Symmetric evaluation of multimodal human-robot interaction with gaze and standard control

© 2018 by the authors. Control of robot arms is often required in engineering and can be performed by using different methods. This study examined and symmetrically compared the use of a controller, eye gaze tracker and a combination thereof in a multimodal setup for control of a robot arm. Tasks of different complexities were defined and twenty participants completed an experiment using these interaction modalities to solve the tasks. More specifically, there were three tasks: the first was to navigate a chess piece from a square to another pre-specified square; the second was the same as the first task, but required more moves to complete; and the third task was to move multiple pieces to reach a solution to a pre-defined arrangement of the pieces. Further, while gaze control has the potential to be more intuitive than a hand controller, it suffers from limitations with regard to spatial accuracy and target selection. The multimodal setup aimed to mitigate the weaknesses of the eye gaze tracker, creating a superior system without simply relying on the controller. The experiment shows that the multimodal setup improves performance over the eye gaze tracker alone (p 0.05)

Pharmacotherapy review: a proposal to improve medication adherence among hypertensive patients

Abstract Pharmacotherapy review is a structured assessment of medicines, which aims to obtain a partnership with patients to achieve drug treatment goals and agreement about drug dosage, as well as when and how the drugs should be administered. The objective was to analyze the influence of pharmacotherapy review, by scheduling drug administration to improve medication adherence among antihypertensive patients. This study was an uncontrolled intervention developed in three distinct stages. The first stage included data collection on the profile of patients and their medications, and a preliminary assessment of medication adherence. In the second stage, the review report was delivered to patients. In the third stage, the results of blood pressure and medication adherence were assessed. The influence of the revision was measured through statistical tests (p<0.05). The study included 40 patients with a mean age of 58.0 (SD:11.3) years; 72.5% were women. Thirty-three (82.5 %) patients required some intervention, after when there was a significant increase in the number of daily doses (p=0.039) and drug intakes (p=0.025). There was a significant increase in the adherence rate, according to both the Morisky-Green test (p<0.001) and self-reported assessment (p=0.004). There was also an improvement in the levels of systolic (p<0.001) and diastolic (p=0.002) blood pressure and in the number of patients with controlled hypertension (p=0.006). The pharmaceutical service enhanced medication adherence and control of systemic blood pressure; however, it increased the complexity of treatment

Facilitating learning through hands-on engagement with virtual museum artefacts

In collaborative museum learning contexts, it is problematic that groups of museum visitors are not able able to touch, handle, and pass museum artefacts around during collaborative discussions. This can be due to the fragility of the artefacts themselves or due to the people discussing them being in different locations. Interacting with virtual representations of artefacts is a solution to the problem, but digital experiences have typically lacked many of the qualities that are so successful in engaging museum learners with physical artefacts. In this paper, we introduce our theory that hands-on, reality-based interaction using a tablet interface offers a much more engaging way for collaborators to explore and discuss virtual artefacts than the more traditional desktop interface-based experience, and that this increase in engagement will potentially lead to learning outcomes for the collaborators

RelicPad: A hands-on, mobile approach to collaborative exploration of virtual museum artifacts

In an ideal world, physical museum artefacts could be touched, handled, examined and passed between interested viewers by hand. Unfortunately, this is not always possible – artefacts may be too fragile to handle or pass around, or groups of people with mutual interests in objects may not be in the same location. This can be problematic when attempting to explain or make sense of the physical properties of artefacts. To address these problems, we propose that direct manipulation of 3D content based on real-world interaction metaphors can help collaborators (both co and remotely located) to construct personal and mutual physical and spatial awareness of artefacts, while networked communication and collaboration allow for ideas and knowledge to be exchanged and shared. We present our interpretations from two studies of RelicPad, a tablet-based application that allows users to manually manipulate museum artefacts and to ‘point out’ areas of interest to each other using 3D annotations, facilitating a mutual awareness of spatial properties and referencing during discussion.</p