Effects of aging on identifying emotions conveyed by point-light walkers

M.G. was supported by EC FP7 HBP (grant 604102), PITN-GA-011-290011 (ABC) FP7-ICT-2013-10/ 611909 (KOROIBOT), and by GI 305/4-1 and KA 1258/15-1, and BMBF, FKZ: 01GQ1002A. K.S.P. was supported by a BBSRC New Investigator Grant. A.B.S. and P.J.B. were supported by an operating grant (528206) from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. The authors also thank Donna Waxman for her valuable help in data collection for all experiments described here.Peer reviewedPostprin

Retail Innovation - The never-ending road to success? A critical analysis of pitfalls and opportunities

This paper outlines the current and continuous changes occurring in the retail and social environment that necessitate the constant evolution of retail formats. Over recent years experiential retail formats have appeared in recognition of the increasing need to ‘entertain’ shoppers and satisfy their ‘leisure’ needs. A number of ‘best practice’ examples of such retail innovation have been presented. While such experiential innovations appear to be the ‘holy grail’ of modern retailing, they often require considerable investments of both capital and management time. This paper has used an autoethnographic approach to reflect upon the constraints and costs involved in the design, construction and operation of such a retail enterprise to provide a unique and holistic assessment of the benefits and challenges experiential innovation holds in developing new retail formats and initiatives. The findings from this research highlight a number of previously unreported pitfalls that are likely to be encountered, financially, operationally and symbolically. It is recommended that retailers continue to explore experiential innovations, but that they proceed with caution

Mobiles and wearables: owner biometrics and authentication

We discuss the design and development of HCI models for authentication based on gait and gesture that can be supported by mobile and wearable equipment. The paper proposes to use such biometric behavioral traits for partially transparent and continuous authentication by means of behavioral patterns. © 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s)

Gait Verification using Knee Acceleration Signals

A novel gait recognition method for biometric applications is proposed. The approach has the following distinct features. First, gait patterns are determined via knee acceleration signals, circumventing difficulties associated with conventional vision-based gait recognition methods. Second, an automatic procedure to extract gait features from acceleration signals is developed that employs a multiple-template classification method. Consequently, the proposed approach can adjust the sensitivity and specificity of the gait recognition system with great flexibility. Experimental results from 35 subjects demonstrate the potential of the approach for successful recognition. By setting sensitivity to be 0.95 and 0.90, the resulting specificity ranges from 1 to 0.783 and 1.00 to 0.945, respectively

The Complexity of Human Walking: A Knee Osteoarthritis Study

This study proposes a framework for deconstructing complex walking patterns to create a simple principal component space before checking whether the projection to this space is suitable for identifying changes from the normality. We focus on knee osteoarthritis, the most common knee joint disease and the second leading cause of disability. Knee osteoarthritis affects over 250 million people worldwide. The motivation for projecting the highly dimensional movements to a lower dimensional and simpler space is our belief that motor behaviour can be understood by identifying a simplicity via projection to a low principal component space, which may reflect upon the underlying mechanism. To study this, we recruited 180 subjects, 47 of which reported that they had knee osteoarthritis. They were asked to walk several times along a walkway equipped with two force plates that capture their ground reaction forces along 3 axes, namely vertical, anterior-posterior, and medio-lateral, at 1000 Hz. Data when the subject does not clearly strike the force plate were excluded, leaving 1–3 gait cycles per subject. To examine the complexity of human walking, we applied dimensionality reduction via Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis. The first principal component explains 34% of the variance in the data, whereas over 80% of the variance is explained by 8 principal components or more. This proves the complexity of the underlying structure of the ground reaction forces. To examine if our musculoskeletal system generates movements that are distinguishable between normal and pathological subjects in a low dimensional principal component space, we applied a Bayes classifier. For the tested cross-validated, subject-independent experimental protocol, the classification accuracy equals 82.62%. Also, a novel complexity measure is proposed, which can be used as an objective index to facilitate clinical decision making. This measure proves that knee osteoarthritis subjects exhibit more variability in the two-dimensional principal component space