Online Group-exercises for Older Adults of Different Physical Abilities

In this paper we describe the design and validation of a virtual fitness environment aiming at keeping older adults physically and socially active. We target particularly older adults who are socially more isolated, physically less active, and with less chances of training in a gym. The virtual fitness environment, namely Gymcentral, was designed to enable and motivate older adults to follow personalised exercises from home, with a (heterogeneous) group of remote friends and under the remote supervision of a Coach. We take the training activity as an opportunity to create social interactions, by complementing training features with social instruments. Finally, we report on the feasibility and effectiveness of the virtual environment, as well as its effects on the usage and social interactions, from an intervention study in Trento, Ital

The interplay of physical and social wellbeing in older adults: investigating the relationship between physical training and social interactions with virtual social environments

Background. Regular physical activity can substantially improve the physical wellbeing of older adults, preventing several chronic diseases and increasing cognitive performance and mood. However, research has shown that older adults are the most sedentary segment of society, spending much of their time seated or inactive. A variety of barriers make it difficult for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, including logistical difficulties in going to a gym (for some adults, leaving home can be challenging), reduced functional abilities, and lack of motivation. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of Gymcentral. A training application running on tablet was designed to allow older adults to follow a personalized home-based exercise program while being remotely assisted by a coach. The objective of the study was to assess if a virtual gym that enables virtual presence and social interaction is more motivating for training than the same virtual gym without social interaction. Methods. A total of 37 adults aged between 65 and 87 years old (28 females and 9 males, mean age = 71, sd = 5.8) followed a personalized home-based strength and balance training plan for eight weeks. The participants performed the exercises autonomously at home using the Gymcentral application. Participants were assigned to two training groups: the Social group used an application with persuasive and social functionalities, while the Control group used a basic version of the service with no persuasive and social features. We further explored the effects of social facilitation, and in particular of virtual social presence, in user participation to training sessions. Outcome measures were adherence, persistence and co-presence rate. Results. Participants in the Social group attended significantly more exercise sessions than the Control group, providing evidence of a better engagement in the training program. Besides the focus on social persuasion measures, the study also confirms that a virtual gym service is effective for supporting individually tailored home-based physical training for older adults. The study also confirms that social facilitation tools motivate users to train together in a virtual fitness environment. Discussion. The study confirms that Gymcentral increases the participation of older adults in physical training compare to a similar version of the application without social and persuasive features. In addition, a significant increase in the co-presence of the Social group indicates that social presence motivates the participants to join training sessions at the same time with the other participants. These results are encouraging, as they motivate further research into using home-based training programs as an opportunity to stay physically and socially active, especially for those who for various reasons are bound to stay at home

Collective Memories in Wikipedia

Collective memories are precious resources for the society, because they contribute to strengthening the emotional bonding between community members, maintaining groups cohesion, and directing future behavior. Understanding the formation of the collective memories of emotional upheavals is important to a better comprehension of people's reactions and of the consequences on their psychological health. Previous studies investigated the effects of single traumatizing events, but few of them applied a quantitative approach to analyze the different psychological processes associated to the collective memories formation of upheavals on a large scale. This thesis explores the opportunities of applying quantitative methods to the study of collective memories in a collaborative environment such as the English Wikipedia. First, the presence of commemoration processes in Wikipedia articles and talk pages about traumatic events will be investigated through the analysis of edit activity patterns. Second, natural language processing techniques will be applied to detect differences in the collective representations of traumatic and non traumatic events, in the temporal focus of old and recent traumatic events, and in the representations of natural and human-made disasters. Third, the temporal evolution of language related to emotional, cognitive and social processes will be analyzed in the talk pages of two different emotional upheavals, the 2005 London bombings and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The results will confirm the interpretation of Wikipedia as a global memory place, and highlight specific psychological processes related to the formation of collective memories of different types of traumatic events, opening the way to the quantitative study of collective memory formation in digital collaborative environments

Mobile for Older Adults: Towards Designing Multimodal Interaction.

The paper presents the preliminary studies carried out in ECOMODE (Event-Driven Compressive Vision for Multimodal Interaction with Mobile Devices), an EU project aiming to design a multimodal interaction suitable for elderly people using mobile technology. The project exploits EDC (Event Driven Compressive) paradigm to realize a new generation of low-power multimodal human-computer interfaces for mobile devices. In our studies we investigated (1) how older adults interact with mobile devices and (2) how they use applications based on mid-air gesture interaction. Our studies basically confirm the findings of previous works about usability and accessibility issues, specifically characterizing elderly users’ interaction with mobile technology

Ubiquitous games and gamification for well-being

Ubiquitous games and gamification have recently become a widely applied approach for promoting well-being and improving health behaviours such as a physically active lifestyle. In this Special Issue of the Journal ICST Transactions on Ambient Systems, we collected a selection of high-quality papers presented at the workshop on “Ubiquitous games and gamification for promoting behaviour change and wellbeing”, held at the 2013 CHItaly Conference. The articles explore different areas where ubiquitous games and gamification can influence the attitudes, health and behaviours of people towards well-being, from the management of diseases to eco-sustainable mobility, from serious moral games to the monitoring of burnout levels and the well-being of small groups during social occasions such as museum visits

Analyzing collaborative networks emerging in Enterprise 2.0: the Taolin Platform

AbstractCoordination and networking among people working in the same organization is not a trivial activity: competences, positions, and the structural characteristics of the company together with communication preferences and group assets may prevent a positive flow of knowledge and decrease opportunities for collaboration. Technologies and, in particular, Web platforms have great potential to serve as a solution to these issues and to promote the spread of innovation and effectiveness inside the work environment. These platforms were usually referred to as Intranets and, more recently, as Enterprise2.0, a new keyword representing how some of the most important characteristics of Web2.0, mainly user participation, can be adopted inside organizations. In this working paper we report the ongoing creation of an open source Enterprise2.0 platform and its deployment inside Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research institute with around 400 researchers and employees conducting studies in different research areas. We also investigate the usage and communication patterns in the platform, and analyze the activities of different kinds of users in the platform and their group relations. Our initial investigation reveals that the main social activities, such as chatting and profile viewing, are performed by users more often towards members of their own research group than with other colleagues. When we analyze users according to their seniority level, we find that colleagues who recently joined FBK exhibit larger betweenness centrality both in chat and profile view networks

Exploiting Web Analytics Tracking for Bootstrapping a Case-based Recommender System

Case-based recommender systems have been successfully applied to tourism web sites for suggesting to travellers products they might like such as hotels or events. Since they exploit previous experiences by other travellers (cases), their casebase needs to be bootstrapped at deploy time by inserting initial experiences. In this paper we address this open problem and propose a methodology for bootstrapping case-based recommender systems by exploiting the tracking features of Web Analytics tools

How to increase older adults’ accessibility tomobile technology? The new ECOMODE camera.

Designing and developing mobile technology that is able to meet the needs of older adults is fundamental to improve their independent living and expand their social inclusion. However, although mobile technology is nowadays widely present in our every-day activities, older adults continue to lag in its adoption. While exploring what hinders older adults in adopting mobile technology and questioning about how to increase their accessibility to it, the paper presents the ECOMODE project, whose technology based on the Event-Driven Compressive (EDC) paradigm is a possible answer. First, to contextualize our study, the paper describes the ECOMODE technology based on multimodal interaction, i.e. mid-air gestures combined with voice commands. Then, it details the design of the interaction with the ECOMODE device, which aims to increase accessibility and usability of mobile devices for older adults