Responsive and Emotive Wearable Technology: physiological data, devices and communication

My research practice and thesis investigates how wearable technology can be used to create new forms of nonverbal communication. Using devices developed through my practice, I explore how physiological data can be drawn from the body, then visualised and broadcast. I examine the opinions and requirements of potential users and observers of this technology, through qualitative responses in interviews and surveys from focus groups and field tests. I have analysed the resulting data to extract preferences and concerns, plus the requirements for the functionality and aesthetics of these devices. I discuss the social and cultural aspects of wearing such devices, as well as the issues, including how privacy may be affected and the implications of recording personal data. I examine my practice in the context of the work of the communities and practitioners in the field, and introduce two new terms to label two sub-sections of wearable technology. These are ‘responsive wearables’ and ‘emotive wearables’, and they form part of the distinctive contribution that I make. Reflecting on the evolution of my practice has led to other contributions regarding the development of wearable technology. Through this, I identify and share the insights into the disciplines and processes required for the fusion of technology and design successfully to evolve electronics, code and materials into research prototypes. I conclude by discussing findings from my practice, research and studies with potential users of emotive wearables. I comment on the impact that physiologically sensing wearable technology has on aspects of social interaction for the individual as well as for the wider community. I open the discussion on future research by revealing two new examples of emotive wearables — the AnemoneStarHeart and the ThinkerBelle EEG Amplifying Dress — which have evolved from pinpointing specific areas of the focus group and field test feedback that I undertook

Diversity and Inclusivity in the Age of Wearables: A Buzzword, a Myth, an Uncertain Reality

‘Wearable Technology’ is a buzzword of our contemporary era. It could be argued there are few examples of aesthetically pleasing devices that are designed to meet our needs and/or our consumer desires. However, do we focus on design and aesthetics of technology as a holistic action with the capacity to simultaneously engage conceptual and practical shifts that make our society a place with no boundaries? To design inclusively is to engage the user deeply throughout the design process, sharing our practices and amalgamating people’s unique knowledge as technological interventions. Design diversity and inclusion seems to be used interchangeably with two other terminologies, a) Universal Design and b) Design for All. The terms have a parallel purpose but their origin and use is distinguished in various parts of the world. For example, Inclusive Design is used within Europe and goes beyond age, ethnicity, gender, sex, and disabilities to focus on other excluded groups to deliver mainstream solutions. Inspired by the limited understanding and choices around aesthetics and personalisation in wearables, this article discusses how we use technology to empower individuals in a variety of contexts; to improve our way of living in the world, through a number of contextual resources and practice-research, which were devised and conducted to address women’s concerns and preferences on wearable technologies

Diversity and inclusivity in the age of wearables: A buzzword, a myth, an uncertain reality

‘Wearable Technology’ is a buzzword of our contemporary era. It could be argued there are few examples of aesthetically pleasing devices that are designed to meet our needs and/or our consumer desires. However, do we focus on design and aesthetics of technology as a holistic action with the capacity to simultaneously engage conceptual and practical shifts that make our society a place with no boundaries? To design inclusively is to engage the user deeply throughout the design process, sharing our practices and amalgamating people’s unique knowledge as technological interventions. Design diversity and inclusion seems to be used interchangeably with two other terminologies, a) Universal Design and b) Design for All. The terms have a parallel purpose but their origin and use is distinguished in various parts of the world. For example, Inclusive Design is used within Europe and goes beyond age, ethnicity, gender, sex, and disabilities to focus on other excluded groups to deliver mainstream solutions. Inspired by the limited understanding and choices around aesthetics and personalisation in wearables, this article discusses how we use technology to empower individuals in a variety of contexts; to improve our way of living in the world, through a number of contextual resources and practice-research, which were devised and conducted to address women’s concerns and preferences on wearable technologies

Le rôle de la mémoire à long terme dans la perception du temps

Le rôle de la mémoire à long terme (MLT) dans la perception temporelle est souvent éclipsé par d’autres processus cognitifs comme l’attention. Cette thèse visait donc à faire la lumière sur le rôle de la MLT en perception temporelle. Plus précisément, la thèse visait à étudier l’effet des connaissances propres à la durée sur une variété de jugements temporels. Pour ce faire, 4 expériences ont été réalisées, toutes avec des athlètes (coureurs et nageurs). Le recours aux athlètes permettait d’avoir accès à des participants ayant beaucoup de connaissances propres à la durée (en lien avec leur sport). Les quatre expériences démontrent un effet constant : les connaissances propres à la durée améliorent la perception temporelle. Ainsi, les expériences réalisées dans le cadre de cette thèse permettent d’affirmer qu’il est nécessaire de reconsidérer le rôle de la MLT dans la perception temporelle; les connaissances acquise au fil du temps, à force de répétitions, sont transférées en mémoire et utilisées subséquemment pour percevoir le temps

