Designing for physically disabled users: benefits from human motion capture – a case study

International audiencePurpose: The present study aimed to improve the design of an interface that may help disabled children to play a musical instrument. The main point is to integrate human motion capture in the design process. Method: The participant performed 20 pointing movements toward four selected locations. A three one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed in order to determine the most efficient input location. For each button position, we compared (1) the reaction time (RT), (2) the movement time (MT), and (3) the spatial variability of the movements. Results: According to the results obtained for RT and MT, one position was the most efficient button location in order to produce efficient movements. Conclusions: As the case study showed, combining the 3D motion capture system and the statistical analysis led to help the designers their design methodology and crucial choices

THE COMPARISON BETWEEN ERROR-LESS LEARNING AND ERRORFUL LEARNING IN VIRTUAL REALITY ON POKÉMON THEME

We discuss the feasibility of cognitive training in the virtual reality (VR) environment by comparing both error-less (EL) and errorful (EF) ways with Pokémon characters as training material. We developed a VR environment for experiencing the procedural and a questionnaire for collecting data. We tested the performance of this application as a preliminary study and received the feedbacks from participants, who are young student. We found firstly that they could be engaged in the cognitive training with Pokémon theme. Secondly, they showed a better training effect under EL condition although they found the training under EF condition more fun than that under EL condition. Thirdly, participants were fond of the VR device as a presenting way. We plan to carry out another experiment with a modified version to collect feedbacks from the healthy elderly. Accordingly, we believe that the proposed approach is acceptable in practice. From this perspective, we expect that our work can benefit the elderly by attracting them to take part in such EL-based exercises

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe ability to navigate without getting lost is an important aspect of quality of life. This dissertation evaluated how one mobility-related challenge-the increased demands of keeping oneself safe while walking with degraded vision (risk monitoring)- affects spatial learning. I proposed that spatial learning deficits result from attention competition. In Experiment 1, participants walked through two paths in a real-world indoor environment: one with simulated degraded vision, one with normal vision. Memory was greater when navigating with normal compared to degraded vision. Experiment 2 evaluated the role of risk-monitoring. Participants performed the learning task while guided (low risk- monitoring demands) or independently (high risk-monitoring demands). Access to visual information was equated for each path; half of the participants performed both trials with normal vision and half with simulated low vision. Memory was better when guided versus unguided, only in the low-vision condition, suggesting that mobility-risk demands affect spatial learning. In Experiment 3, participants walked while performing an auditory listening task both with simulated degraded vision and with normal vision. Auditory performance was poorer when navigating with simulated degraded vision, suggesting increased cognitive demands with degraded vision. Experiment 4 tested additional attentional resources that were needed when risk monitoring demands are higher. Participants with simulated low vision walked half the paths guided, half unguided. Auditory task error rates were higher in the unguided condition, suggesting more attention is required to navigate with high compared to low demands of risk monitoring. Experiment 5 used a mediational analysis to test whether attention task errors predicted spatial learning errors when each participant performed both tasks in a single experiment. Results from Experiment 5 replicated Experiments 2 and 4, but the mediational analysis results were not consistent with the hypothesis. These results are likely due to experimental design issues, but the causal role of attentional demands on spatial learning outcomes remains an open question. Together, these studies suggest that more attention is required and spatial learning is impaired when navigating with degraded viewing. This work also suggests that the cognitive process of risk monitoring contributes to both the decrease in attention and memory for the environment

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

When humans are the exception: cross-species databases at the interface of biological and clinical research.

