Enhancing musical experience for the hearing - impaired using visual and haptic displays

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Know Thyself: Improving Interoceptive Ability Through Ambient Biofeedback in the Workplace

Interoception, the perception of the body’s internal state, is intimately connected to self-regulation and wellbeing. Grounded in the affective science literature, we design an ambient biofeedback system called Soni-Phy and a lab study to investigate whether, when and how an unobtrusive biofeedback system can be used to improve interoceptive sensibility and accuracy by amplifying a users’ internal state. This research has practical significance for the design and improvement of assistive technologies for the workplace

EyeRing: an eye on a finger

Finger-worn devices are a greatly underutilized form of interaction with the surrounding world. By putting a camera on a finger we show that many visual analysis applications, for visually impaired people as well as the sighted, prove seamless and easy. We present EyeRing, a ring mounted camera, to enable applications such as identifying currency and navigating, as well as helping sighted people to tour an unknown city or intuitively translate signage. The ring apparatus is autonomous, however our system also includes a mobile phone or computation device to which it connects wirelessly, and an earpiece for information retrieval. Finally, we will discuss how different finger worn sensors may be extended and applied to other domains

Using Sensor-Based Programming to Improve Self-Efficacy and Outcome Expectancy for Students from Underrepresented Groups

Knowledge of programming and computing is becoming increasingly valuable in today's world, and thus it is crucial that students from all backgrounds have the opportunity to learn. As the teaching of computing at high-school becomes more common, there is a growing need for approaches and tools that are effective and engaging for all students. Especially for students from groups that are traditionally underrepresented at university level, positive experiences at high-school can be an important factor for their future academic choices. In this paper we report on a hands-on programming workshop that we ran over multiple sessions for Maori and Pasifika high-school students who are underrepresented in computer science at the tertiary level in New Zealand. In the workshop, participants developed Scratch programs starting from a simple template we provided. In order to control the action in their programs, half of the participants used standard mouse and keyboard inputs, and the other half had access to plug-and-play sensors that provided real-time environmental data. We explore how students' perceptions of self-efficacy and outcome expectancy -- both key constructs driving academic career choices -- changed during the workshop and how these were impacted by the availability of the sensor toolkit. We found that participants enjoyed the workshop and reported improved self-efficacy with or without use of the toolkit, but outcome expectancy improved only for students who used the sensor toolkit

Toro: A Web-based Tool to Search, Explore, Screen, Compare and Visualize Literature

We present TORO (https://www.toro.ac.nz/), a web-based application that aims to simplify the time-consuming literature research process by providing an easy way of searching, exploring, screening, and comparing literature inside a visual paper graph. Unlike many automated tools, the user actively explores papers and constructs the graph. Users can add papers by searching across different publishers or pasting DOI links and bib-files. Users can analyse relations between papers in one view, look up common keywords, access paper details and categorize them easily. Expanding references allows exploring interesting streams of literature and performing search strategies like snowballing easily across platforms. To manage large numbers of papers and identify interesting work, users can define filters and highlighting criteria. We present our initial design and implementation and discuss the results of a preliminary user study with 18 researchers. The results indicate that TORO already helps researchers\u27 exploration process and highlights opportunities for future work

Emotion Regulation Training Companion: A Design Science Research

Emotion regulation ability has a critical role in our physical and mental well-being. Strong emotion regulation capability is associated with academic success and life satisfaction. This capability also bolsters people’s psychological strength to bounce back from negative, challenging emotional experiences. Although interest in designing emotion regulation support technology has grown significantly in the past few years, much of the effort has been put into helping users to change their physiological responses to emotional episodes. Limited works have focused on designing a solution that equips users with the necessary “tools” that enable them to master their own emotions. Informed by theories in affective neuroscience, we propose to design a conversational agent that helps users regulate their emotions by identifying their true cause, labeling them with a wide range of emotion words, and gradually building up their emotional granularity. By acquiring more fine-grained emotion concepts, we expect users to have more clarity and flexibility in navigating their emotional experiences

EyeRing: A Finger-Worn Input Device for Seamless Interactions with Our Surroundings

Finger-worn interfaces remain a vastly unexplored space for user interfaces, despite the fact that our fingers and hands are naturally used for referencing and interacting with the environment. In this paper we present design guidelines and implementation of a finger-worn I/O device, the EyeRing, which leverages the universal and natural gesture of pointing. We present use cases of EyeRing for both visually impaired and sighted people. We discuss initial reactions from visually impaired users which suggest that EyeRing may indeed offer a more seamless solution for dealing with their immediate surroundings than the solutions they currently use. We also report on a user study that demonstrates how EyeRing reduces effort and disruption to a sighted user. We conclude that this highly promising form factor offers both audiences enhanced, seamless interaction with information related to objects in the environment.Singapore University of Technology and Design. International Design Center (IDC grant IDG31100104A)Singapore University of Technology and Design. International Design Center (IDC grant IDD41100102A