積み木遊びデータ解析による子供の行動と心理状態推定

Tohoku University北村喜文課

Child's play: activity recognition for monitoring children's developmental progress with augmented toys

The way in which infants play with objects can be indicative of their developmental progress and may serve as an early indicator for developmental delays. However, the observation of children interacting with toys for the purpose of quantitative analysis can be a difficult task. To better quantify how play may serve as an early indicator, researchers have conducted retrospective studies examining the differences in object play behaviors among infants. However, such studies require that researchers repeatedly inspect videos of play often at speeds much slower than real-time to indicate points of interest. The research presented in this dissertation examines whether a combination of sensors embedded within toys and automatic pattern recognition of object play behaviors can help expedite this process. For my dissertation, I developed the Child'sPlay system which uses augmented toys and statistical models to automatically provide quantitative measures of object play interactions, as well as, provide the PlayView interface to view annotated play data for later analysis. In this dissertation, I examine the hypothesis that sensors embedded in objects can provide sufficient data for automatic recognition of certain exploratory, relational, and functional object play behaviors in semi-naturalistic environments and that a continuum of recognition accuracy exists which allows automatic indexing to be useful for retrospective review. I designed several augmented toys and used them to collect object play data from more than fifty play sessions. I conducted pattern recognition experiments over this data to produce statistical models that automatically classify children's object play behaviors. In addition, I conducted a user study with twenty participants to determine if annotations automatically generated from these models help improve performance in retrospective review tasks. My results indicate that these statistical models increase user performance and decrease perceived effort when combined with the PlayView interface during retrospective review. The presence of high quality annotations are preferred by users and promotes an increase in the effective retrieval rates of object play behaviors.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Starner, Thad E.; Committee Co-Chair: Abowd, Gregory D.; Committee Member: Arriaga, Rosa; Committee Member: Jackson, Melody Moore; Committee Member: Lukowicz, Paul; Committee Member: Rehg, James M

The Use of Personality Assessments in Designing Environmental Enrichment for Garnett\u27s Bushbabies (\u3ci\u3eOtolemur garnettii\u3c/i\u3e)

Recently the study of animal personality has become an important and credible topic of research and a number of studies have revealed personality traits in a variety of species. The consideration of individual animal personality traits is important for animal management and welfare. For example, ensuring inter-individual compatibility in group housing animals may serve to ensure the safety of the whole group. To date, no formal research has been conducted on whether the assessment of individual personality traits could be used as a tool for individualizing environmental enrichment interventions. The goal of environmental enrichment is to increase the rate of species-typical behaviors in captive animals. Prior research has, for the most part, implemented enrichment strategies genetically, exposing all animals to the same intervention (de Azevedo, et al., 2007). However, individual animals have unique problems or preferences, and could benefit from enrichment plans tailored specifically for them. Testing multiple enrichment options with all individuals of a large group would be very time-consuming and cost-prohibitive. A possible solution is to assess the different personality traits within the group of animals, and provide various enrichment interventions specific to these individual differences. Thus, the current study examined whether certain enrichment options are more effective for particular personality traits within a prosimian species. Personality traits often Garnett\u27s bushbabies were assessed and the subjects were categorized as either high or low on five personality factors: Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. All ten subjects were exposed to five different environmental enrichment interventions. The effectiveness of each enrichment intervention was assessed by examining stereotypic behaviors before and after exposure to the enrichment interventions. All five enrichment interventions generally improved animal welfare by increasing frequency of species-typical behavior across the subjects. In addition, some of the enrichment interventions differentially benefited the subjects based on their individual personality traits. For example, following being housed with an unfamiliar conspecific, highly agreeable (more affiliative and friendly) subjects significantly decreased their maladaptive behaviors. Overall, this study suggests that individualized plans of enrichment related to personality differences are beneficial to a prosimian species

Tangible user interface design for learners with different multiple intelligence

The creation of learning activities responsive to learners with different basic skills has been limited due to a classroom environment and applied technologies. The goals of this research were to develop Tang-MI, a game with a tangible user interface supporting primary school learners’ analytical skills based on the theory of multiple intelligences (MI), and to present design guidelines for a tangible user interface suitable for learners in different MI groups. In this research, the Tangible user interface for multiple intelligence (Tang-MI) was tested with thirty students initially evaluated for their multiple intelligences. The learners’ usage behavior was observed and recorded while the students performed the assigned tasks. The behavioral data were analyzed and grouped into behaviors occurring before performing the tasks, during the tasks, and after completing the tasks. Based on the learners’ usage behavior, the tangible user interface design guidelines for learners in different MI groups were proposed concerning physical equipment design, question design, interactive program design, audio design, and animated visual feedback design. These guidelines would help educators build learning games that respond to the learners’ intelligence styles and enhance students’ motivation to learn

On the Possibility of Robots Having Emotions

I argue against the commonly held intuition that robots and virtual agents will never have emotions by contending robots can have emotions in a sense that is functionally similar to humans, even if the robots\u27 emotions are not exactly equivalent to those of humans. To establish a foundation for assessing the robots\u27 emotional capacities, I first define what emotions are by characterizing the components of emotion consistent across emotion theories. Second, I dissect the affective-cognitive architecture of MIT\u27s Kismet and Leonardo, two robots explicitly designed to express emotions and to interact with humans, in order to explore whether they have emotions. I argue that, although Kismet and Leonardo lack the subjective feelings component of emotion, they are capable of having emotions

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

Infant Locomotor Skill Development in the Context of Mother-Infant Interactions

The acquisition of locomotor skills and transitions within them leads to changes in infants’ exploratory abilities and interactive behaviors, which affects several aspects of parent-infant exchanges. Here, we tracked how the onset of crawling and walking affected both infants’ and mothers’ spatial exploration, interactive behaviors, and use of postures in 10-minute free play sessions held in a laboratory setting. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed longitudinally with biweekly sessions occurring from before crawling onset until infants had two months walking experience. We focused on two 6-session transition periods centered around the onsets of hands-and-knees crawling and walking. Behavioral data from the free play sessions were used to identify changes in spatial location coordinates, interactive behaviors, and postures within and across sessions. The use of location coordinates allowed us to derive measures of spatial exploration, including distance traveled, speed of travel, dispersion in the room, and distance between the mother and the infant. We related measures of spatial exploration to their interactive behaviors with toys, furniture and each other, their use of, and transitions between, postures, and the infants’ postural stabilization during play as they moved about the room. Results showed that predominantly with the acquisition of hands-and-knees crawling, infants increased their spatial exploration of the room, which was associated with concomitant increases in their interactive behaviors and postural changes. Mothers, on the other hand, showed an increase in spatial displacement in the room, but this increase was not associated with increased interactive behaviors or postural changes. This indicated that mothers’ spatial displacement was more likely driven by monitoring their child, and not active discovery of the room. As infants gained mobility, the distance between infant and mother increased. Mother-infant interactions and explorations therefore reorganized over time as infants gained motor skills