychophysics, and computer science - with a particular focus on human-computer interaction, affective computing, and social signal processing - to discuss such challenges under a multidisciplinary perspective. The workshop is partially supported by the EU-H2020-ICT Project weDRAW (http://www.wedraw.eu).

When two partners perform a joint physical task, each of them experiences a force that sums together a component generated by the partner and another generated from the environment. To investigate whether subjects are able to distinguish these two components, we created a force perception task in which two partners indicate the direction of an external force applied to a rigid bar that they grasp from opposite ends. In a previous study we showed that dyads adopt different response strategies and that many do not split the external force in a manner that allows both subjects to experience a meaningful interaction force. Here, we investigated whether a visual feedback on the partner's and correct response let dyads learn how to best split the external force. We show that this is not the case and that the dyads' force sharing and response strategies were comparable to those of the previous experiment.

Computer games are a promising tool to support intensive rehabilitation. However, at present, they do not incorporate the supervision provided by a real therapist and do not allow safe and effective use at a patient's home. We show how specifically tailored computational intelligence based techniques allow extending exergames with functionalities that make rehabilitation at home effective and safe. The main function is in monitoring the correctness of motion, which is fundamental in avoiding developing wrong motion patterns, making rehabilitation more harmful than effective. Fuzzy systems enable us to capture the knowledge of the therapist and to provide real-time feedback of the patient's motion quality with a novel informative color coding applied to the patient's avatar. This feedback is complemented with a therapist avatar that, in extreme cases, explains the correct way to carry out the movements required by the exergames. The avatar also welcomes the patient and summarizes the therapy results to him/her. Text to speech and simple animation improve the engagement. Another important element is adaptation. Only the proper level of challenge exercises can be both effective and safe. For this reason exergames can be fully configured by therapists in terms of speed, range of motion, or accuracy. These parameters are then tuned during exercise to the patient's performance through a Bayesian framework that also takes into account input from the therapist. A log of all the interaction data is stored for clinicians to assess and tune the therapy, and to advise patients. All this functionality has been added to a classical game engine that is extended to embody a virtual therapist aimed at supervising the motion, which is the final goal of the exergames for rehabilitation. This approach can be of broad interest in the serious games domain. Preliminary results with patients and therapists suggest that the approach can maintain a proper challenge level while keeping the patient motivated, safe, and supervised.

The haptic modality is a direct and informative communication channel when manipulating objects jointly, but it may also be difficult to interpret. Indeed, the forces generated by the partner and the environment are summed together. This work uses techniques from psychophysics to investigate the ability of humans to untangle these two sources when collaborating in a joint perceptual task where one subject's actions can have a strong impact on the partner's perception. We asked 16 pairs of subjects to perform a joint force detection task, in which they had to identify the direction of a weak external force. Results unveiled a variety of force sharing strategies adopted by the dyads. We present the different strategies adopted by the dyads and their implications on the subjects' task performance.

Rehabilitation for stroke patients with postural instability or balance disorders can be enhanced using game-based rehabilitative strategies. Our work explored the potential of commercially available haptic devices for a home rehabilitation system. One group of participants used a low-cost device (Falcon) while another group used a high-end device (Omega). Both groups performed various tasks with the haptic device, with the eyes either closed or open. Results showed that participants interacted somewhat differently with the two devices, although the analysis of the center of pressure showed qualitatively similar balance performance for the two groups. Light touch task increased the stability, whereas the force tasks decreased it. This study showed that a low-cost haptic device can affect postural stability in a controllable way.

This preliminary study investigated behaviorally the performance of a sample of young twins in a set of classical visuomotor tasks. The assessment was carried out using a small haptic interface used to produce force and record the hand trajectory during the execution of tasks requiring rapid and precise movements. The aim of the study was to evaluate the sensorimotor development across a wide age-range (6-13 years) in which dramatic changes in sensorimotor integration and motor skills occur. A mixed-effect analysis was performed in order to evaluate age-related effects and to check for reduction of residual variability within twins with respect to variability across all pairs of twins. We report both an effect of age and of parenthood when considering reaction times and control of position of the hand under perturbed environment. The ability of tracking a moving target and the velocity of information processing show a dependence on age but not on the parenthood factor. This study validates the methodology used to investigate the age effects on the motor behavior of children and promises to provide new insights in twin-studies.

In real object manipulation, the deformation of the fingerpads along the contact surfaces provides local information about the geometry of the object the subject is manipulating, even in absence of vision and any exploratory movement. In virtual reality with haptic feedback this kind of stimulation is not available because the haptic devices currently available allow to simulate a contact point force interaction thus preventing the deformation of the fingerpads. The aim of this work is that of proposing a novel contact model to augment the information conveyed during kinesthetic interaction with single-point haptic devices. We extended the classic god-point algorithm by using a pseudo-ellipsoidal force field that creates anisotropic compliance in the neighborhood of the contact point. We performed several experiments in order to verify that such contact model can provide information about contact surface orientation even in absence of vision and of free voluntary exploration. The main finding was that participants could identify the orientation of the contact surface when the compliance was maximum in the tangential plane by using small exploratory movements allowed by the penalty-based contact model.