Challenges for Smart Environments in Bathroom Contexts

Leichsenring C, Yang J, Hammerschmidt J, Hermann T. Challenges for Smart Environments in Bathroom Contexts. Presented at the ICMI 2016 Workshop on Embodied Interaction with Smart Environments, Tokyo, Japan.Smart homes have been mostly treated as homogeneous environments where each room is distinguished by the activities performed there but not by any fundamentally different basic parameters for systems to operate in. We argue that at least for bathroom environments, things like the extensive presence of liquid water and humidity and special privacy considerations challenge these assumptions. We discuss typical and unique challenges for ubiquitous computing interfaces in bathroom environments and we look at how actual and conceptual systems confront these challenges. We review bathroom systems in the literature and present two systems of our own to exemplify the unique challenges to smart environments the bathroom provides

Transfer of manualized Short Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (STPP) for social phobia into clinical practice: study protocol for a cluster-randomised controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Psychodynamic psychotherapy is frequently applied in the treatment of social phobia. Nevertheless, there has been a lack of studies on the transfer of manualized treatments to routine psychodynamic practice. Our study is the first one to examine the effects of additional training in a manualized Short Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (STPP) procedure on outcome in routine psychotherapy for social phobia. This study is an extension to a large multi-site RCT (N = 512) comparing the efficacy of STPP to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) of Social Phobia.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>The manualized treatment is designed for a time limited approach with 25 individual sessions of STPP over 6 months. Private practitioners will be randomized to training in manualized STPP vs. treatment as usual without a specific training (control condition). We plan to enrol a total of 105 patients (84 completers). Assessments will be conducted before treatment starts, after 8 and 15 weeks, after 25 treatment sessions, at the end of treatment, 6 months and 12 months after termination of treatment. The primary outcome measure is the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Remission from social phobia is defined scoring with 30 or less points on this scale.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>We will investigate how the treatment can be transferred from a controlled trial into the less structured setting of routine clinical care. This question represents Phase IV of psychotherapy research. It combines the benefits of randomized controlled and naturalistic research. The study is genuinely designed to promote faster and more widespread dissemination of effective interventions. It will answer the questions whether manualized STPP can be implemented into routine outpatient care, whether the new methods improve treatment courses and outcomes and whether treatment effects reached in routine psychotherapeutic treatments are comparable to those of the controlled, strictly manualized treatment of the main study.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS) DRKS00000570</p

Three-dimensional muscle architecture and comprehensive dynamic properties of rabbit gastrocnemius, plantaris and soleus: input for simulation studies

The vastly increasing number of neuro-muscular simulation studies (with increasing numbers of muscles used per simulation) is in sharp contrast to a narrow database of necessary muscle parameters. Simulation results depend heavily on rough parameter estimates often obtained by scaling of one muscle parameter set. However, in vivo muscles differ in their individual properties and architecture. Here we provide a comprehensive dataset of dynamic (n=6 per muscle) and geometric (three-dimensional architecture, n=3 per muscle) muscle properties of the rabbit calf muscles gastrocnemius, plantaris, and soleus. For completeness we provide the dynamic muscle properties for further important shank muscles (flexor digitorum longus, extensor digitorum longus, and tibialis anterior; n=1 per muscle). Maximum shortening velocity (normalized to optimal fiber length) of the gastrocnemius is about twice that of soleus, while plantaris showed an intermediate value. The force-velocity relation is similar for gastrocnemius and plantaris but is much more bent for the soleus. Although the muscles vary greatly in their three-dimensional architecture their mean pennation angle and normalized force-length relationships are almost similar. Forces of the muscles were enhanced in the isometric phase following stretching and were depressed following shortening compared to the corresponding isometric forces. While the enhancement was independent of the ramp velocity, the depression was inversely related to the ramp velocity. The lowest effect strength for soleus supports the idea that these effects adapt to muscle function. The careful acquisition of typical dynamical parameters (e.g. force-length and force-velocity relations, force elongation relations of passive components), enhancement and depression effects, and 3D muscle architecture of calf muscles provides valuable comprehensive datasets for e.g. simulations with neuro-muscular models, development of more realistic muscle models, or simulation of muscle packages

How to address smart homes with a social robot? A multi-modal corpus of user interactions with an intelligent environment

Holthaus P, Leichsenring C, Bernotat J, et al. How to address smart homes with a social robot? A multi-modal corpus of user interactions with an intelligent environment. In: Calzolari N, ed. LREC 2016, Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. [Proceedings]. Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA); 2016: 3440-3446.In order to explore intuitive verbal and non-verbal interfaces in smart environments we recorded user interactions with an intelligent apartment. Besides offering various interactive capabilities itself, the apartment is also inhabited by a social robot that is available as a humanoid interface. This paper presents a multi-modal corpus that contains goal-directed actions of naive users in attempts to solve a number of predefined tasks. Alongside audio and video recordings, our data-set consists of large amount of temporally aligned sensory data and system behavior provided by the environment and its interactive components. Non-verbal system responses such as changes in light or display contents, as well as robot and apartment utterances and gestures serve as a rich basis for later in-depth analysis. Manual annotations provide further information about meta data like the current course of study and user behavior including the incorporated modality, all literal utterances, language features, emotional expressions, foci of attention, and addressees

Welcome to the future – How naïve users intuitively address an intelligent robotics apartment.

