Guidelines for Affect Elicitation and Tracking in High Intensity VR Exergaming

This position paper provides an overview of advances made in affect elicitation and tracking. We provide guidelines forevoking underwhelming, overwhelming and optimal affective states and tracking the affective state using psychophysiologicalmeasurements in high intensity VR exergaming.We discuss the research challenges that need to be addressed to implement affective high intensity VR exergaming.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 66599

AdHealth:A feasibility study to measure digital food marketing to adolescents through Facebook

OBJECTIVE: To test the feasibility of a browser extension to estimate the exposure of adolescents to (un)healthy food and beverage advertisements on Facebook and the persuasive techniques used to market these foods and&nbsp;beverages. DESIGN: A Chrome browser extension (AdHealth) was developed to automatically collect advertisements seen by participants on their personal Facebook accounts. Information was extracted and sent to a web server by parsing the Document Object Model tree representation of Facebook web pages. Key information retrieved included the advertisement type seen and duration of each ad sighting. The WHO-Europe Nutrient Profile Model was used to classify the healthiness of products advertised as permitted (healthy) or not permitted (unhealthy) to be advertised to&nbsp;children. SETTING: Auckland, New&nbsp;Zealand. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty-four Facebook users aged 16-18&nbsp;years. RESULTS: The browser extension retrieved 4973 advertisements from thirty-four participants, of which 204 (4 %) were food-related, accounting for 1·1 % of the exposure duration. Of those food advertisements, 98 % were classified as not permitted, and 33·7 and 31·9 %, respectively, of those featured promotional characters or premium offers. The mean rate of exposure to not permitted food was 4·8 (sd = 2·5) advertisements per hour spent on&nbsp;Facebook. CONCLUSIONS: Using a Chrome extension to monitor exposure to unhealthy food and beverage advertisements showed that the vast majority of advertisements were for unhealthy products, despite numerous challenges to implementation. Further efforts are needed to develop tools for use across other social media platforms and mobile devices, and policies to protect young people from digital food&nbsp;advertising.</p

Rift Racers - Effect of Balancing and Competition on Exertion, Enjoyment, and Motivation in an Immersive Exergame

By immersing themselves in a game users may exert themselves more than they would in every day life. One important driving factor in games and many forms of exercise is competition, at once engaging socially in the activity and trying to outdo an opponent or oneself. Large differences in fitness levels make competition infeasible between some opponents, but exergaming can remedy this with the use of balancing via exertion.We developed a fully immersive virtual cycling race and balanced the competition between opponents by scaling their speed according to how close they were to their target heart rate. Incorporating a virtual reality headset and a vibrant 3D world, users were exhilarated and pushed themselves to high levels of exertion. Our results suggest that balanced games can reduce the performance gap between opponents, and might increase motivation and enjoyment for users with lower fitness level. However, heart-rate balancing might be demotivating for very fit users. </p

Taxonomy of Usability Requirements for Home Telehealth Systems

Over the past decade increasing healthcare and elderly care costs and demographic changes are rapidly making traditional healthcare concepts unaffordable for many developed countries. Telecare and telehealth applications have become increasingly popular because of their promise to reduce costs and staffing requirements while maintaining or even improving care. Most of the existing applications are centred around the clinical users. Patient factors are considered, but usually only incorporated into the user interface design rather than the system and its application. The patient population, and especially the large proportion of elderly patients, has unique needs, capabilities and limitations that must be considered throughout the design process of such applications. In this paper we present a taxonomy of usability requirements and design concepts for home telehealth systems which enable a more patient centric design. We systematically explore the usability problems of past and current telehealth applications. Problems faced by users of home telehealth systems are identified and solutions delineated. The paper aims to build a good understanding of the technology needs of the elderly population. It represent a solid foundation for constructing novel and more general telehealth solutions in order to make the technology more effective and more widely available

Automatic generation of user interface layouts for alternative screen orientations

Creating multiple layout alternatives for graphical user interfaces to accommodate different screen orientations for mobile devices is labor intensive. Here, we investigate how such layout alternatives can be generated automatically from an initial layout. Providing good layout alternatives can inspire developers in their design work and support them to create adaptive layouts. We performed an analysis of layout alternatives in existing apps and identified common realworld layout transformation patterns. Based on these patterns we developed a prototype that generates landscape and portrait layout alternatives for an initial layout. In general, there is a very large number of possibilities of how widgets can be rearranged. For this reason we developed a classification method to identify and evaluate “good” layout alternatives automatically. From this set of “good” layout alternatives, designers can choose suitable layouts for their applications. In a questionnaire study we verified that our method generates layout alternatives that appear well structured and are easy to use

Evaluation of a Social Web-based Telehealth System

Increasing healthcare costs and demographic changes necessitate healthcare interventions that foster independent care. Existing telehealth systems are focused on treating diseases instead of preventing them, suffer from high initial costs, lack extensibility, and do not address the social and psychological needs of patients. We developed Healthcare4Life, an online telehealth system for seniors. In this paper, we report the results of a 6-week user study involving 43 seniors (aged 60 and above). Results indicate that seniors are ready to take charge of their health via a web-based telehealth system, provided there are suitable health applications for them to use. The social networking features require a sufficiently large user base to be useful. The results also suggest that web-based telehealth solutions can positively change the attitude of seniors towards managing their own healthcare

Skewed Distributions in Semi-stream Joins: How Much Can Caching Help?

Semi-stream join algorithms join a fast data stream with a disk-based relation. This is important, for example, in real-time data warehousing where a stream of transactions is joined with master data before loading it into a data warehouse. In many important scenarios, the stream input has a skewed distribution, which makes certain performance optimizations possible. We propose two such optimization techniques: (1) a caching technique for frequently used master data and (2) a technique for selective load shedding of stream tuples. The caching technique is fine-grained, operating on a tuple-level. Furthermore, it is generic in the sense that it can be applied to different semi-stream join algorithms to deal with data skew. We analyze it by combining it with various well-known semi-stream joins, and show that it improves the service rate by more than 40% for typical data with skewed distributions. The load shedding technique sheds the fraction of the stream that is most expensive to join. In contrast to existing approaches, the service rate improves under load shedding. We present experimental data showing significant improvements as compared to related approaches and perform a sensitivity analysis for various internal parameters