A study of normal and abnormal motor development in infants (An approach to muscle testing of infants)

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

WearPut : Designing Dexterous Wearable Input based on the Characteristics of Human Finger Motions

Department of Biomedical Engineering (Human Factors Engineering)Powerful microchips for computing and networking allow a wide range of wearable devices to be miniaturized with high fidelity and availability. In particular, the commercially successful smartwatches placed on the wrist drive market growth by sharing the role of smartphones and health management. The emerging Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) also impact various application areas in video games, education, simulation, and productivity tools. However, these powerful wearables have challenges in interaction with the inevitably limited space for input and output due to the specialized form factors for fitting the body parts. To complement the constrained interaction experience, many wearable devices still rely on other large form factor devices (e.g., smartphones or hand-held controllers). Despite their usefulness, the additional devices for interaction can constrain the viability of wearable devices in many usage scenarios by tethering users' hands to the physical devices. This thesis argues that developing novel Human-Computer interaction techniques for the specialized wearable form factors is vital for wearables to be reliable standalone products. This thesis seeks to address the issue of constrained interaction experience with novel interaction techniques by exploring finger motions during input for the specialized form factors of wearable devices. The several characteristics of the finger input motions are promising to enable increases in the expressiveness of input on the physically limited input space of wearable devices. First, the input techniques with fingers are prevalent on many large form factor devices (e.g., touchscreen or physical keyboard) due to fast and accurate performance and high familiarity. Second, many commercial wearable products provide built-in sensors (e.g., touchscreen or hand tracking system) to detect finger motions. This enables the implementation of novel interaction systems without any additional sensors or devices. Third, the specialized form factors of wearable devices can create unique input contexts while the fingers approach their locations, shapes, and components. Finally, the dexterity of fingers with a distinctive appearance, high degrees of freedom, and high sensitivity of joint angle perception have the potential to widen the range of input available with various movement features on the surface and in the air. Accordingly, the general claim of this thesis is that understanding how users move their fingers during input will enable increases in the expressiveness of the interaction techniques we can create for resource-limited wearable devices. This thesis demonstrates the general claim by providing evidence in various wearable scenarios with smartwatches and HMDs. First, this thesis explored the comfort range of static and dynamic touch input with angles on the touchscreen of smartwatches. The results showed the specific comfort ranges on variations in fingers, finger regions, and poses due to the unique input context that the touching hand approaches a small and fixed touchscreen with a limited range of angles. Then, finger region-aware systems that recognize the flat and side of the finger were constructed based on the contact areas on the touchscreen to enhance the expressiveness of angle-based touch input. In the second scenario, this thesis revealed distinctive touch profiles of different fingers caused by the unique input context for the touchscreen of smartwatches. The results led to the implementation of finger identification systems for distinguishing two or three fingers. Two virtual keyboards with 12 and 16 keys showed the feasibility of touch-based finger identification that enables increases in the expressiveness of touch input techniques. In addition, this thesis supports the general claim with a range of wearable scenarios by exploring the finger input motions in the air. In the third scenario, this thesis investigated the motions of in-air finger stroking during unconstrained in-air typing for HMDs. The results of the observation study revealed details of in-air finger motions during fast sequential input, such as strategies, kinematics, correlated movements, inter-fingerstroke relationship, and individual in-air keys. The in-depth analysis led to a practical guideline for developing robust in-air typing systems with finger stroking. Lastly, this thesis examined the viable locations of in-air thumb touch input to the virtual targets above the palm. It was confirmed that fast and accurate sequential thumb touch can be achieved at a total of 8 key locations with the built-in hand tracking system in a commercial HMD. Final typing studies with a novel in-air thumb typing system verified increases in the expressiveness of virtual target selection on HMDs. This thesis argues that the objective and subjective results and novel interaction techniques in various wearable scenarios support the general claim that understanding how users move their fingers during input will enable increases in the expressiveness of the interaction techniques we can create for resource-limited wearable devices. Finally, this thesis concludes with thesis contributions, design considerations, and the scope of future research works, for future researchers and developers to implement robust finger-based interaction systems on various types of wearable devices.ope

Child Massage Integrated Therapy: A Preliminary Intervention Manual for Psychological Trauma Treatment

This dissertation introduces an original preliminary treatment manual as a guide for mental health providers interested in adding a research-informed massage therapy component to traditional child trauma psychotherapy.Child Massage Integrated Therapy (CMIT) offers a standardized protocol to support the implementation of a replicable treatment modality that fosters critical somatic resources for traumatized children within real-world settings. The multidisciplinary field of interpersonal neurobiology, including attachment and polyvagal theories, as well as the concept of interoceptive awareness, are the theoretical constructs informing the proposed model of care. A review of the research literature recognizing massage therapy\u27s role in creating a regulating mind/body experience provides the fundamental basis for pursuing this line of intervention as a component of a phase-oriented psychological trauma treatment

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

The relationship between the creation and perception of art

It is suggested that similar cognitive processes are involved with both the creation and perception of art. However, a lack of research examines this relationship, whether this is just from the perspective of the artist, or in relation to the artist and perceiver of the final product. To do so, we examined the experience of artists and non‐artists investigating initial stages of art‐making by examining relationships between aesthetic and drawing preferences of geometric stimuli (Experiments 1 & 2). To further understand this experience, we allowed artists and non‐artists to be involved in actual drawing activity (stippling and stroking) whilst making drawing preferences. We also examined how being involved in drawing influenced aesthetic preferences (Experiment 3), this led to conducting studies considering perceivers (artists/non‐artists) of artworks. Here, we investigated how congruent actions (simultaneously produced or learnt during pre‐training) with the artists behind the artwork influenced aesthetic responses (Experiments 4 & 5). Examination of gaze behaviour throughout these studies provides further insight into the aesthetic experience by revealing the processes behind formations of judgements. Overall, we conclude that there are similarities between experiences (gaze and judgments) involved in the creation and perception of art. We find similarities between aesthetic and drawing preferences and find gaze to be impacted in a similar manner when observing images in comparison to making a drawing choice. We do not provide support that these drawing choices are influenced by being involved with drawing but do show that the more experience a perceiver receives with these actions of the artist the more their aesthetic judgements are influenced by these, supporting the relationship between artist and perceiver depicted in the mirror model of art. We provide a foundation for future research to empirically analyse connections between the creation and perception of art and the relationships between the artist and perceiver

