SHELDON Smart habitat for the elderly.

An insightful document concerning active and assisted living under different perspectives: Furniture and habitat, ICT solutions and Healthcare

‘Subtle’ Technology: Design for Facilitating Face-to-Face Interaction for Socially Anxious People

PhD thesisShy people have a desire for social interaction but fear being scrutinised and rejected. This conflict results in attention deficits during face-to-face situations. It can cause the social atmosphere to become ‘frozen’ and shy persons to appear reticent. Many of them avoid such challenges, taking up the ‘electronic extroversion’ route and experiencing real-world social isolation. This research is aimed at improving the social skills and experience of shy people. It establishes conceptual frameworks and guidelines for designing computer-mediated tools to amplify shy users’ social cognition while extending conversational resources. Drawing on the theories of Social Objects, ‘natural’ HCI and unobtrusive Ubiquitous Computing, it proposes the Icebreaker Cognitive-Behavioural Model for applying user psychology to the systems’ features and functioning behaviour. Two initial design approaches were developed in forms of Wearable Computer and evaluated in a separate user-centred study. One emphasised the users’ privacy concerns in the form of a direct but covert display of the Vibrosign Armband. Another focused on low-attention demand and low-key interaction preferences – rendered through a peripheral but overt visual display of the Icebreaker T-shirt, triggered by the users’ handshake and disguised in the system’s subtle operation. Quantitative feedback by vibrotactile experts indicated the armband effective in signalling various types of abstract information. However, it added to the mental load and needed a disproportionate of training time. In contrast, qualitative-based feedback from shy users revealed unexpected benefits of the information display made public on the shirt front. It encouraged immediate and fluid interaction by providing a mutual ‘ticket to talk’ and an interpretative gap in the users’ relationship, although the rapid prototype compromised the technology’s subtle characteristics and impeded the users’ social experience. An iterative design extended the Icebreaker approach through a systematic refinement and resulted in the Subtle Design Principle implemented in the Icebreaker Jacket. Its subtle interaction and display modalities were compared to those of a focal-demand social aid, using a mixed-method evaluation. Inferential analysis results indicated the subtle technology more engaging with users’ social aspirations and facilitating a higher degree of unobtrusive experience. Through the Icebreaker model and Subtle Design Principle, together with the exploratory research framework and study outcome, this thesis demonstrates the advantages of using subtle technology to help shy users cope with the challenges of face-to-face interaction and improve their social experience.RCUK under the Digital Economy Doctoral Training scheme, through MAT programme, EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre EP/G03723X/1

Low-Cost Sensors and Biological Signals

Many sensors are currently available at prices lower than USD 100 and cover a wide range of biological signals: motion, muscle activity, heart rate, etc. Such low-cost sensors have metrological features allowing them to be used in everyday life and clinical applications, where gold-standard material is both too expensive and time-consuming to be used. The selected papers present current applications of low-cost sensors in domains such as physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and affective technologies. The results cover various aspects of low-cost sensor technology from hardware design to software optimization

Investigating the Inner Experience of Individuals Attending Psychotherapy at a Community Mental Health Center

Although psychotherapy outcome studies sometimes use qualitative methods (e.g., interviews and traditional sampling methods), the majority of those studies rely mainly on quantitative methods (e.g., retrospective self-report progress-monitoring questionnaires), even when investigating clients’ experience of treatment. However, there are reasons to believe that both qualitative and quantitative methods are substantially flawed—both interviews and self-report questionnaires investigating experience can yield substantially inconsistent findings in comparison to careful, descriptive sampling-based methods such as Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). To date, there are neither qualitative nor quantitative published studies that explore the everyday, natural inner experience of psychotherapy clients. The current study used DES, a method designed to provide high-fidelity accounts of inner experience, as a step toward understanding the inner experience of psychotherapy clients in their natural environments. Eleven individuals, recruited from a community mental health center located on a university campus, participated in approximately eight days of DES sampling (sampling approximately once a week across eight weeks). This study was exploratory and the output was 11 case studies, each describing salient characteristics of the participant’s inner experience, diagnosis, presenting issues in psychotherapy, and psychotherapist’s impressions. Although the present study did not find a specific pattern or salient characteristic that characterized our sample, our findings suggest that individuals who seek psychotherapy may have noteworthy characteristics of inner experience that accompany their distress or contribute to their decision to seek psychotherapy services. The current study is basic science: we explored the inner experience of individuals who were receiving weekly psychotherapy and described what we found

Textile materials

In this specialised publication, the reader will find research results and real engineering developments in the field of modern technical textiles. Modern technical textile materials, ranging from ordinary reinforcing fabrics in the construction and production of modern composite materials to specialised textile materials in the composition of electronics, sensors and other intelligent devices, play an important role in many areas of human technical activity. The use of specialized textiles, for example, in medicine makes it possible to achieve important results in diagnostics, prosthetics, surgical practice and the practice of using specialized fabrics at the health recovery stage. The use of reinforcing fabrics in construction can significantly improve the mechanical properties of concrete and various plaster mixtures, which increases the reliability and durability of various structures and buildings in general. In mechanical engineering, the use of composite materials reinforced with special textiles can simultaneously reduce weight and improve the mechanical properties of machine parts. Fabric- reinforced composites occupy a significant place in the automotive industry, aerospace engineering, and shipbuilding. Here, the mechanical reliability and thermal resistance of the body material of the product, along with its low weight, are very relevant. The presented edition will be useful and interesting for engineers and researchers whose activities are related to the design, production and application of various technical textile materials

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with