9,295 research outputs found

    Running to Your Own Beat:An Embodied Approach to Auditory Display Design

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    Personal fitness trackers represent a multi-billion-dollar industry, predicated on devices for assisting users in achieving their health goals. However, most current products only offer activity tracking and measurement of performance metrics, which do not ultimately address the need for technique related assistive feedback in a cost-effective way. Addressing this gap in the design space for assistive run training interfaces is also crucial in combating the negative effects of Forward Head Position, a condition resulting from mobile device use, with a rapid growth of incidence in the population. As such, Auditory Displays (AD) offer an innovative set of tools for creating such a device for runners. ADs present the opportunity to design interfaces which allow natural unencumbered motion, detached from the mobile or smartwatch screen, thus making them ideal for providing real-time assistive feedback for correcting head posture during running. However, issues with AD design have centred around overall usability and user-experience, therefore, in this thesis an ecological and embodied approach to AD design is presented as a vehicle for designing an assistive auditory interface for runners, which integrates seamlessly into their everyday environments

    Facilitating prosociality through technology: Design to promote digital volunteerism

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    Volunteerism covers many activities involving no financial rewards for volunteers but which contribute to the common good. There is existing work in designing technology for volunteerism in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) and related disciplines that focuses on motivation to improve performance, but it does not account for volunteer wellbeing. Here, I investigate digital volunteerism in three case studies with a focus on volunteer motivation, engagement, and wellbeing. My research involved volunteers and others in the volunteering context to generate recommendations for a volunteer-centric design for digital volunteerism. The thesis has three aims: 1. To investigate motivational aspects critical for enhancing digital volunteers’ experiences 2. To identify digital platform attributes linked to volunteer wellbeing 3. To create guidelines for effectively supporting volunteer engagement in digital volunteering platforms In the first case study I investigate the design of a chat widget for volunteers working in an organisation with a view to develop a design that improves their workflow and wellbeing. The second case study investigates the needs, motivations, and wellbeing of volunteers who help medical students improve their medical communication skills. An initial mixed-methods study was followed by an experiment comparing two design strategies to improve volunteer relatedness; an important indicator of wellbeing. The third case study looks into volunteer needs, experiences, motivations, and wellbeing with a focus on volunteer identity and meaning-making on a science-based research platform. I then analyse my findings from these case studies using the lens of care ethics to derive critical insights for design. The key contributions of this thesis are design strategies and critical insights, and a volunteer-centric design framework to enhance the motivation, wellbeing and engagement of digital volunteers

    Understanding the Potential of Sport for Promoting Physical Activity and Psychological Well-Being in Middle-Aged and Older Adults

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    Insufficient physical activity is considered a global public health challenge. This thesis highlights that, for middle-aged and older adults, sport participation is associated with a wide range of psychosocial benefits. Then, the thesis offers insight into the potential of walking sport programmes to promote health-enhancing physical activity in middle-aged and older adults. Recommendations are provided to promote the appeal, feasibility, and sustainability of walking sport programmes in community-based settings

    Soundscape in Urban Forests

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    This Special Issue of Forests explores the role of soundscapes in urban forested areas. It is comprised of 11 papers involving soundscape studies conducted in urban forests from Asia and Africa. This collection contains six research fields: (1) the ecological patterns and processes of forest soundscapes; (2) the boundary effects and perceptual topology; (3) natural soundscapes and human health; (4) the experience of multi-sensory interactions; (5) environmental behavior and cognitive disposition; and (6) soundscape resource management in forests

    Quantified Canine: Inferring Dog Personality From Wearables

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    Being able to assess dog personality can be used to, for example, match shelter dogs with future owners, and personalize dog activities. Such an assessment typically relies on experts or psychological scales administered to dog owners, both of which are costly. To tackle that challenge, we built a device called "Patchkeeper" that can be strapped on the pet's chest and measures activity through an accelerometer and a gyroscope. In an in-the-wild deployment involving 12 healthy dogs, we collected 1300 hours of sensor activity data and dog personality test results from two validated questionnaires. By matching these two datasets, we trained ten machine-learning classifiers that predicted dog personality from activity data, achieving AUCs in [0.63-0.90], suggesting the value of tracking the psychological signals of pets using wearable technologies.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, 4 table

    International Academic Symposium of Social Science 2022

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    This conference proceedings gathers work and research presented at the International Academic Symposium of Social Science 2022 (IASSC2022) held on July 3, 2022, in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia. The conference was jointly organized by the Faculty of Information Management of Universiti Teknologi MARA Kelantan Branch, Malaysia; University of Malaya, Malaysia; Universitas Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Jakarta, Indonesia; Universitas Ngudi Waluyo, Indonesia; Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges, Philippines; and UCSI University, Malaysia. Featuring experienced keynote speakers from Malaysia, Australia, and England, this proceeding provides an opportunity for researchers, postgraduate students, and industry practitioners to gain knowledge and understanding of advanced topics concerning digital transformations in the perspective of the social sciences and information systems, focusing on issues, challenges, impacts, and theoretical foundations. This conference proceedings will assist in shaping the future of the academy and industry by compiling state-of-the-art works and future trends in the digital transformation of the social sciences and the field of information systems. It is also considered an interactive platform that enables academicians, practitioners and students from various institutions and industries to collaborate

    Shaping the auditory peripersonal space with motor planning in immersive virtual reality

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    Immersive audio technologies require personalized binaural synthesis through headphones to provide perceptually plausible virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) simulations. We introduce and apply for the first time in VR contexts the quantitative measure called premotor reaction time (pmRT) for characterizing sonic interactions between humans and the technology through motor planning. In the proposed basic virtual acoustic scenario, listeners are asked to react to a virtual sound approaching from different directions and stopping at different distances within their peripersonal space (PPS). PPS is highly sensitive to embodied and environmentally situated interactions, anticipating the motor system activation for a prompt preparation for action. Since immersive VR applications benefit from spatial interactions, modeling the PPS around the listeners is crucial to reveal individual behaviors and performances. Our methodology centered around the pmRT is able to provide a compact description and approximation of the spatiotemporal PPS processing and boundaries around the head by replicating several well-known neurophysiological phenomena related to PPS, such as auditory asymmetry, front/back calibration and confusion, and ellipsoidal action fields

    AR-MoCap: Using augmented reality to support motion capture acting

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    Technology is disrupting the way films involving visual effects are produced. Chroma-key, LED walls, motion capture (mocap), 3D visual storyboards, and simulcams are only a few examples of the many changes introduced in the cinema industry over the last years. Although these technologies are getting commonplace, they are presenting new, unexplored challenges to the actors. In particular, when mocap is used to record the actors’ movements with the aim of animating digital character models, an increase in the workload can be easily expected for people on stage. In fact, actors have to largely rely on their imagination to understand what the digitally created characters will be actually seeing and feeling. This paper focuses on this specific domain, and aims to demonstrate how Augmented Reality (AR) can be helpful for actors when shooting mocap scenes. To this purpose, we devised a system named AR-MoCap that can be used by actors for rehearsing the scene in AR on the real set before actually shooting it. Through an Optical See-Through Head- Mounted Display (OST-HMD), an actor can see, e.g., the digital characters of other actors wearing mocap suits overlapped in real- time to their bodies. Experimental results showed that, compared to the traditional approach based on physical props and other cues, the devised system can help the actors to position themselves and direct their gaze while shooting the scene, while also improving spatial and social presence, as well as perceived effectiveness
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