REHAP Balance Tiles: A modular system supporting balance rehabilitation

© 2015 ICST. This paper describes the design, development, implementation and user evaluation of an interactive modular tile system, aimed to support balance rehabilitation of patients recovering from a stroke. The REHAP Balance Tiles system is an innovative tool, which has been developed in close collaboration with therapists and patients in stroke units of health rehabilitation institutes in Sydney, Australia and Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The system was designed to allow therapists to tailor exercises for each patient by changing the physical configuration of tiles. We report a user evaluation in a rehabilitation clinic, which lasted five weeks. Results indicate that the tiles can fulfill their envisioned purpose. They are received well by therapists, meeting requirements for ease of use, motivational feedback, modularity and flexibility

Things that make us reminisce: Everyday memory cues as opportunities for interaction design

© Copyright 2015 ACM. Interactive devices can support personal remembering to benefit well-being. These designs require insight into what brings the past to mind, and how people relate to such cues. Prior work focused on mementos in the home; instead, this paper presents a diary and interview study of involuntary memory cueing in everyday life. Data was collected from fifteen adult individuals, using sentence completion diaries, combined with debriefing interviews. Qualitative analysis of the data showed that these participants were relying on everyday physical objects like food items for cueing memories during everyday life, locations and (repeated) activities, while digital items and photos were shown to be less frequent stimulants. Meaningful relations to memory cues can be partially explained from a memory cueing perspective. We discuss how design for remembering can benefit from our insights, through careful trade-offs in timing, exposure to cues, and supporting a process of personal attachment with items invoking memories

Investigating the impact of feed and cutting speed on cutting forces for the increase of surface removal rate in face milling

Face milling is used for the manufacturing of engineering surfaces. A significant part of the produced surfaces pertains to flat surfaces with high quality. Surface quality, in turn, is connected to the machining conditions used in the process. In this paper, the influence of feed and cutting speed on cutting forces is experimentally investigated, with a view to increase surface removal rate A w (mm²/min) of the process. The experimental results are treated with ANOVA, indicate a high influence of the feed on all components of the cutting force. With the analysis, optimum conditions may be obtained with the aim of lower cutting forces

A different approach in an AAL ecosystem: a mobile assistant for the caregiver

Currently the Ambient Assisted Living and the Ambient Intelligence areas are very prolific. There is a demand of security and comfort that should be ensured at people’s homes. The AAL4ALL (ambient assisted living for all) pro-ject aims to develop a unified ecosystem and a certification process, allowing the development of fully compatible devices and services. The UserAccess emerges from the AAL4ALL project, being a demonstration of its validity. The UserAc-cess architecture, implementation, interfaces and test scenario are presented, along with the sensor platform specially developed for the AAL4ALL project.Project "AAL4ALL", co-financed by the European Community Fund FEDER, through COMPETE - Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (POFC). Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Lisbon, Portugal, through Project PEst-C/CTM/LA0025/2013 and the project PEst-OE/EEI/UI0752/2014. Project CAMCoF - Context-aware Multimodal Communication Framework funded by ERDF -European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-028980

Do we ruin the moment? Exploring the design of novel capturing technologies

Copyright © 2015 ACM. By capturing our experiences we often strive to better remember them in the future. However, the act of media capturing also influences these same experiences in the present, an area which is underexplored. This paper describes a study with the aim to inform the design of novel media capturing strategies. Adopting an approach of defamiliarization based on intervention and reflection, we strive to gain insights in the influences of future capturing technologies on the experience of a day out. We conducted an exploratory study in which 28 students went on a day out and used a variety of capturing strategies. Individual and group reflections on the experience during this day identified several important aspects that media capturing influences: engagement, perception & attention and social activity. The paper concludes with implications for design and proposes three potential future directions for media capturing, that instead of disturbing the moment enhance the experience

Socio-digital experiences

The experiences emerging from interacting with digital technology need to be understood, designed and engineered. This is quintessential for ensuring that related systems and services have a purpose and value for their users, helping them achieve their aspirations and desires. Rooted in this human-experience centered perspective, we explore ambient intelligence technologies, where computation and communication are embedded in our physical and social environment, adapting to users and their context. The overarching motivation is to create novel socio-digital experiences that address societal needs, like staying connected with dear ones, children’s outdoor play, achieving desirable behavior change, supporting independent living, and rehabilitation. Looking to the future, two grand challenges concern us. First is to design technologies that people can shape to meet idiosyncratic and dynamically emerging requirements, known as meta-design. Second is endowing ambient intelligence technologies with aspects of social intelligence

Multi-Agent System (MAS) Applications in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Environments

Proceedings of: 8th Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (PAAMS`10). Salamanca (Spain), 28-30 April 2010Research in context-aware systems has been moving towards reusable and adaptable architectures for managing more advanced human-computer interfaces. Ambient. Intelligence (AmI) investigates computer-based services, which are ubiquitous and based on a variety of objects and devices. Their intelligent and intuitive interfaces act as mediators through which people can interact with the ambient environment. In this paper we present an agent-based architecture which supports the execution of agents in AmI environments. Two case studies are also presented, an airport information system and a railway information system, which uses spoken conversational agents to respond to the user's requests using the contextual information that includes the location information of the user.This work has been partially supported by CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255 and DPS2008-07029-C02-02Publicad