Personal Health Manager – Designing an intermediary sys-tem supporting health education and exercise programs

The Personal Health Manager (PHM) is an IT-based product-service system (combining face to face, automated and computer-mediated services, hardware, software) supporting health exercise programs in workplace health promotion. Major HCI design challenges are different target groups, unstructured tasks, various hardware and service components, and finding the limit between face to face and automated services –ranging from top quality human supervision to cheap, scalable automated services in hedonic systems. We present an iterative development and test design as well as first design ideas. Through this case we try to highlight that traditional MIS and HCI approaches „as is‟ are hardly applicable for designing IT-based product-service systems and that new approaches are necessary

A human computer interactions framework for biometric user identification

Computer assisted functionalities and services have saturated our world becoming such an integral part of our daily activities that we hardly notice them. In this study we are focusing on enhancements in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that can be achieved by natural user recognition embedded in the employed interaction models. Natural identification among humans is mostly based on biometric characteristics representing what-we-are (face, body outlook, voice, etc.) and how-we-behave (gait, gestures, posture, etc.) Following this observation, we investigate different approaches and methods for adapting existing biometric identification methods and technologies to the needs of evolving natural human computer interfaces

"Touch me": workshop on tactile user experience evaluation methods

In this workshop we plan to explore the possibilities and challenges of physical objects and materials for evaluating the User Experience (UX) of interactive systems. These objects should face shortfalls of current UX evaluation methods and allow for a qualitative (or even quantitative), playful and holistic evaluation of UX -- without interfering with the users' personal experiences during interaction. This provides a tactile enhancement to a solely visual stimulation as used in classical evaluation methods. The workshop serves as a basis for networking and community building with interested HCI researchers, designers and practitioners and should encourage further development of the field of tactile UX evaluation

Agents, Believability and Embodiment in Advanced Learning Environments

On the World Wide Web we see a growing number of general HCI interfaces, interfaces to educational or entertainment systems, interfaces to professional environments, etc., where an animated face, a cartoon character or a human-like virtual agent has the task to assist the user, to engage the user into a conversation or to educate the user. What can be said say about the effects a human-like agent has on a student's performance? We discuss agents, their intelligence, embodiment and interaction modalities. In particular, we introduce viewpoints and questions about roles embodied agents can play in educational environment

A Framework for collaborative writing with recording and post-meeting retrieval capabilities

From a HCI perspective, elucidating and supporting the context in which collaboration takes place is key to implementing successful collaborative systems. Synchronous collaborative writing usually takes place in contexts involving a “meeting” of some sort. Collaborative writing meetings can be face-to-face or, increasingly, remote Internet-based meetings. The latter presents software developers with the possibility of incorporating multimedia recording and information retrieval capabilities into the collaborative environment. The collaborative writing that ensues can be seen as an activity encompassing asynchronous as well as synchronous aspects. In order for revisions, information retrieval and other forms of post-meeting, asynchronous work to be effectively supported, the synchronous collaborative editor must be able to appropriately detect and record meeting metadata. This paper presents a collaborative editor that supports recording of user actions and explicit metadata production. Design and technical implications of introducing such capabilities are discussed with respect to document segmentation, consistency control, and awareness mechanisms

Microbial revolt:Redefining biolab tools and practices for more-than-human care ecologies

Recent work in HCI has called for deeper ethical considerations when engaging with more-than-human organisms in design. In this paper, we introduce Microbial Revolt, a provocative method to support reflection on the perspectives of organisms involved in HCI and design practice. By asking participants to consider the reality of a chosen organism in feral and lab environments and to redesign lab tools in order to account for their “non-participation”, we identified the manifestation of key epistemic differences between approaches to care and ecologies in typical design and biology research - as well as the potential for design and HCI to creatively redefine power dynamics in the lab. Further interviews revealed specific challenges and opportunities that designers and HCI researchers face in adapting practices to lab standards, and lab equipment to their practices, calling for a redefinition of tools, spaces and guidance to accommodate phenomenological perspectives and multiple modes of interaction with living organisms

Hand Detection using HSV Model

Natural Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is the demand of today’s technology oriented world. Detecting and tracking of face and hands are important for gesture recognition. Skin detection is a very popular and useful technique for detecting and tracking human-body parts. It has been much attention mainly because of its vast range of applications such as, face detection and tracking, naked people detection, hand detection and tracking, people retrieval in databases and Internet, etc. Many models and algorithms are being used for detection of face, hand and its gesture. Hand detection using model or classification is to build a decision rule that will discriminate between skin and non-skin pixels. Identifying skin color pixels involves finding the range of values for which most skin pixels would fall in a given color space. All external factors will be eliminated to detect the hand and its color in the image in complex background. Keywords: image segmentation, hand detection, hci, computer vision, RGB, HS