Author's post print appears courtesy of Sage Publications. Please cite published version available at: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/2/214.abstractCross-species comparison has long been regarded as a stepping-stone for medical research, enabling the discovery and testing of prospective treatments before they undergo clinical trial on humans. Post-genomic medicine has made cross-species comparison crucial in another respect: the 'community databases' developed to collect and disseminate data on model organisms are now often used as a template for the dissemination of data on humans and as a tool for comparing results of medical significance across the human-animal boundary. This paper identifies and discusses four key problems encountered by database curators when integrating human and non-human data within the same database: (1) picking criteria for what counts as reliable evidence, (2) selecting metadata, (3) standardising and describing research materials and (4) choosing nomenclature to classify data. An analysis of these hurdles reveals epistemic disagreement and controversies underlying cross-species comparisons, which in turn highlight important differences in the experimental cultures of biologists and clinicians trying to make sense of these data. By considering database development through the eyes of curators, this study casts new light on the complex conjunctions of biological and clinical practice, model organisms and human subjects, and material and virtual sources of evidence--thus emphasizing the fragmented, localized and inherently translational nature of biomedicine.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Behavioral Sex Difference in Healthy Sprauge-Dawley Rats

Recently, the NIH has pushed for both sexes of a species to be incorporated into behavioral experiments. This push came as a result of an unchecked exclusion of females in experimentation. In rat studies, it is a common argument that females are more variable than males due to the presence of their estrous cycle. This study set out to evaluate this claim, and provide sex differences data for a variety of motor, anxiety, and cognitive behavioral tests. No sex differences in motor or anxiety behavior were found between the sexes. Males performed significantly better on the spontaneous alternation test of spatial memory, but had no differences on other cognitive tasks including novel object recognition and the T-maze learning test. While the estrous cycle of females was not monitored in the current study, no significant sex differences in variability of behavioral responding were found, disputing the claim that females are more variable than males. The results of this study will help to dispel the bias in rat model research, and thus encourage the production of more accurate behavioral data

The Unfinished Business of Anna Kingsford: Science, Enchantment, and Experiments on Animals

The project takes seriously Dr Anna Kingsford’s (1846-1888) claim that vivisection is a type of sorcery and science, a type of occult or spiritual undertaking believing that the assertion, which gained currency during the 19th–century antivivisection movement and is now overlooked, is yet unfinished and therefore a potentially powerful figuration for current antivivisectionists. To that end, the dissertation provides a critical and intersectional reading of the 19th-century British and European antivivisection movement, the fin de siècle occult revival, and Kingsford’s role in each, often working to bring these worlds together. This historical analysis includes an examination of Victorian attitudes to the period’s changing understanding of gender, species, race, and science. Building on this historical foundation, the dissertation will provide a theoretical discussion of Kingsford’s contemporary resonances with emerging disciplines in the environmental and posthumanities, including critical animal studies, material feminism, feminist posthumanism, and science and technology studies. Many theorists in these fields are interested in reappraising the roles of affect, enchantment, mysticism, and wonder in ethical thinking and human-animal-environmental relations. This project builds on these historical and theoretical insights by providing an “enchanted” analysis of the contemporary laboratory space, experiments on animals, and a reading of three case studies of ongoing animal experimentation paradigms (i.e., maternal deprivation, learned helplessness, and the organizational-activational hypothesis of homosexuality) which I argue lend themselves to a Kingsford-inspired analysis. Furthermore, this project articulates a novel “enchanted animal ethic” involving a feminist and neo-Spinozist articulation of human-animal and environmental ethics that makes space for mystical, non-secular modes of meaning-making, care-centered multispecies community building, and social and political movements. Finally, the project and an enchanted understanding of animal ethics will be useful to interdisciplinary scholars and advocates seeking a paradigm change in the sciences away from experiments on animals and towards a more humane and efficacious science as well as more egalitarian and meaningful relationships with animals and the more-than-human world

The effects of long-term cognitive training on the behaviour and welfare of goats