The Book of Proceedings of the 1st International Scientific Conference of Aquatic Space Activities

Nomura T, Ungerechts B. The Book of Proceedings of the 1st International Scientific Conference of Aquatic Space Activities. Tsukuba JAP: University of Tsukuba; 2008

Pinching sweaters on your phone – iShoogle : multi-gesture touchscreen fabric simulator using natural on-fabric gestures to communicate textile qualities

The inability to touch fabrics online frustrates consumers, who are used to evaluating physical textiles by engaging in complex, natural gestural interactions. When customers interact with physical fabrics, they combine cross-modal information about the fabric's look, sound and handle to build an impression of its physical qualities. But whenever an interaction with a fabric is limited (i.e. when watching clothes online) there is a perceptual gap between the fabric qualities perceived digitally and the actual fabric qualities that a person would perceive when interacting with the physical fabric. The goal of this thesis was to create a fabric simulator that minimized this perceptual gap, enabling accurate perception of the qualities of fabrics presented digitally. We designed iShoogle, a multi-gesture touch-screen sound-enabled fabric simulator that aimed to create an accurate representation of fabric qualities without the need for touching the physical fabric swatch. iShoogle uses on-screen gestures (inspired by natural on-fabric movements e.g. Crunching) to control pre-recorded videos and audio of fabrics being deformed (e.g. being Crunched). iShoogle creates an illusion of direct video manipulation and also direct manipulation of the displayed fabric. This thesis describes the results of nine studies leading towards the development and evaluation of iShoogle. In the first three studies, we combined expert and non-expert textile-descriptive words and grouped them into eight dimensions labelled with terms Crisp, Hard, Soft, Textured, Flexible, Furry, Rough and Smooth. These terms were used to rate fabric qualities throughout the thesis. We observed natural on-fabric gestures during a fabric handling study (Study 4) and used the results to design iShoogle's on-screen gestures. In Study 5 we examined iShoogle's performance and speed in a fabric handling task and in Study 6 we investigated users' preferences for sound playback interactivity. iShoogle's accuracy was then evaluated in the last three studies by comparing participants’ ratings of textile qualities when using iShoogle with ratings produced when handling physical swatches. We also described the recording and processing techniques for the video and audio content that iShoogle used. Finally, we described the iShoogle iPhone app that was released to the general public. Our evaluation studies showed that iShoogle significantly improved the accuracy of fabric perception in at least some cases. Further research could investigate which fabric qualities and which fabrics are particularly suited to be represented with iShoogle

Giving a voice to the hard to reach: Song as an effective medium for communicating with PMLD children who have low social tolerance

Common practice in special schools is to sing rather than speak to children with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD), in order to initiate and maintain interactions; however, there is little formal evidence to support this practice. This study explored the extent to which singing is effective with this ‘hard to reach’ cohort. Five pupils participated, who had PMLD and low social tolerance. These individuals do not like to be touched, talked to or to be in close proximity with other people. This research set out to explore the effectiveness of different sorts of interactive approaches, notably singing or speaking, as a starting point for building an evidence base to underpin practice. The study used a single subject research methodology, with an adult as a communication partner who initiated interactions, and responded to the behavioural cues of the child. Interactions were video recorded. A system to code participants’ responses to different interactions was developed, based on detailed descriptions of each individual’s behaviour on three major dimensions: Attention Focus, Social Proximity, and Facial Expression. Pupils’ vocalisations and coordinated actions were also recorded. Events were presented graphically; statistical analyses explored the effectiveness of different interaction approaches; sessions were described qualitatively. The research revealed consistent communicative behaviours (and a means to identify these) in individuals with PMLD and poor social tolerance. Participants were able to express their internal states through consistent patterns in their eye gaze, social proximity, facial expression, and vocal behaviours. The communication partner played a critical role in structuring and directing the interactions; interactions were shaped and influenced by both environment and context. Simple behavioural descriptors are insensitive to context. The research showed that, used on their own, they can lead to misinterpretations of events, and so must be complemented by qualitative descriptions. Nevertheless, the microanalysis of behaviours revealed ‘moments of wonder’ which overturned expectations about who was leading interactions; none of the participants was thought (by staff) to be capable of the secondary intersubjectivity and attention directing behaviours that were documented. There were individual differences in response to singing: however, overall, singing was associated with more positive facial expressions (smiles), higher levels of social tolerance (to touch and proximity), and improved communicative responses (eye contact, vocalisations, and coordinated actions). This provides evidence to support current practices of singing to children with PMLD. This thesis modelled a strategy for collating a profile of communicative behaviours. A practical outcome of the research was that details of the communicative behaviours of participants were circulated via a ‘communication passport’ for each participant, and shared with parents and carers. The use of song became a more explicit part of the daily routine and a planned element in lessons. Findings are related to research on mother-infant communication and infant development, and on the role of music in emotional regulation, and the psychology of music. Directions for future research are discussed

Natural and Smooth Pen-based Interaction Utilizing Multiple Pen Input Channels

高知工科大学博士(工学) 平成22年3月19日授与 (甲第176号