5,550 research outputs found

    A Novel Reinforcement-Based Paradigm for Children to Teach the Humanoid Kaspar Robot

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    © The Author(s) 2019. This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00607-xThis paper presents a contribution to the active field of robotics research with the aim of supporting the development of social and collaborative skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). We present a novel experiment where the classical roles are reversed: in this scenario the children are the teachers providing positive or negative reinforcement to the Kaspar robot in order for the robot to learn arbitrary associations between different toy names and the locations where they are positioned. The objective of this work is to develop games which help children with ASD develop collaborative skills and also provide them tangible example to understand that sometimes learning requires several repetitions. To facilitate this game we developed a reinforcement learning algorithm enabling Kaspar to verbally convey its level of uncertainty during the learning process, so as to better inform the children interacting with Kaspar the reasons behind the successes and failures made by the robot. Overall, 30 Typically Developing (TD) children aged between 7 and 8 (19 girls, 11 boys) and 6 children with ASD performed 22 sessions (16 for TD; 6 for ASD) of the experiment in groups, and managed to teach Kaspar all associations in 2 to 7 trials. During the course of study Kaspar only made rare unexpected associations (2 perseverative errors and 1 win-shift, within a total of 272 trials), primarily due to exploratory choices, and eventually reached minimal uncertainty. Thus the robot's behavior was clear and consistent for the children, who all expressed enthusiasm in the experiment.Peer reviewe

    Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

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    In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

    CGAMES'2009

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    Hand Rehabilitation and Telemonitoring through Smart Toys

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    We describe here a platform for autonomous hand rehabilitation and telemonitoring of young patients. A toy embedding the electronics required to sense fingers pressure in different grasping modalities is the core element of this platform. The system has been realized following the user-centered design methodology taking into account stakeholder needs from start: clinicians require reliable measurements and the ability to get a picture remotely on rehabilitation progression; children have asked to interact with a pleasant and comfortable object that is easy to use, safe, and rewarding. These requirements are not antithetic, and considering both since the design phase has allowed the realization of a platform reliable to clinicians and keen to be used by young children

    Exploring the Affective Loop

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    Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

    Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

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    This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion
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