Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Challenges in Collaborative HRI for Remote Robot Teams

Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be beneficial, they need to be trusted to operate autonomously, performing tasks such as inspection and emergency response, thus reducing the number of personnel placed in harm's way. As remote robots are generally trusted less than robots in close-proximity, we present a solution to instil trust in the operator through a `mediator robot' that can exhibit social skills, alongside sophisticated visualisation techniques. In this position paper, we present general challenges and then take a closer look at one challenge in particular, discussing an initial study, which investigates the relationship between the level of control the supervisor hands over to the mediator robot and how this affects their trust. We show that the supervisor is more likely to have higher trust overall if their initial experience involves handing over control of the emergency situation to the robotic assistant. We discuss this result, here, as well as other challenges and interaction techniques for human-robot collaboration.Comment: 9 pages. Peer reviewed position paper accepted in the CHI 2019 Workshop: The Challenges of Working on Social Robots that Collaborate with People (SIRCHI2019), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2019, Glasgow, U

Brain-Computer interfaces: from research to consumer products

Brain-computer interfaces have recently made its way into a consumer setting where it could potentially reach new areas of impact. This dissertation addresses the question of how this change in setting impact the experience of the ethical concerns in researchers and consumer innovators. The concept of responsible research and innovation is a novel attempt at expanding the discussion of ethics to both research and innovation. This thesis argues that research settings and consumer innovation settings have different experiences of ethical concerns, which makes this combination a challenge. This thesis also argues that the brain-computer interface discourse has challenges when discussing ethical because they are not often explicitly addressing the nuances in experience there is between different settings. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of what these differences in understanding are and shows that significant changes can be made to reduce the gap between the two settings. This is done with the usage of the AREA which gives a broad understanding of how the ethical concerns are experienced in the two settings. By describing the nuances in the experience of ethical concerns in the two settings, this thesis discusses the impact on both the brain-computer interface discourse as well as the responsible research and innovation discourse.This project/research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Specific Grant Agreement No. 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : User Acceptance Testing of Course and Class Approval Online Pilot (C-CAP)

The PiP Evaluation Plan documents four distinct evaluative strands, the first of which entails an evaluation of the PiP system pilot (WP7:37 – Systems & tool evaluation). Phase 1 of this evaluative strand focused on the heuristic evaluation of the PiP Course and Class Approval Online Pilot system (C-CAP) and was completed in December 2011. Phase 2 of the evaluation is broadly concerned with "user acceptance testing". This entails exploring the extent to which C-CAP functionality meets users' expectations within specific curriculum design tasks, as well as eliciting data on C-CAP's overall usability and its ability to support academics in improving the quality of curricula. The general evaluative approach adopted therefore employs a combination of standard Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) approaches and specially designed data collection instruments, including protocol analysis, stimulated recall and pre- and post-test questionnaire instruments. This brief report summarises the methodology deployed, presents the results of the evaluation and discusses their implications for the further development of C-CAP

Robotic Rabbit Companions: amusing or a nuisance?

Most of the studies in human-robot interaction involve controlled experiments in a laboratory and only a limited number of studies have put robotic companions into people’s home. Introducing robots into a real-life environment does not only pose many technical challenges but also raises several methodological issues. And even though there might be a gain in ecological validity of the findings, there are other drawbacks that limit the validity of the results. In this paper we reflect on some of these issues based on the experience we gained in the SERA project where a robotic companion was put in the homes of a few people for ten days. We try to draw some general lessons from this experience

Designing a mobile interface for a deaf user

My MA thesis is a collaborative research and design project about designing a mobile application to bridge the communication gap between Deaf people and healthcare professionals in South Africa. It explores health knowledge transfer problems faced by the Deaf community during a health consultation and aims to solve them by the means of a mobile application interface designed to aid communication. Healthcare, a basic human right, is violated when healthcare professionals don't find the means to communicate health information to Deaf people in a medium that they understand. This communication problem is due to a language barrier between the Deaf and the hearing world. A Deaf person uses sign language as his or her primary form of communication, yet there is a lack of sign language interpreters at healthcare centers. Sign language is the first language of Deaf people because of which a number of Deaf communities all over the world are only able to use a very basic level of written or spoken language. Moreover, medical information is complex and the factors mentioned above make it difficult to transfer health knowledge between healthcare professionals and Deaf patients, leading to poor health conditions of the latter. In order to solve this problem, my thesis explores ways of transferring medical knowledge using visual methods of communication as opposed to text based communication, via a mobile application. Since health knowledge is a vast topic, for my project I focus on only one medical condition, Diabetes type 2. This choice is determined by the fact that Diabetes is a lifelong condition that requires regular hospital visits and timely communication and treatment. A core aspect of my research is finding ways to design interactive interfaces that better suit the requirements of the Deaf user than they do at present, using a process of benchmarking, co-creation, interviews and usability testing. My project documents insights from desk and field research which are used to design and test a prototype of the mobile application with Deaf users in South Africa

Participatory healthcare service design and innovation

This paper describes the use of Experience Based Design (EBD), a participatory methodology for healthcare service design, to improve the outpatient service for older people at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The challenges in moving from stories to designing improvements, co-designing for wicked problems, and the effects of participants' limited scopes of action are discussed. It concludes by proposing that such problems are common to participatory service design in large institutions and recommends that future versions of EBD incorporate more tools to promote divergent thinking

Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things?

This study examines the question of whether tags can be useful in the process of information retrieval. Participants searched a social bookmarking tool specialising in academic articles (CiteULike) and an online journal database (Pubmed). Participant actions were captured using screen capture software and they were asked to describe their search process. Users did make use of tags in their search process, as a guide to searching and as hyperlinks to potentially useful articles. However, users also made use of controlled vocabularies in the journal database to locate useful search terms and of links to related articles supplied by the database

What makes re-finding information difficult? A study of email re-finding

Re-nding information that has been seen or accessed before is a task which can be relatively straight-forward, but often it can be extremely challenging, time-consuming and frustrating. Little is known, however, about what makes one re-finding task harder or easier than another. We performed a user study to learn about the contextual factors that influence users' perception of task diculty in the context of re-finding email messages. 21 participants were issued re-nding tasks to perform on their own personal collections. The participants' responses to questions about the tasks combined with demographic data and collection statistics for the experimental population provide a rich basis to investigate the variables that can influence the perception of diculty. A logistic regression model was developed to examine the relationships be- tween variables and determine whether any factors were associated with perceived task diculty. The model reveals strong relationships between diculty and the time lapsed since a message was read, remembering when the sought-after email was sent, remembering other recipients of the email, the experience of the user and the user's ling strategy. We discuss what these findings mean for the design of re-nding interfaces and future re-finding research