Children’s Creativity Lab : creating a ‘pen of the future’

This work is funded by EPSRC and SICSA.Technology is changing the way we acquire new skills and proficiencies and handwriting is no exception to this. However, while some technological advancements exist in this area, the question of how we can digitally enhance the process of learning handwriting remains under-explored. Being immersed in this process on an everyday basis, we believe that school aged children can provide valuable ideas and insights into the design of future writing tools for learners developing their (hand)writing skills. As end-users of the proposed technology, we explore including children in a form of informed participatory design during a creativity lab where we invited 12 children, aged 11–12, to put themselves into the shoes of a product designers and create a Pen of the Future using prototyping materials. In this paper we describe our methodology and discuss the design ideas that children came up with and how these may inform the design of future writing tools.Postprin

Jeeves - an Experience Sampling study creation tool

Ubiquitous mobile technology affords clinicians new opportunities to enhance personalised, patient-centric care remotely, easing the burden on both patient and clinician. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) involves the repeated assessment of patients on their symptoms or behaviours, and their external contexts, as they go about their everyday lives, enhancing ecological validity and minimising recall bias. While previously conducted with paper diaries, ESM smartphone applications are now being employed, that have a range of benefits over paper-based methods including the ability to scale to many more patients. However, development of such applications is time-consuming and requires considerable programming knowledge. This has prompted the development of ESM creation tools that alleviate a researcher from the burden of programming an ESM application from scratch. This paper presents our work on Jeeves, a visual environment for creating secure ESM Android applications, and a usability evaluation we conducted with health psychology students.Postprin

Tangible UI by object and material classification with radar

Radar signals penetrate, scatter, absorb and reflect energy into proximate objects and ground penetrating and aerial radar systems are well established. We describe a highly accurate system based on a combination of a monostatic radar (Google Soli), supervised machine learning to support object and material classification based Uls. Based on RadarCat techniques, we explore the development of tangible user interfaces without modification of the objects or complex infrastructures. This affords new forms of interaction with digital devices, proximate objects and micro-gestures.Postprin

Towards end-user development for chronic disease management

Although developments in modern medicine continue to reduce premature death from acute illnesses, chronic diseases are now pervading the resultant aging population at a growing rate. Such diseases cannot be cured with drug-based treatment, but can be controlled with patients' regular monitoring of their symptoms and consequent lifestyle changes. However, this level of sustained engagement outside face-to-face appointments places a considerable burden upon patients. Smartphones are suitable platforms to support both patients in engaging with self-management plans, and clinicians in directly monitoring the influence of these plans. Bespoke applications exist for such purposes, yet the diversity in patients' lifestyles and levels of engagement necessitates many new or personalised applications. One approach, to solve these problems at scale, is with end-user development. This paper reports the findings from interviews with clinicians, and ethnographic observation in chronic disease management clinics, to derive requirements of end-user development technology to support clinicians and patients in tailored management of their diseases. Time and quality are key factors towards stakeholders' acceptance of chronic disease management with end-user development.Postprin

Workshop on object recognition for input and mobile interaction

Today we can see an increasing number of Object Recognition systems of very different sizes, portability, embedability and form factors which are starting to become part of the ubiquitous, tangible, mobile and wearable computing ecosystems that we might make use of in our daily lives.These systems rely on a variety of technologies including computer vision, radar, acoustic sensing, tagging and smart objects. Such systems open up a wide-range of new forms of touchless interaction. With systems deployed in mobile products then using everyday objects that can be found in the office or home, we can realise new applications and novel types of interaction. Object based interactions might revolutionise how people interact with a computer. System could be used in conjunction with a mobile phone, for example it could be trained to open a recipe app when you hold a phone to your stomach, or change its settings when operating with a gloved hand. Although the last few years have seen an increasing amount of research in this area, knowledge about this subject remains under explored, fragmented, and cuts across a set of related but heterogeneous issues. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the challenges posed by Object Recognition for Input and Mobile Interaction.Postprin

