406 research outputs found
Running to Your Own Beat:An Embodied Approach to Auditory Display Design
Personal fitness trackers represent a multi-billion-dollar industry, predicated on devices for assisting users in achieving their health goals. However, most current products only offer activity tracking and measurement of performance metrics, which do not ultimately address the need for technique related assistive feedback in a cost-effective way. Addressing this gap in the design space for assistive run training interfaces is also crucial in combating the negative effects of Forward Head Position, a condition resulting from mobile device use, with a rapid growth of incidence in the population. As such, Auditory Displays (AD) offer an innovative set of tools for creating such a device for runners. ADs present the opportunity to design interfaces which allow natural unencumbered motion, detached from the mobile or smartwatch screen, thus making them ideal for providing real-time assistive feedback for correcting head posture during running. However, issues with AD design have centred around overall usability and user-experience, therefore, in this thesis an ecological and embodied approach to AD design is presented as a vehicle for designing an assistive auditory interface for runners, which integrates seamlessly into their everyday environments
Soundscape in Urban Forests
This Special Issue of Forests explores the role of soundscapes in urban forested areas. It is comprised of 11 papers involving soundscape studies conducted in urban forests from Asia and Africa. This collection contains six research fields: (1) the ecological patterns and processes of forest soundscapes; (2) the boundary effects and perceptual topology; (3) natural soundscapes and human health; (4) the experience of multi-sensory interactions; (5) environmental behavior and cognitive disposition; and (6) soundscape resource management in forests
Northeastern Illinois University, Academic Catalog 2023-2024
https://neiudc.neiu.edu/catalogs/1064/thumbnail.jp
Landscapes of Affective Interaction: Young Children's Enactive Engagement with Body Metaphors
Empirical research into embodied meaning making suggests specific
sensorimotor experiences can support children’s understanding of abstract
science ideas. This view is aligned with enactive and grounded cognition
perspectives, both centred in the view that our ability to conceptualise emerges
from our experiences of interaction with our environment. While much of this
research has focused on understanding action and action processes in
individual children or children in pairs, less attention has been paid to affective
dimensions of young children’s group interaction, and how this relates to
meaning making with body metaphors. Indeed, Gallagher describes how no
action exists in a vacuum, but rather revolves around a complex web of
affective-pragmatic features comprising a ‘Landscape of Interaction’ (2020,
p.42).
This research project addresses gaps in research in understanding young
children’s affective engagement from an enactivist cognition perspective. It
takes a Design-Based Research approach with an iterative design orientation
to examine young children’s interaction with multisensory body-based
metaphors through an embodied participation framework. A series of empirical
studies with young children, aged 2-7 years, comprising of experiential
workshops, build iteratively upon each other. A novel theoretically informed
method, Affective Imagination in Motion, is developed involving several
purpose-built multisensory body metaphors prompts to enable access to
dimensions of young children’s affective engagement.
This research makes theoretical and methodological contributions. It extends
the theoretical notion of ‘affect’ from enactive and grounded cognition
perspectives through identifying key interactive processes in young children’s
engagement with multisensory action metaphors. In addition, the novel
method offers a contribution as a way of ‘looking’ at affect within a group
situation from affective-pragmatic and social embodiment perspectives.
Finally, the research contributes to embodied learning design frameworks
offering a guideline for designers wishing to inform their work from enactive
cognition perspective
Desktop vs. Headset: A Comparative Study of User Experience and Engagement for Flexibility Exercise in Virtual Reality
This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) technology for flexibility exercise and compare the physical outcomes, user experience, and engagement of VR desktops and VR headsets. The VR exercise application was designed using motion capture technology and exported to different VR devices. Each of the devices was used by 30 participants to perform a flexibility exercise in VR. Physical outcomes were measured using the sit-and-reach test, and user experience and engagement were evaluated using questionnaires and group discussions. The results showed that VR desktop participants had higher sit-and-reach scores. However, VR headset participants reported a more immersive experience (reality judgment) and motivation (value and usefulness). They also had higher engagement (focused attention and reward) levels than VR desktop participants. There were no significant differences between the two approaches in terms of enjoyment, effort, pressure, choice, correspondence, absorption, perceived usability, and aesthetic appeal. The study highlights the importance of considering physical outcomes, user experience, and engagement by comparing two different VR approaches for flexibility exercise. Further research is needed to explore the limitations and potential benefits of VR technology for physical activity. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-04-03 Full Text: PD
Occupational Therapy Strategies for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome
Effectiveness of occupational therapy strategies with adults with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome
Sensitive and Makeable Computational Materials for the Creation of Smart Everyday Objects
The vision of computational materials is to create smart everyday objects using the materi- als that have sensing and computational capabilities embedded into them. However, today’s development of computational materials is limited because its interfaces (i.e. sensors) are unable to support wide ranges of human interactions , and withstand the fabrication meth- ods of everyday objects (e.g. cutting and assembling). These barriers hinder citizens from creating smart every day objects using computational materials on a large scale.
To overcome the barriers, this dissertation presents the approaches to develop compu- tational materials to be 1) sensitive to a wide variety of user interactions, including explicit interactions (e.g. user inputs) and implicit interactions (e.g. user contexts), and 2) makeable against a wide range of fabrication operations, such cutting and assembling. I exemplify the approaches through five research projects on two common materials, textile and wood. For each project, I explore how a material interface can be made to sense user inputs or activities, and how it can be optimized to balance sensitivity and fabrication complexity. I discuss the sensing algorithms and machine learning model to interpret the sensor data as high-level abstraction and interaction. I show the practical applications of developed computational materials. I demonstrate the evaluation study to validate their performance and robustness.
In the end of this dissertation, I summarize the contributions of my thesis and discuss future directions for the vision of computational materials
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