Exploring Archaeological Parks by Playing Games on Mobile Devices

Explore! is an m-learning system that combining e-learning and mobile computing allows middle school students to interact with learning materials in different ways while playing a game in an archaeological park. Design is based on user-centred and participatory approaches. The evaluation of Explore! through systematic field studies has shown that it is able to transform the visit to archaeological parks into a more complete and culturally rich experience. Thanks to the generality of the software infrastructure, games to be played in different parks can be easily created; to this aim, an Authoring Tool to be used by history experts and/or teachers has been developed

User-defined semantics for the design of IoT systems enabling smart interactive experiences

© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recently, automation has been adopted also for the provision of interactive and immersive experiences that actively involve the users. IoT technology thus becomes the key for Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs), i.e., immersive automated experiences created by orchestrating different devices to enable smart environments to fluidly react to the final users’ behavior. There are domains, e.g., cultural heritage, where these systems and the SIEs can support and provide several benefits. However, experts of such domains, while intrigued by the opportunity to induce SIEs, are facing tough challenges in their everyday work activities when they are required to automate and orchestrate IoT devices without the necessary coding skills. This paper presents a design approach that tries to overcome these difficulties thanks to the adoption of ontologies for defining Event-Condition-Action rules. More specifically, the approach enables domain experts to identify and specify properties of IoT devices through a user-defined semantics that, being closer to the domain experts’ background, facilitates them in automating the IoT devices behavior. We also present a study comparing three different interaction paradigms conceived to support the specification of user-defined semantics through a “transparent” use of ontologies. Based on the results of this study, we work out some lessons learned on how the proposed paradigms help domain experts express their semantics, which in turn facilitates the creation of interactive applications enabling SIEs.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

How future surgery will benefit from SARS-COV-2-related measures: a SPIGC survey conveying the perspective of Italian surgeons

COVID-19 negatively affected surgical activity, but the potential benefits resulting from adopted measures remain unclear. The aim of this study was to evaluate the change in surgical activity and potential benefit from COVID-19 measures in perspective of Italian surgeons on behalf of SPIGC. A nationwide online survey on surgical practice before, during, and after COVID-19 pandemic was conducted in March-April 2022 (NCT:05323851). Effects of COVID-19 hospital-related measures on surgical patients' management and personal professional development across surgical specialties were explored. Data on demographics, pre-operative/peri-operative/post-operative management, and professional development were collected. Outcomes were matched with the corresponding volume. Four hundred and seventy-three respondents were included in final analysis across 14 surgical specialties. Since SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, application of telematic consultations (4.1% vs. 21.6%; p < 0.0001) and diagnostic evaluations (16.4% vs. 42.2%; p < 0.0001) increased. Elective surgical activities significantly reduced and surgeons opted more frequently for conservative management with a possible indication for elective (26.3% vs. 35.7%; p < 0.0001) or urgent (20.4% vs. 38.5%; p < 0.0001) surgery. All new COVID-related measures are perceived to be maintained in the future. Surgeons' personal education online increased from 12.6% (pre-COVID) to 86.6% (post-COVID; p < 0.0001). Online educational activities are considered a beneficial effect from COVID pandemic (56.4%). COVID-19 had a great impact on surgical specialties, with significant reduction of operation volume. However, some forced changes turned out to be benefits. Isolation measures pushed the use of telemedicine and telemetric devices for outpatient practice and favored communication for educational purposes and surgeon-patient/family communication. From the Italian surgeons' perspective, COVID-related measures will continue to influence future surgical clinical practice

How do archaeologists work? A multimedia digital object to learn their investigation process

The aim of the CHAT ("Cultural Heritage fruition & e-learning applications of new Advanced (multimodal) Technologies") research project was to provide on smartphones context-sensitive multimedia services accessible through several interaction modalities. The multimedia content of such services was implemented as Digital Objects managed by the Fedora web service. In this paper, we present a multimedia digital object that, through images, videos, 3D reconstructions, sounds, informs people about the scientific value of the archaeological investigation and about the complexity of the overall archaeological research process. Archaeologists follow a rigorous method, called stratigraphic excavation, to reconstruct the past civilizations lifestyles. People tend to think that the archaeologist work consists only in the excavation and research of valuable elements, while it has its scientific rigor. By exploiting the CHAT infrastructure, the multimedia digital object about the archaeologist work can be accessed in difTerent context on several device

An EUD approach to the design of educational games

Distance education has experienced profound changes due to the introduction of new technologies, especially mobile devices of different types. It is necessary to define new learning techniques which are able to capture students' attention and to engage them in their learning activities, reducing problems like distraction generated by the use of the device itself and/or by the surrounding environment. Game-based learning is a valuable possibility. The excursion-game has been recently proposed to support pupils learning history during visits to historical sites; its goal is to make the visit and the overall experience of cultural heritage more engaging. This paper describes the approach followed in the design of the system implementing the excursion-game; it takes into account an end-user development perspective in order to allow domain experts, i.e., experts in history and cultural heritage, contributing to design excursion-games for a wide set of historical sites

EUD Software Environments in Cultural Heritage: A Prototype

This paper describes the prototype of a framework for designing interactive applications for cultural heritage sites by following an end-user development approach. The framework is devoted to all design stakeholders, i.e. software engineers, HCI experts, cultural heritage experts and visitors, and provides them with tailored design environments for contributing their expertise to shaping the final applications. The design is guided by application templates, which provide the rules for assembling the basic components, called building blocks, whose result is the final application

A visual paradigm for defining task automation

In the last years, researchers are devoting many efforts to improve technological aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), while little attention has dedicated to social and practical sides. Professional developers program the behavior of smart objects. In addition, often the functionality exposed by a single object are not able, alone, to exhaustively support the end users' tasks. The opportunities offered by IoT can be amplified if new highlevel abstractions and interaction paradigms enable also non-technical users to compose the behavior of multiple objects. To fulfill this goal, we present a model to express rules for smart object composition, which includes new operators for defining rules coupling multiple events and conditions exposed by smart objects, and for defining temporal and spatial constraints on rule activation. Such model has been implemented in a Web application whose composition paradigm has been designed during an elicitation study with 25 participants