Fear Classification using Affective Computing with Physiological Information and Smart-Wearables

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorAmong the 17 Sustainable Development Goals proposed within the 2030 Agenda and adopted by all of the United Nations member states, the fifth SDG is a call for action to effectively turn gender equality into a fundamental human right and an essential foundation for a better world. It includes the eradication of all types of violence against women. Focusing on the technological perspective, the range of available solutions intended to prevent this social problem is very limited. Moreover, most of the solutions are based on a panic button approach, leaving aside the usage and integration of current state-of-the-art technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), affective computing, cyber-physical systems, and smart-sensors. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to provide new insight into the design and development of tools to prevent and combat Gender-based Violence risky situations and, even, aggressions, from a technological perspective, but without leaving aside the different sociological considerations directly related to the problem. To achieve such an objective, we rely on the application of affective computing from a realist point of view, i.e. targeting the generation of systems and tools capable of being implemented and used nowadays or within an achievable time-frame. This pragmatic vision is channelled through: 1) an exhaustive study of the existing technological tools and mechanisms oriented to the fight Gender-based Violence, 2) the proposal of a new smart-wearable system intended to deal with some of the current technological encountered limitations, 3) a novel fear-related emotion classification approach to disentangle the relation between emotions and physiology, and 4) the definition and release of a new multi-modal dataset for emotion recognition in women. Firstly, different fear classification systems using a reduced set of physiological signals are explored and designed. This is done by employing open datasets together with the combination of time, frequency and non-linear domain techniques. This design process is encompassed by trade-offs between both physiological considerations and embedded capabilities. The latter is of paramount importance due to the edge-computing focus of this research. Two results are highlighted in this first task, the designed fear classification system that employed the DEAP dataset data and achieved an AUC of 81.60% and a Gmean of 81.55% on average for a subjectindependent approach, and only two physiological signals; and the designed fear classification system that employed the MAHNOB dataset data achieving an AUC of 86.00% and a Gmean of 73.78% on average for a subject-independent approach, only three physiological signals, and a Leave-One-Subject-Out configuration. A detailed comparison with other emotion recognition systems proposed in the literature is presented, which proves that the obtained metrics are in line with the state-ofthe- art. Secondly, Bindi is presented. This is an end-to-end autonomous multimodal system leveraging affective IoT throughout auditory and physiological commercial off-theshelf smart-sensors, hierarchical multisensorial fusion, and secured server architecture to combat Gender-based Violence by automatically detecting risky situations based on a multimodal intelligence engine and then triggering a protection protocol. Specifically, this research is focused onto the hardware and software design of one of the two edge-computing devices within Bindi. This is a bracelet integrating three physiological sensors, actuators, power monitoring integrated chips, and a System- On-Chip with wireless capabilities. Within this context, different embedded design space explorations are presented: embedded filtering evaluation, online physiological signal quality assessment, feature extraction, and power consumption analysis. The reported results in all these processes are successfully validated and, for some of them, even compared against physiological standard measurement equipment. Amongst the different obtained results regarding the embedded design and implementation within the bracelet of Bindi, it should be highlighted that its low power consumption provides a battery life to be approximately 40 hours when using a 500 mAh battery. Finally, the particularities of our use case and the scarcity of open multimodal datasets dealing with emotional immersive technology, labelling methodology considering the gender perspective, balanced stimuli distribution regarding the target emotions, and recovery processes based on the physiological signals of the volunteers to quantify and isolate the emotional activation between stimuli, led us to the definition and elaboration of Women and Emotion Multi-modal Affective Computing (WEMAC) dataset. This is a multimodal dataset in which 104 women who never experienced Gender-based Violence that performed different emotion-related stimuli visualisations in a laboratory environment. The previous fear binary classification systems were improved and applied to this novel multimodal dataset. For instance, the proposed multimodal fear recognition system using this dataset reports up to 60.20% and 67.59% for ACC and F1-score, respectively. These values represent a competitive result in comparison with the state-of-the-art that deal with similar multi-modal use cases. In general, this PhD thesis has opened a new research line within the research group under which it has been developed. Moreover, this work has established a solid base from which to expand knowledge and continue research targeting the generation of both mechanisms to help vulnerable groups and socially oriented technology.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y Automática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: David Atienza Alonso.- Secretaria: Susana Patón Álvarez.- Vocal: Eduardo de la Torre Arnan

