Design Strategies for Playful Technologies to Support Light-intensity Physical Activity in the Workplace

Moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity has an established preventative role in obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. However recent evidence suggests that sitting time affects health negatively independent of whether adults meet prescribed physical activity guidelines. Since many of us spend long hours daily sitting in front of a host of electronic screens, this is cause for concern. In this paper, we describe a set of three prototype digital games created for encouraging light-intensity physical activity during short breaks at work. The design of these kinds of games is a complex process that must consider motivation strategies, interaction methodology, usability and ludic aspects. We present design guidelines for technologies that encourage physical activity in the workplace that we derived from a user evaluation using the prototypes. Although the design guidelines can be seen as general principles, we conclude that they have to be considered differently for different workplace cultures and workspaces. Our study was conducted with users who have some experience playing casual games on their mobile devices and were able and willing to increase their physical activity.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Video: http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/see-saw

Autonomous Robotic Reinforcement Learning with Asynchronous Human Feedback

Ideally, we would place a robot in a real-world environment and leave it there improving on its own by gathering more experience autonomously. However, algorithms for autonomous robotic learning have been challenging to realize in the real world. While this has often been attributed to the challenge of sample complexity, even sample-efficient techniques are hampered by two major challenges - the difficulty of providing well "shaped" rewards, and the difficulty of continual reset-free training. In this work, we describe a system for real-world reinforcement learning that enables agents to show continual improvement by training directly in the real world without requiring painstaking effort to hand-design reward functions or reset mechanisms. Our system leverages occasional non-expert human-in-the-loop feedback from remote users to learn informative distance functions to guide exploration while leveraging a simple self-supervised learning algorithm for goal-directed policy learning. We show that in the absence of resets, it is particularly important to account for the current "reachability" of the exploration policy when deciding which regions of the space to explore. Based on this insight, we instantiate a practical learning system - GEAR, which enables robots to simply be placed in real-world environments and left to train autonomously without interruption. The system streams robot experience to a web interface only requiring occasional asynchronous feedback from remote, crowdsourced, non-expert humans in the form of binary comparative feedback. We evaluate this system on a suite of robotic tasks in simulation and demonstrate its effectiveness at learning behaviors both in simulation and the real world. Project website https://guided-exploration-autonomous-rl.github.io/GEAR/.Comment: Project website https://guided-exploration-autonomous-rl.github.io/GEAR

The uncanny body: from medical to aesthetic abnormality

In this essay I explore a possibility of experiential synthesis of the medicalized abnormal body with its aesthetic images. A personal narrative about meeting extreme abnormality serves as an introduction into theorizing aesthetic abnormality. The essay builds its argument on the phenomenological grounds; I therefore approach corporeality with Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In turn, Max Ernst introduces an aesthetic frame for the subsequent examination of uncanny surreality. Two exemplars of the surreal body, Joel Witkin’s “Satiro” and Don DeLillo’s “Body Artist,” intend to substantiate the preceding theoretic. The study shows how the encounter with the abnormal embodiment may suspend normalized modes of constitution to provoke uncanny experience

Evaluation of on-line analytic and numeric inverse kinematics approaches driven by partial vision input

Despite its central role in the constitution of a truly enactive interface, 3D interaction through human full body movement has been hindered by a number of technological and algorithmic factors. Let us mention the cumbersome magnetic equipments, or the underdetermined data set provided by less invasive video-based approaches. In the present paper, we explore the recovery of the full body posture of a standing subject in front of a stereo camera system. The 3D position of the hands, the head and the center of the trunk segment are extracted in real-time and provided to the body posture recovery algorithmic layer. We focus on the comparison between numeric and analytic inverse kinematics approaches in terms of performances and overall quality of the reconstructed body posture. Algorithmic issues arise from the very partial and noisy input and the singularity of the human standing posture. Despite stability concerns, results confirm the pertinence of this approach in this demanding contex

Scripting human animations in a virtual environment

The current deficiencies of virtual environment (VE) are well known: annoying lag time in drawing the current view, drastically simplified environments to reduce that time lag, low resolution and narrow field of view. Animation scripting is an application of VE technology which can be carried out successfully despite these deficiencies. The final product is a smoothly moving high resolution animation displaying detailed models. In this system, the user is represented by a human computer model with the same body proportions. Using magnetic tracking, the motions of the model's upper torso, head and arms are controlled by the user's movements (18 degrees of freedom). The model's lower torso and global position and orientation are controlled by a spaceball and keypad (12 degrees of freedom). Using this system human motion scripts can be extracted from the user's movements while immersed in a simplified virtual environment. Recorded data is used to define key frames; motion is interpolated between them and post processing adds a more detailed environment. The result is a considerable savings in time and a much more natural-looking movement of a human figure in a smooth and seamless animation

An Architecture for Online Affordance-based Perception and Whole-body Planning

The DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials held in December 2013 provided a landmark demonstration of dexterous mobile robots executing a variety of tasks aided by a remote human operator using only data from the robot's sensor suite transmitted over a constrained, field-realistic communications link. We describe the design considerations, architecture, implementation and performance of the software that Team MIT developed to command and control an Atlas humanoid robot. Our design emphasized human interaction with an efficient motion planner, where operators expressed desired robot actions in terms of affordances fit using perception and manipulated in a custom user interface. We highlight several important lessons we learned while developing our system on a highly compressed schedule

Workspace comparisons of setup configurations for human-robot interaction

In virtual assembly verification or remote maintenance tasks, bimanual haptic interfaces play a crucial role in successful task completion. This paper proposes a method for objectively comparing how well a haptic interface covers the reachable workspace of human arms. Two system configurations are analyzed for a recently introduced haptic device that is based on two DLR-KUKA light weight robots: the standard configuration, where the device is opposite the human operator, and the ergonomic configuration, where the haptic device is mounted behind the human operator. The human operator directly controls the robotic arms using handles. The analysis is performed using a representation of the robot arm workspace. The merits of restricting the comparisons to the most significant regions of the human workspace are discussed. Using this method, a greater workspace correspondence for the ergonomic configuration was shown. ©2010 IEEE