Within animal husbandry, the biological needs of animals are rarely met. Captive housing environments are often barren and provide animals only with the basic requirements. The introduction of cognitively challenging tasks has been suggested to put captive animals in a position where they can engage evolved cognitive skills and actively control some aspects of their environment. Current evidence suggests that frequent exposure to cognitive stimulation not only constitutes a need, but also has potential positive effects on the welfare of animals. First results indicate that by increasing behavioural flexibility and reducing stress reactivity, cognitive stimulation could improve an animal’s ability to adapt and cope with its environment. The introduction of automated cognitive enrichment devices in the housing environment of animals has been commonly used to provide cognitive stimulation to animals in captivity. Cognitive tests are increasingly conducted in many zoos as well as research facilities around the world to assess cognitive skills of many species. While the goal of cognitive enrichment devices is the engagement of cognitive skills, cognitive tests primarily aim to assess these. Cognitive tests often require animals to be isolated, handled by a human and/or given food reinforcement by a human. To assess the effects of cognitive testing on welfare, it has to be disentangled from these confounding factors (Chapter I). In this thesis, it was investigated whether goats want to be cognitively challenged and whether cognitive stimulation, by means of long-term exposure to cognitive tests, might positively affect behaviour and welfare. Goats are a good model species for this research question because lots of literature on their cognitive skills and their reaction to stress exists. For instance, genetic selection for certain traits such as high productivity can lead to reduced motivation to work for feed as well as reduced activity and stress reactivity. To account for this fact and to increase external validity and variability of our results, dairy goats selected for high productivity, and dwarf goats, not selected for production traits were tested. The first aim of this thesis was to assess whether goats have an intrinsic motivation for cognitive stimulation and thus work for food in a manipulation task that resembles their natural foraging behaviours and requires low effort (Chapter II). We examined whether domestic goats choose to open a sliding door to receive a reward rather than getting the same reward for free. This phenomenon, known as Contrafreeloading (CFL), has been explained by an intrinsic motivation to search for information, novelty, and challenges, amongst other things. Using an Item Response Tree generalized linear mixed model, we found that goats do work for food. Both selection lines of goats are similarly motivated to do so but differ in their performance over several trials. Farm animals must be able to deal with many stressors such as isolation or handling by humans. To investigate if cognitive stimulation has the potential to improve an animal’s ability to cope with these stressors and thus to reduce stress reactivity, we conditioned three treatment groups (Chapter III). Goats from the COG treatment group were tested individually in human-presented object-choice tests. Goats in the POS treatment were isolated individually in the same arena as COG goats but received rewards without being administered the object-choice tests. Goats in the ISO treatment group were isolated individually but neither received a reward nor were administered the tests. Subsequently, we tested all treatment groups in four tests: a Novel Arena test (NA), a Novel Object test (NO), a Novel Human test (NH) and a weighing test (WH) where goats were handled on a weigh scale. To increase external validity, we tested both selection lines (dairy and dwarf goats) at two research sites. We did not find evidence that long-term cognitive testing did have a substantial effect on stress reactivity in any of these tests. However, positive human contact seemed to increase boldness towards a novel object and increased reactivity towards handling in dwarf goats. Furthermore, we found that reactivity towards different stressors is strongly affected by selection line. As farm animals are exposed to different husbandry systems throughout their life, they need to be able to flexibly adapt to their surroundings. It has been proposed that mastering tasks successfully makes the animal proficient in manipulating its environment, and likely improves behavioural flexibility. Using the same three treatment groups as in Chapter III, we investigated whether cognitive testing improves behavioural flexibility of goats in two conceptually different cognitive tests, namely a spatial A-not-B detour test and an instrumental problem-solving test (Chapter IV). Again, we tested both selection lines (dairy and dwarf goats) at two research sites. We found that cognitive testing per se (COG) and exposure to a testing environment via human-given object-choice tests (POS) do not notably affect the performance in subsequent conceptually different cognitive tests in goats. In summary, we found that two different selection lines of domestic goats are similarly interested in cognitive stimulation and are willing to work for it. Further, we did not find general effects of cognitive testing (COG) per se or human-animal-interaction (POS) on responses to different stressors in goats in a novel arena test, a novel object test, a novel human test and during weighing on a scales. Selection lines did differ in some aspects of stress reactivity, but cognitive testing and positive human contact seem to have caused some differences to disappear in the POS and COG dwarf goats. With respect to the goats’ detour or problem-solving performance, we found only subtle differences between treatments. Finally, our multi-lab approach in Chapter III and IV allowed us to detect large variances between research sites that should be considered when making claims from data obtained on single sites