Bernotat J, Schiffhauer B, Eyssel FA, et al. Welcome to the future – How naïve users intuitively address an intelligent robotics apartment. In: Agah A, Cabibihan JJ, Howard AM, Salichs MA, He H, eds. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). Vol 9979. Heidelberg/ Berlin: Springer; 2016: 982-992

Subliminal Copresence Systems

Leichsenring C. Subliminal Copresence Systems. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2016.Telepresence research has focused on the ideal of recreating face-to-face conversations via remote mediated channels – maximising what has been termed social presence. A mostly overlooked aspect of communication is the simple sense of being together; the ability to be close to someone without necessarily having to interact consciously. Goffman described this as copresence. We propose a class of systems to specifically support this mode of communication over a distance which we call subliminal copresence systems (SCS); they fulfil the definition of calmness as coined by Weiser. We think such systems have the potential to fill a gap that was left during the increase in technologically mediated communication as a consequence of the rise in long-distance relationships in recent decades and the rapidly growing importance of computer-based media in social interactions such as e-mail and especially online social networks. In this work, we explore SCS in terms of their user acceptance, their effectiveness to convey information, their potential to influence and create feelings of connectedness and presence, and their ability to do so without being annoying or distracting. To this end, we implemented two proof-of-concept subliminal copresence systems called feelabuzz and upstairs. In feelabuzz, two unmodified smartphones are used to constantly transmit one user’s movements to another user as vibration of the phone and vice versa. In upstairs, two remote rooms are virtually stacked so that it sounds as if Room A were located above Room B and conversely, Room B were above Room A. For this, contact microphones are used to transduce the structure-borne sounds of the floor. Three user studies were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of these systems. Firstly, feelabuzz was shown to recognisably confer basic activity types. Feelabuzz and upstairs were then tested in two related, longitudinal studies to evaluate the systems’ capabilities to evoke a sense of copresence over a distance. Both systems were shown to create copresence to a significantly larger extent than social presence. User acceptance was higher for upstairs than for feelabuzz and upstairs incurred a significantly smaller amount of cognitive load on its users. To address remaining acceptance and cognitive load issues brought up in these studies, we investigate the introduction of automatic filters to reduce the necessity of interpretation by the users. We explore context recognition in the area of subliminal copresence systems and present two such systems – one using instant messaging clients and another using mobile phones. Both achieved good recognition rates but worrying about user acceptance of such black box systems whose subsymbolic models are incomprehensible even for experts, we present a system that ex- tracts symbolic rules from these models. We compare existing methods for the extraction of such rules and also discuss different ways to present rule sets to the users in order for them to modify them and feed them back into the system. A partial prototype of one such system was implemented and is also discussed

Direct Tactile Coupling of Mobile Phones with the feelabuzz System

Tünnermann R, Leichsenring C, Hermann T. Direct Tactile Coupling of Mobile Phones with the feelabuzz System. In: Mobile Social Signal Processing. First International Workshop, MSSP 2010, Lisbon, Portugal, September 7, 2010, Invited Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 8045. Heidelberg: Springer; 2014: 74-83.Touch can convey emotions on a very direct level. We propose feelabuzz, a system implementing a remote touch connection using standard mobile phone hardware. Accelerometer data is mapped to vibration strength on two smartphones connected via the Internet. This is done using direct mapping techniques, without any abstraction of the acceleration signal. By this, feelabuzz can be used for implicit context communication, i.e. the background monitoring of the natural movements of the users themselves or their environments, as well as for direct communication, i.e. voluntary and symbolic signalling through this new channel. We describe the system and its implementation, discuss its possible implications and verify the system's ability to recognizably transmit different actions in a preliminary user study

feelabuzz: Direct Tactile Communication with Mobile Phones

Leichsenring C, Tünnermann R, Hermann T. feelabuzz: Direct Tactile Communication with Mobile Phones. International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction. 2011;3(2):65-74.Touch can create a feeling of intimacy and connectedness. This work proposes feelabuzz, a system to transmit movements of one mobile phone to the vibration actuator of another one. This is done in a direct, non-abstract way, without the use of pattern recognition techniques in order not to destroy the feel for the other. The tactile channel enables direct communication, i. e. what another person explicitly signals, as well as implicit context communication, the complex movements any activity consists of or even those that are produced by the environment. This paper explores the potential of this approach, presents the mapping use and discusses further possible development beyond the existing prototype to enable a large-scale user study

Upstairs: A calm auditory communication and presence system

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.For decades, researchers have been creating and evaluating so-called media spaces. Most of those were virtual spaces that bridge physical distance in order to create a common shared space. In the tradition of these spaces, upstairs supports peripheral awareness between non-colocated spaces but follows a different approach. Instead of creating a large unifying space, it makes use of the metaphor of wall-diffused noises commonly known from neighbors living upstairs or next door. When sharing a space, people are subconsciously aware of other people’s activities, mainly because of their interaction with the environment. We designed upstairs to extend today’s telepresence and social presence systems (i. e. most notably the telephone and videoconferencing solutions) that mostly focus on the transmission of the conscious part of communication and thereby enrich these systems by supporting peripheral awareness to allow for a permanent connection without distracting too much. In this paper we present the design decisions that led to realized system, the technical setup and the study we conducted over a two week time frame in the homes of couples in long distance relationships