The Case for Public Interventions during a Pandemic

Funding Information: This work has been supported by Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions ITN AffecTech (ERC H2020 Project 1059 ID: 722022). Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.Within the field of movement sensing and sound interaction research, multi-user systems have gradually gained interest as a means to facilitate an expressive non-verbal dialogue. When tied with studies grounded in psychology and choreographic theory, we consider the qualities of interaction that foster an elevated sense of social connectedness, non-contingent to occupying one’s personal space. Upon reflection of the newly adopted social distancing concept, we orchestrate a technological intervention, starting with interpersonal distance and sound at the core of interaction. Materialised as a set of sensory face-masks, a novel wearable system was developed and tested in the context of a live public performance from which we obtain the user’s individual perspectives and correlate this with patterns identified in the recorded data. We identify and discuss traits of the user’s behaviour that were accredited to the system’s influence and construct four fundamental design considerations for physically distanced sound interaction. The study concludes with essential technical reflections, accompanied by an adaptation for a pervasive sensory intervention that is finally deployed in an open public space.publishersversionpublishe

BITE: Recipes for Remarkable Research

BITE: Recipes for remarkable research is an edited field book capturing the research, learning and experiences of an international network of scholars studying effective and creative research environments. The book encapsulates what it is that enables remarkable research, and offers, as Professor Lizbeth Goodman says, “practical, evidence-based instantiations of ideas and innovations” as well as theoretical knowledge. It is set out as a recipe book, with supporting academic papers and case studies.; Readership: Educational Researchers and their student

Recent Advancements in Augmented Reality for Robotic Applications: A Survey

Robots are expanding from industrial applications to daily life, in areas such as medical robotics, rehabilitative robotics, social robotics, and mobile/aerial robotics systems. In recent years, augmented reality (AR) has been integrated into many robotic applications, including medical, industrial, human–robot interactions, and collaboration scenarios. In this work, AR for both medical and industrial robot applications is reviewed and summarized. For medical robot applications, we investigated the integration of AR in (1) preoperative and surgical task planning; (2) image-guided robotic surgery; (3) surgical training and simulation; and (4) telesurgery. AR for industrial scenarios is reviewed in (1) human–robot interactions and collaborations; (2) path planning and task allocation; (3) training and simulation; and (4) teleoperation control/assistance. In addition, the limitations and challenges are discussed. Overall, this article serves as a valuable resource for working in the field of AR and robotic research, offering insights into the recent state of the art and prospects for improvement

Décision multicritère à base de traces pour les applications interactives à exécution adaptative

Our work deals with software architectures for adaptive interactive applications. We assume that one application is structured with contextual interaction sequences called situations. Users perform actions in successive situations to reach one or more predefined designer’s objectives. During its execution, it could happen that the user cannot fulfil designer’s logic because of some system’s blockings or missing data. Our challenge is to propose a method that chooses the most appropriate situation according to the given one. We propose to improve the decision-making process by using the generated traces during previous executions. These traces represent users’ interactions and system activity logs. A trace-based system collects and manages all users’ generated traces (logs). Our main contributions are: the design of a trace-based algorithm for criteria weighting; the design of an alternatives determination algorithm; the design and the formalisation of the users’ choice (using the trace-based subjective logic) and the system’s choice (using the trace-based PROMETHEE II) to classify all the identified alternatives and the aggregation of different choices to suggest to the user the right option to follow. A Tamagotchi case study is presented to validate our contributions.Nos travaux sont menés dans le cadre des architectures logicielles pour des applications interactives dont le principe général d’exécution adaptative a été défini au sein du laboratoire. Nous nous plaçons dans l’hypothèse où une application interactive est contextualisée au moyen de situations. L’utilisateur exécute des actions dans le contexte de situations successives pour avancer dans l’application interactive jusqu’à atteindre un ou plusieurs objectifs prédéfinis par le concepteur. Au cours de son déroulement, il se peut que l’utilisateur ne puisse plus continuer selon la logique du concepteur à cause des blocages du système ou une insuffisance de données pour poursuivre la logique d’exécution. Pour y remédier, un système d’aide à la décision est indispensable pour permettre au système et/ou à l’utilisateur de faire un choix adapté au contexte pour poursuivre l’exécution de l’application. Nous proposons d’améliorer le processus de décision en utilisant les traces des exécutions précédentes. Pendant l’exécution de l’application, un système à base de traces (système de gestion de traces) va collecter toutes les traces générées par l’utilisateur et les traces d’activité (les logs) au cours de l’interaction avec le système. Les contributions de nos travaux se situent à plusieurs niveaux : la conception d’un algorithme à base de traces pour la pondération des critères de décision ; la conception d’un algorithme de détermination des alternatives ; la définition et la formalisation des logiques de choix de l’utilisateur (utilisation de la logique subjective) et du système (PROMETHEE II à base de traces) pour classer les alternatives et l’agrégation des différents choix pour suggérer à l’utilisateur un choix final à exécuter. Un cas d’étude Tamagotchi est présenté pour valider nos contributions