Toward a Mobile Platform for Pervasive Games

Emerging pervasive games will be immersed into real-life situations and leverage new types of contextual interactions therein. For instance, a player's punching gesture, running activity, and fast heart rate conditions can be used as the game inputs. Although the contextual interaction is the core building blocks of pervasive games, individual game developers hardly utilize a rich set of interactions within a game play. Most challenging, it is significantly difficult for developers to expect dynamic availability of input devices in real life, and adapt to the situation without system-level support. Also, it is challenging to coordinate its resource use with other gaming logics or applications. To address such challenges, we propose Player Space Director (PSD), a novel mobile platform for pervasive games. PSD facilitates the game developers to incorporate diverse contextual interactions in their game without considering complications in player's real-life situations, e.g., heterogeneity, dynamics or resource scarcity of input devices. We implemented the PSD prototype on mobile devices, diverse set of sensors, and actuators. On top of PSD, we developed three exploratory applications, ULifeAvatar, Swan Boat, U-Theater, and showed the effectiveness of PSD through extensive deployment of those games.

Jasper: Sensing gamers' emotions using physiological sensors

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under IDM Futures Funding Initiativ

ExerLink: Enabling Pervasive Social Exergames with Heterogeneous Exercise Devices

We envision that diverse social exercising games, or exergames, will emerge, featuring much richer interactivity with immersive game play experiences. Further, the recent advances of mobile devices and wireless networking will make such social engagement more pervasive - people carry portable exergame devices (e.g., jump ropes) and interact with remote users anytime, anywhere. Towards this goal, we explore the potential of using heterogeneous exercise devices as game controllers for a multi-player social exergame; e.g., playing a boat paddling game with two remote exercisers (one with a jump rope, and the other with a treadmill). In this paper, we propose a novel platform called ExerLink that converts exercise intensity to game inputs and intelligently balances intensity/delay variations for fair game play experiences. We report the design considerations and guidelines obtained from the design and development processes of game controllers. We validate the efficacy of game controllers and demonstrate the feasibility of social exergames with heterogeneous exercise devices via extensive human subject studies.

MobiCon: A mobile context-monitoring platform

User context is defined by data generated through everyday physical activity in sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments.</jats:p

Association between Cigarette Smoking History and Mortality in 36,446 Health Examinees in Korea

Background: It is well known that smoking is a preventable factor for all-cause mortality; however, it is still questionable how many years after smoking cessation that people will have reduced risk for mortality, in particular in those with a high interest in their own health. We aimed to examine the association between time since quitting smoking and total mortality among past-smokers relative to current smokers. Materials and Methods: We enrolled 36,446 health examinees that voluntarily taken with diverse health check-up packages of high cost burden in 1995-2003 and followed them till death by 2004. The history of cigarette smoking consumption was collected using a self-administrative questionnaire at the first visit time. Mortality risk by smoking cessation years was analyzed using Cox's proportional hazard model. Results: Compared to non-smokers, male smokers over 15 pack-years had higher risk for total mortality (HR=1.60, 95% CI 1.23-2.14). The mortality risk in female smokers with same pack-years was more pronounced than that in male smokers (HR=2.83, 95% CI 1.17-7.04) despite a small number of cases. Compared to current smokers, a decrease of total mortality was observed among those who ceased smoking, and inverse dose-response was found with years after cessation: RR 0.98 ( 95% CI, 0.64-1.41) (= 10 yrs). Conclusions: A reduced risk of total mortality was observed after 3 years of smoking cessation. Our findings suggest that at least 3 years of smoking cessation may contribute to reduce premature mortality among Asian men.OAIID:oai:osos.snu.ac.kr:snu2014-01/102/0000052039/11SEQ:11PERF_CD:SNU2014-01EVAL_ITEM_CD:102USER_ID:0000052039ADJUST_YN:YEMP_ID:A079543DEPT_CD:806CITE_RATE:1.5FILENAME:association between cigarette smoking history and mortality in 36,446 health examinees in korea..pdfDEPT_NM:의과학과SCOPUS_YN:YCONFIRM:

The Voice Makes the Car: Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Perceptions and Adoption Intention through Voice Agent Gender and Style

The present research explores how autonomous vehicle voice agent (AVVA) design influences autonomous vehicle passenger (AVP) intentions to adopt autonomous vehicles. An online experiment (N = 158) examined the role of gender stereotypes in response to an AVVA with respect to the technology acceptance model. The findings indicate that characteristics of the AVVA that are more consistent with the stereotypical expectation of the social role (informative male AVVA and social female AVVA) foster greater perceived ease of use (PEU) and perceived usefulness (PU) than inconsistent conditions (social male AVVA and informative female AVVA). The study offers theoretical implications regarding the technology acceptance model in the context of autonomous technologies as well as practical implications for the design of autonomous vehicle voice agents

An Exploratory Study on the Köhler Effect and Flow in Long-term Exergaming

Background. One way to motivate people to exercise is to create a motivating social context, such as group exercise, due to social comparison opportunities. However, typical group exercise is not always easy for those who have problems in scheduling or social physique anxiety. Software-generated partners (SGPs) could offer a solution because they have advantages over human partners. Aim. This exploratory study examined the psychological state of flow under Köhler paradigm over a 24-week exergame with different types of SGPs: Individual Control (IC), Always Superior Partner (AWS), and Not Always Superior Partner (NAS). Method. The experiment was a 3 (Type of the partner) × 3 (Time blocks) factorial design. Fifteen participants engaged in the experiment. A multivariate multiple regression with type of SGPs predicting flow state at the second and third block was conducted. Results. Participants with an NAS partner had significantly higher flow state, as compared to participants under IC, at both blocks. Participants with an AWS partner had approximately equal flow state, as compared to participants under IC, at both blocks. Conclusions. Possible reasons for flow perceptions with different types of SGPs over time were discussed in terms of programming SGPs and flow theory. </jats:p