Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, ‘the good life,’ and everyday experience

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Educational Psychology

The title of the book Educational Psychology - Between Certitudes and Uncertainties is relevant for the dynamic and low predictable research from genetics, neurosciences, technologies, etc. that produce challenges and exchanges across sciences. This new framework argues that this book is to be considered a fairly unique and realistic way to rebuild the incongruities and paradoxes in this area. Naturally, "certitudes and uncertainties" is a common denominator for the existing sophisticated academic conventions and for the immense potential of continuous professional development. The title of the book reflects the state of the art, a new trend in the conceptual fabric of educational psychology, and an attitude toward an academic market in the age of many battles in the world of science

How should an electric vehicle sound? User and expert perception

International audienc

2015 Annual Research Symposium Abstract Book

2015 annual volume of abstracts for science research projects conducted by students at Trinity Colleg

A health-oriented emotion-centred origami-based PSS concept. A product-service system concept aimed to help users manage and reduce their stress more tangibly to improve their health and well-being.

Emotions have a fundamental role in the experience, perception, cognition, and development of people (Barrett et al., 2016; Plutchik, 2001). Negative emotions such as stress, if not managed appropriately, may be a risk factor in developing diseases such as dementia, cardiovascular problems, and depression, amongst others (Dum et al., 2016; Sandi et al., 2001). This interdisciplinary research presents OrigamEase, a health-oriented emotion-centred origami-based PSS concept to help adults manage their stress more tangibly, in response to its main research question: How can engineering design research contribute to improving people’s emotional health and wellbeing? OrigamEase was designed throughout this research, and its design and testing served to develop a health & well-being oriented, emotion-centred engineering design methodology (HWOEED). Therefore, the design of this methodology is the result of the structuring and ordering of the developmental process of exploring, conducting and streamlining the research, design and testing of OrigamEase. The design of OrigamEase (both the product and the service part) is based on the cognitive research stream of emotions and stress. Therefore, this research also aims to broaden the knowledge about the implications and management of the emotional experience of stress from an engineering and design point of view, complementing the available solutions for stress management through a structured, measurable, and tangible tool. The HWOEED methodology is influenced by Kansei Engineering and Design Thinking methodologies and integrates various engineering design research methods. However, this methodology proposes a different application of the integration of emotional considerations into engineering design processes., it seeks to improve the emotional experience of users to preserve and promote their health and well-being through specifically designed products, services or PSS. Therefore, these designs become the means and not the end of the engineering design efforts. Also, this methodology can be transferrable to other engineering design solutions. OrigamEase was tested with 114 adults between 18 and 70 years old through three pilot tests (n=43) and six trial tests (n=71) using a concurrent triangulation mixed methods design. Then the results from these tests were contrasted with two control tests (n=22). The results show that using OrigamEase reduced the measured stress levels of participants (self-reported, heart rate and electrodermal activity) significantly, supporting the experiment hypothesis. Stress levels were recorded before and after using OrigamEase; then, a repeated-measures t-test was applied to find if these differences were significant or not. After using OrigamEase, 73.2% of participants reported feeling less stressed (mean reduction=13.94%), 85.5% experienced a reduction in their heart rate (mean reduction=9.8 bpm), and 78.9% had a lower electrodermal activity (mean reduction= 10.8 points). The testing of OrigamEase served as an initial application validation of the HWOEED methodology. This research demonstrates that engineering and design fields not only can but need to contribute to research on emotions through interdisciplinary research. Emotions are a fundamental part of all human experiences, impacting a person’s health and well-being profoundly

Odor-Based Molecular Communications: State-of-the-Art, Vision, Challenges, and Frontier Directions

Humankind mimics the processes and strategies that nature has perfected and uses them as a model to address its problems. That has recently found a new direction, i.e., a novel communication technology called molecular communication (MC), using molecules to encode, transmit, and receive information. Despite extensive research, an innate MC method with plenty of natural instances, i.e., olfactory or odor communication, has not yet been studied with the tools of information and communication technologies (ICT). Existing studies focus on digitizing this sense and developing actuators without inspecting the principles of odor-based information coding and MC, which significantly limits its application potential. Hence, there is a need to focus cross-disciplinary research efforts to reveal the fundamentals of this unconventional communication modality from an ICT perspective. The ways of natural odor MC in nature need to be anatomized and engineered for end-to-end communication among humans and human-made things to enable several multi-sense augmented reality technologies reinforced with olfactory senses for novel applications and solutions in the Internet of Everything (IoE). This paper introduces the concept of odor-based molecular communication (OMC) and provides a comprehensive examination of olfactory systems. It explores odor communication in nature, including aspects of odor information, channels, reception, spatial perception, and cognitive functions. Additionally, a comprehensive comparison of various communication systems sets the foundation for further investigation. By highlighting the unique characteristics, advantages, and potential applications of OMC through this comparative analysis, the paper lays the groundwork for exploring the modeling of an end-to-end OMC channel, considering the design of OMC transmitters and receivers, and developing innovative OMC techniques