WatchMI: pressure touch, twist and pan gesture input on unmodified smartwatches

The screen size of a smartwatch provides limited space to enable expressive multi-touch input, resulting in a markedly difficult and limited experience. We present WatchMI: Watch Movement Input that enhances touch interaction on a smartwatch to support continuous pressure touch, twist, pan gestures and their combinations. Our novel approach relies on software that analyzes, in real-time, the data from a built-in Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in order to determine with great accuracy and different levels of granularity the actions performed by the user, without requiring additional hardware or modification of the watch. We report the results of an evaluation with the system, and demonstrate that the three proposed input interfaces are accurate, noise-resistant, easy to use and can be deployed on a variety of smartwatches. We then showcase the potential of this work with seven different applications including, map navigation, an alarm clock, a music player, pan gesture recognition, text entry, file explorer and controlling remote devices or a game character.Postprin

WatchMI: applications of watch movement input on unmodified smartwatches

In this demo, we show that it is possible to enhance touch interaction on unmodified smartwatch to support continuous pressure touch, twist and pan gestures, by only analyzing the real-time data of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Our evaluation results show that the three proposed input interfaces are accurate, noise-resistant, easy to use and can be deployed to a variety of smartwatches. We then showcase the potential of this work with seven example applications. During the demo session, users can try the prototype.Postprin

Multi-scale gestural interaction for augmented reality

We present a multi-scale gestural interface for augmented reality applications. With virtual objects, gestural interactions such as pointing and grasping can be convenient and intuitive, however they are imprecise, socially awkward, and susceptible to fatigue. Our prototype application uses multiple sensors to detect gestures from both arm and hand motions (macro-scale), and finger gestures (micro-scale). Micro-gestures can provide precise input through a belt-worn sensor configuration, with the hand in a relaxed posture. We present an application that combines direct manipulation with microgestures for precise interaction, beyond the capabilities of direct manipulation alone.Postprin

Walkers—encoding multivariate data into human motion sequences

The human perceptual system is highly efficient and effective at processing visual information, even at a pre-conscious level. Data visualisation leverages these functions to extract meaning and patterns from data, reducing cognitive load. Yet, the design of visualisations that represent multivariate data is still a challenge — as the number of data attributes increases, so does the complexity of visualisations, with it, the complexity of analysis processes potential users are facing. Many algorithms exist that support dimension reduction, leading to simpler, yet less nuanced visualisations in 2D space. We propose a novel way of presenting complex multivariate data using dimensional reduction that leverages humans’ ability to quickly process and decipher even complex sequences and compositions of motions to extract social cues. By encoding data into biomechanical motion of abstract figurines—“walkers”— and then using Point Light Displays to convey their motion in isolation, our proposed technique for data visualisation results in subconscious dimensional reduction and pattern recognition, enabling a meaningful overview of complex multivariate data with little cognitive effort. In this workshop paper, we introduce walkers as a novel visualisation concept and describe how this idea could be integrated into potential immersive analytics application scenarios. We also discuss the research questions that the idea of encoding data into biomechanical motion raises in the context of immersive analytics.PostprintPeer reviewe

SYSTEMIC SCLEROSIS AND MALIGNANT DISEASES

Bolesnici sa sistemskom sklerozom (SSc) imaju povećan rizik od malignoma u odnosu na opću populaciju. Najčešće je riječ o karcinomu pluća, hematološkim bolestima, malignomima probavnog sustava, dojke i nemelanomskim karcinomima kože. Trajanje bolesti, starija životna dob u trenutku postavljanja dijagnoze SSc-a, pušenje i konzumiranje alkohola znatno povećavaju rizik od razvoja malignih bolesti. SSc, skleroderma like sindrom i Raynaudov sindrom također se javljaju u sklopu paraneoplastičkog sindroma. Povezanost SSc-a i malignoma objašnjava se jedinstvenom genetskom osjetljivošću za razvoj malignoma i autoimunih bolesti te izloženošću zajedničkim rizičnim okolišnim čimbenicima ili autoprotutijelima.Patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) are at increased risk of malignancies in comparison with the general population. The most common is lung cancer, followed by hematologic diseases, malignant tumors of the gastrointestinal tract, breast, and non-melanoma skin cancers. Duration of the disease, older age at the moment of diagnosis, smoking, and alcohol consumption significantly increase the risk of malignancy. SSc, scleroderma-like syndrome, and Raynaud phenomenon can develop within paraneoplastic syndrome. The association of SSc and malignancies could be explained by a unique genetic susceptibility for the development of malignancies or autoimmune diseases, or the exposure to certain environmental factors or autoantibodies