Designing friends

Embodied Conversational Agents are virtual humans that can interact with humans using verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In most cases, they have been designed for short interactions. This paper asks the question how one would start to design synthetic characters that can become your friends. We look at insights from social psychology and propose a methodology for designing friends

How much control is enough? Optimizing fun with unreliable input

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) provide a valuable new input modality within human- computer interaction systems, but like other body-based inputs, the system recognition of input commands is far from perfect. This raises important questions, such as: What level of control should such an interface be able to provide? What is the relationship between actual and perceived control? And in the case of applications for entertainment in which fun is an important part of user experience, should we even aim for perfect control, or is the optimum elsewhere? In this experiment the user plays a simple game in which a hamster has to be guided to the exit of a maze, in which the amount of control the user has over the hamster is varied. The variation of control through confusion matrices makes it possible to simulate the experience of using a BCI, while using the traditional keyboard for input. After each session the user �lled out a short questionnaire on fun and perceived control. Analysis of the data showed that the perceived control of the user could largely be explained by the amount of control in the respective session. As expected, user frustration decreases with increasing control. Moreover, the results indicate that the relation between fun and control is not linear. Although in the beginning fun does increase with improved control, the level of fun drops again just before perfect control is reached. This poses new insights for developers of games wanting to incorporate some form of BCI in their game: for creating a fun game, unreliable input can be used to create a challenge for the user

Human-Computer Interaction for BCI Games: Usability and User Experience

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) come with a lot of issues, such as delays, bad recognition, long training times, and cumbersome hardware. Gamers are a large potential target group for this new interaction modality, but why would healthy subjects want to use it? BCI provides a combination of information and features that no other input modality can offer. But for general acceptance of this technology, usability and user experience will need to be taken into account when designing such systems. This paper discusses the consequences of applying knowledge from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to the design of BCI for games. The integration of HCI with BCI is illustrated by research examples and showcases, intended to take this promising technology out of the lab. Future research needs to move beyond feasibility tests, to prove that BCI is also applicable in realistic, real-world settings

Short-Chain Fatty Acids in the Metabolism of Heart Failure - Rethinking the Fat Stigma

Heart failure (HF) remains a disease with immense global health burden. During the development of HF, the myocardium and therefore cardiac metabolism undergoes specific changes, with decreased long-chain fatty acid oxidation and increased anaerobic glycolysis, diminishing the overall energy yield. Based on the dogma that the failing heart is oxygen-deprived and on the fact that carbohydrates are more oxygen-efficient than FA, metabolic HF drugs have so far aimed to stimulate glucose oxidation or inhibit FA oxidation. Unfortunately, these treatments have failed to provide meaningful clinical benefits. We believe it is time to rethink the concept that fat is harmful to the failing heart. In this review we discuss accumulating evidence that short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) may be an effective fuel for the failing heart. In contrast to long-chain fatty acids, SCFAs are readily taken up and oxidized by the heart and could serve as a nutraceutical treatment strategy. In addition, we discuss how SCFAs activate pathways that increase long chain fatty acid oxidation, which could help increase the overall energy availability. Another potential beneficial effect we discuss lies within the anti-inflammatory effect of SCFAs, which has shown to inhibit cardiac fibrosis - a key pathological process in the development of HF

Exercise:a molecular tool to boost muscle growth and mitochondrial performance in heart failure?

Impaired exercise capacity is the key symptom of heart failure (HF) and is associated with reduced quality of life and higher mortality rates. Unfortunately, current therapies, although generally lifesaving, have only small or marginal effects on exercise capacity. Specific strategies to alleviate exercise intolerance may improve quality of life, while possibly improving prognosis as well. There is overwhelming evidence that physical exercise improves performance in cardiac and skeletal muscles in health and disease. Unravelling the mechanistic underpinnings of exercise-induced improvements in muscle function could provide targets that will allow us to boost exercise performance in HF. With the current review we discuss: (i) recently discovered signalling pathways that govern physiological muscle growth as well as mitochondrial quality control mechanisms that underlie metabolic adaptations to exercise; (ii) the mechanistic underpinnings of exercise intolerance in HF and the benefits of exercise in HF patients on molecular, functional and prognostic levels; and (iii) potential molecular therapeutics to improve exercise performance in HF. We propose that novel molecular therapies to boost adaptive muscle growth and mitochondrial quality control in HF should always be combined with some form of exercise training.</p

Multimodality and ambient intelligence

In this report we discuss multimodal interface technology. We present examples of multimodal interfaces and show problems and opportunities. Fusion of modalities is discussed and some roadmap discussions on research in Multimodality are summarized. This report also discusses future developments where rather than communicating with a single computer, users communicate with their environment using multimodal interactions and where the environmental interface has perceptual competence that includes being able to interpret what is going on in the environment. We contribute roles to virtual humans in order to allow daily users of future computing environments to establish relationships with the environments, or more in particular, these virtual humans