The Virtual-Spine Platform—Acquiring, visualizing, and analyzing individual sitting behavior

Back pain is a serious medical problem especially for those people sitting over long periods during their daily work. Here we present a system to help users monitoring and examining their sitting behavior. The Virtual-Spine Platform (VSP) is an integrated system consisting of a real-time body position monitoring module and a data visualization module to provide individualized, immediate, and accurate sitting behavior support. It provides a comprehensive spine movement analysis as well as accumulated data visualization to demonstrate behavior patterns within a certain period. The two modules are discussed in detail focusing on the design of the VSP system with adequate capacity for continuous monitoring and a web-based interactive data analysis method to visualize and compare the sitting behavior of different persons. The data was collected in an experiment with a small group of subjects. Using this method, the behavior of five subjects was evaluated over a working day, enabling inferences and suggestions for sitting improvements. The results from the accumulated data module were used to elucidate the basic function of body position recognition of the VSP. Finally, an expert user study was conducted to evaluate VSP and support future developments

Facial Expressions, Colours and Basic Emotions

We investigated whether the pairing of facial expressions of emotion with colours is consistent among different cultures, in particular between Australian and European people. Two groups, one consisting mainly of younger and the other of older people, participated in two experiments: For each of six faces, which expressed basic emotions, single colours and combinations of three colours were selected for the best visual \u2018fit\u2019 with the faces. The performance by the two groups was essentially identical. The different emotions appear well characterised by the paired colours in a similar way with the European results by Oberascher & Gallmetzer (2003), da Pos & Valentini (2005), but also with some interesting difference