Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Interação em realidade virtual usando dispositivos móveis

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telem aticaTraditionally, keyboards and 3D controllers such as the Wiimote have been used to interact with Virtual Environments. Despite being simple to use, these types of input devices have a number of limitations: xed layout, require the user to remember the mapping between buttons and functions and indirect manipulation of virtual objects, being done using buttons. This dissertation proposes the use of mobile devices to interact with immersive virtual environments. These devices allow to have exible interfaces and the touchscreen combined with the onboard sensors in smartphones and tablets allow for new interaction styles, in tasks such as direct selection and manipulation of virtual objects and navigation. In order to validate the system a Virtual Museum application was developed. Based on this system two studies addressing two open research questions related to immersive virtual environments: the user virtual embodiment and the interaction methods to use for navigation and selection. This dissertation provides new insights into the e ects of virtual embodiment and even if is not always as robust as the use of 3D controllers, the interaction using mobile devices is viable and o ers several interesting interaction possibilities.Tradicionalmente, teclados e comandos 3D como o Wiimote têm sido usados para interagir com Ambientes Virtuais. Apesar de serem simples de usar, dispositivos deste tipo têm algumas limitações: layout fixo, necessidade de os utilizadores se lembrarem do mapeamento entre cada botão e função e manipulação de objetos virtuais indireta sendo feita através de botões. Esta dissertação propõe o uso de dispositivos móveis para interação com ambientes virtuais imersivos. Estes dispositivos apresentam algumas vantagens, nomeadamente permitem a existência de interfaces flexíveis e os touchscreens juntamente com os sensores internos dos smartphones e tablets permitem novos estilos de interação, para tarefas como a seleção e manipulação direta de objetos virtuais e navegação. Foi desenvolvida uma aplicação de Museu Virtual para validar o sistema proposto. Com base neste sistema foram feitos dois estudos que abordam duas questões ainda em aberto na área dos Ambientes Virtuais Imersivos: a representação virtual do corpo do utilizador e os métodos de interação a usar para navegação e seleção. Esta dissertação apresenta resultados sobre os efeitos da personificação virtual e mostra que apesar de por vezes não ser tão robusta como o uso de comandos 3D, a interação usando dispositivos móveis e viável e oferece v arias possibilidades de interação interessantes

Low-cost eye tracker

Eye trackers have useful applications in numerous industries and fields of research. However, while commercial eye trackers currently exist for these applications, they are exceedingly expensive, limiting their application to high-end speciality products and thus making them unsuitable as a low-cost solution. For this reason, a low-cost eye tracker utilising open-source software would greatly increase the accessibility of eye trackers to those who would benefit from the technology. Modern technology advancements have enabled off-the-shelf video hardware such as computer webcams and consumer video cameras to be suitable for use in an eye tracking hardware configuration while still maintaining their low cost and high accessibility. Furthermore, the development of open-source eye tracking software to operate in conjunction with this hardware has significantly facilitated the implementation of such hardware in the eye tracking system. With the increasing dependence on computers and technology in everyday life, it is of increasing importance to study software usability testing and human-computer interaction to enhance the user experience. This dissertation details the development of a low-cost eye tracker using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software to analyse how learning tools are used by students. Throughout this process, a low-cost head-mounted eye tracking hardware configuration was designed and developed. Implementation of the hardware was achieved using the ITU Gaze Tracker software, developed by the ITU University of Copenhagen (San Agustin, Skovsgaard, Mollenbach, Barret, Tall, Hansen & Hansen 2010). The Gaze Analyser software was also developed to analyse and visualise fixations identified in the raw eye tracking data

Cross-display attention switching in mobile interaction with large displays

Mobile devices equipped with features (e.g., camera, network connectivity and media player) are increasingly being used for different tasks such as web browsing, document reading and photography. While the portability of mobile devices makes them desirable for pervasive access to information, their small screen real-estate often imposes restrictions on the amount of information that can be displayed and manipulated on them. On the other hand, large displays have become commonplace in many outdoor as well as indoor environments. While they provide an efficient way of presenting and disseminating information, they provide little support for digital interactivity or physical accessibility. Researchers argue that mobile phones provide an efficient and portable way of interacting with large displays, and the latter can overcome the limitations of the small screens of mobile devices by providing a larger presentation and interaction space. However, distributing user interface (UI) elements across a mobile device and a large display can cause switching of visual attention and that may affect task performance. This thesis specifically explores how the switching of visual attention across a handheld mobile device and a vertical large display can affect a single user's task performance during mobile interaction with large displays. It introduces a taxonomy based on the factors associated with the visual arrangement of Multi Display User Interfaces (MDUIs) that can influence visual attention switching during interaction with MDUIs. It presents an empirical analysis of the effects of different distributions of input and output across mobile and large displays on the user's task performance, subjective workload and preference in the multiple-widget selection task, and in visual search tasks with maps, texts and photos. Experimental results show that the selection of multiple widgets replicated on the mobile device as well as on the large display, versus those shown only on the large display, is faster despite the cost of initial attention switching in the former. On the other hand, a hybrid UI configuration where the visual output is distributed across the mobile and large displays is the worst, or equivalent to the worst, configuration in all the visual search tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best (i.e., tied with a mobile-only configuration) in text- and photo-search tasks

An experience in using a tool for evaluating a large set of natural language requirements

Requirements analysis is an important phase in a software project. It is often performed in an informal way by specialists who review documents looking for ambiguities, technical inconsistencies and incompleteness. Automatic evaluation of Natural Language (NL) requirements documents has been proposed as a means to improve the quality of the system under development. We show how the tool QuARS Express, introduced in a quality analysis process, is able to manage complex and structured requirement documents containing metadata, and to produce an analysis report rich of categorized information that points out linguistic defects and indications about the writing style of NL requirements. In this paper we report our experience using this tool in the automatic analysis of a large collection of natural language requirements, produced inside the MODCONTROL project