83 research outputs found
Rethinking Eye-blink: Assessing Task Difficulty through Physiological Representation of Spontaneous Blinking
Continuous assessment of task difficulty and mental workload is essential in
improving the usability and accessibility of interactive systems. Eye tracking
data has often been investigated to achieve this ability, with reports on the
limited role of standard blink metrics. Here, we propose a new approach to the
analysis of eye-blink responses for automated estimation of task difficulty.
The core module is a time-frequency representation of eye-blink, which aims to
capture the richness of information reflected on blinking. In our first study,
we show that this method significantly improves the sensitivity to task
difficulty. We then demonstrate how to form a framework where the represented
patterns are analyzed with multi-dimensional Long Short-Term Memory recurrent
neural networks for their non-linear mapping onto difficulty-related
parameters. This framework outperformed other methods that used hand-engineered
features. This approach works with any built-in camera, without requiring
specialized devices. We conclude by discussing how Rethinking Eye-blink can
benefit real-world applications.Comment: [Accepted version] In Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems (CHI '21), May 8-13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New
York, NY, USA. 19 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.344557
Expressive haptics for enhanced usability of mobile interfaces in situations of impairments
Designing for situational awareness could lead to better solutions for
disabled people, likewise, exploring the needs of disabled people could lead to
innovations that can address situational impairments. This in turn can create
non-stigmatising assistive technology for disabled people from which eventually
everyone could benefit. In this paper, we investigate the potential for
advanced haptics to compliment the graphical user interface of mobile devices,
thereby enhancing user experiences of all people in some situations (e.g.
sunlight interfering with interaction) and visually impaired people. We explore
technical solutions to this problem space and demonstrate our justification for
a focus on the creation of kinaesthetic force feedback. We propose initial
design concepts and studies, with a view to co-create delightful and expressive
haptic interactions with potential users motivated by scenarios of situational
and permanent impairments.Comment: Presented at the CHI'19 Workshop: Addressing the Challenges of
Situationally-Induced Impairments and Disabilities in Mobile Interaction,
2019 (arXiv:1904.05382
Exploring Artistic Visualization of Physiological Signals for Mindfulness and Relaxation: A Pilot Study
Mindfulness and relaxation techniques for mental health are increasingly
being explored in the human-computer interaction community. Physiological
signals and their visualization have often been exploited together in a form of
biofeedback with other intervention methods. Here, we aim to contribute to the
body of existing work on biofeedback interfaces for mindfulness, with a
particular focus on incorporating artistic effects into physiological signal
visualization. With an implemented artistic biofeedback interface, we conduct a
pilot study where 10 participants attend stress-induction sessions followed by
two biofeedback mindfulness sessions: classic biofeedback and artistic
visualization. The result demonstrates that artistic visualization-driven
biofeedback significantly improves the effectiveness of biofeedback in helping
users feel relaxed in comparison with a classic graphical form of biofeedback.
Also, it shows that the artistic effect makes it easy to understand what
biofeedback represents. Future work includes exploring how advanced
physiological computing methods can improve its efficiency and performance
Nose Heat: Exploring Stress-induced Nasal Thermal Variability through Mobile Thermal Imaging
Automatically monitoring and quantifying stress-induced thermal dynamic
information in real-world settings is an extremely important but challenging
problem. In this paper, we explore whether we can use mobile thermal imaging to
measure the rich physiological cues of mental stress that can be deduced from a
person's nose temperature. To answer this question we build i) a framework for
monitoring nasal thermal variable patterns continuously and ii) a novel set of
thermal variability metrics to capture a richness of the dynamic information.
We evaluated our approach in a series of studies including laboratory-based
psychosocial stress-induction tasks and real-world factory settings. We
demonstrate our approach has the potential for assessing stress responses
beyond controlled laboratory settings
Mobile Thermography-based Physiological Computing for Automatic Recognition of a Person’s Mental Stress
This thesis explores the use of Mobile Thermography1, a significantly less investigated sensing capability, with the aim of reliably extracting a person’s multiple physiological signatures and recognising mental stress in an automatic, contactless manner. Mobile thermography has greater potentials for real-world applications because of its light-weight, low computation-cost characteristics. In addition, thermography itself does not necessarily require the sensors to be worn directly on the skin. It raises less privacy concerns and is less sensitive to ambient lighting conditions. The work presented in this thesis is structured through a three-stage approach that aims to address the following challenges: i) thermal image processing for mobile thermography in variable thermal range scenes; ii) creation of rich and robust physiology measurements; and iii) automated stress recognition based on such measurements. Through the first stage (Chapter 4), this thesis contributes new processing techniques to address negative effects of environmental temperature changes upon automatic tracking of regions-of-interest and measuring of surface temperature patterns. In the second stage (Chapters 5,6,7), the main contributions are: robustness in tracking respiratory and cardiovascular thermal signatures both in constrained and unconstrained settings (e.g. respiration: strong correlation with ground truth, r=0.9987), and investigation of novel cortical thermal signatures associated with mental stress. The final stage (Chapters 8,9) contributes automatic stress inference systems that focus on capturing richer dynamic information of physiological variability: firstly, a novel respiration representation-based system (which has achieved state-of-the-art performance: 84.59% accuracy, two stress levels), and secondly, a novel cardiovascular representation-based system using short-term measurements of nasal thermal variability and heartrate variability from another sensing channel (78.33% accuracy achieved from 20seconds measurements). Finally, this thesis contributes software libraries and incrementally built labelled datasets of thermal images in both constrained and everyday ubiquitous settings. These are used to evaluate performance of our proposed computational methods across the three-stages
On Quick Measurement of Airborne Ultrasound Pressure Fields
While ultrasound has long been used in the medical field in solid and liquid mediums, it's use in air has been less thoroughly researched due to a previous lack of applications. Recently it has been used for new applications such as mid-air haptics and the levitation of small particles. These applications require accurate acoustic holograms to be generated in mid-air. In order to do so it is vital to measure accurately these pressure fields, but also quickly in order to allow for quick iteration on work, or even real-time feedback. In addition to this it is of benefit to measure the sound field without interfering with it, which microphone set ups often do due to reflections of the device used to move the microphone. This work finds these methods currently lacking, though there are techniques used in place of hydrophones in water that could be adapted to work for the in-air context such as thermography
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