Inter-usability and the Presentation of Multi-modal Feedback for Physical Activity and Diabetic Type II Patients

In the EU Artemis project Smarcos we developed a personal attentive system that supports users in attaining a healthy lifestyle. The system is a persuasive system. Persuasive systems, and especially behaviour change support systems (BCSS) are information systems designed to form, alter or reinforce attitudes, behaviours or an act of complying without using deception, coercion or inducements. BCSS support people in their daily life by providing support by means of a human or digital coach. These systems can support users in coping with chronic diseases like COPD and diabetics, but also to be more physical active

The influence of locative media on social information sharing: a review

Mobile phones and social media enable people to share information with others whenever they want, wherever they want. More recent developments allow people to augment their sharing experience by geo-tagging their information through GPS enabled phones. These 'locative media' can be used to facilitate navigation, way finding or to obtain information about a physical place or object. Other services let the users tag, rate public spaces and recommend them to other people. Furthermore, people can tell their stories by attaching their own context to a physical location. This report is a literature review in the field of locative media. In order to get a complete overview of the research that is done on location-based social networking, the most recent developments in the field are investigated. We also look at research methods used to test the user experience of this type of social media systems. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of location based media on the sharing habits and social practices of the users of these systems. The conclusions of this exploration in the field of locative media research lead to design guidelines and research methods that will be used in a user evaluation of a system for location based smart photo sharing

Virtual coaches for healthy lifestyle

Since the introduction of the idea of the software interface agent the question recurs whether these agents should be personified and graphically visualized in the interface. In this chapter we look at the use of virtual humans in the interface of healthy lifestyle coaching systems. Based on theory of persuasive communication we analyse the impact that the use of graphical interface agents may have on user experience and on the efficacy of this type of persuasive systems. We argue that research on the impact of a virtual human interface on the efficacy of these systems requires longitudinal field studies in addition to the controlled short-term user evaluations in the field of human computer interaction (HCI). We introduce Kristina, a mobile personal coaching system that monitors its user’s physical activity and that presents feedback messages to the user. We present results of field trials (N = 60, 7 weeks) in which we compare two interface conditions on a smartphone. In one condition feedback messages are presented by a virtual animated human, in the other condition they are displayed on the screen in text. Results of the field trials show that user motivation, use context and the type of device on which the feedback message is received influence the perception of the presentation format of feedback messages and the effect on compliance to the coaching regime

Computer literacy systematic literature review method

Although there have been many attempts to define the concept ‘computer literacy’, no consensus has been reached: many variations of the concept exist within litera-ture. The majority of papers does not explicitly define the concept at all, insteadusing an unjustified subset of elements related to computers to assess a subject’slevel of computer literacy. This can limit the generalizability of research and canlead to fallacious conclusions. This is an internal report listing the method by whichthe research was conducted

Elckerlyc goes mobile: enabling technology for ECAs in mobile applications

The fast growth of computational resources and speech technology available on mobile devices makes it pos- sible for users of these devices to interact with service sys- tems through natural dialogue. These systems are sometimes perceived as social agents and presented by means of an animated embodied conversational agent (ECA). To take the full advantage of the power of ECAs in service systems, it is important to support real-time, online and responsive interaction with the system through the ECA. The design of responsive animated conversational agents is a daunting task. Elckerlyc is a model-based platform for the specification and animation of synchronised multimodal responsive animated agents. This paper presents a new light-weight PictureEngine that allows this platform to embed an ECA in the user interface of mobile applications. The ECA can be specified by using the behavior markup language (BML). An application and user evaluations of Elckerlyc and the PictureEngine in a mobile embedded digital coach is presented

Feedback presentation for mobile personalised digital physical activity coaching platforms

User interface design and feedback are important in personalised behavior change support systems. This paper discusses two service platforms that monitor user’s physical activity through wearable sensors and that present the user personalised feedback. Important principles for effectiveness of such systems are personalisation or tailoring, context- awareness, feedback and interaction. We focus here on the presentation of feedback to the user. We present results of a number of short and long term user studies in which we compare different forms of feedback presentation: text, graphics and with or without an anthropomorphic graphical talking character. Results show that although some users like the talking character they don’t have a positive effect on adherence to the activity program. The outcomes of the user evaluations support our beliefs that personal motivation is of primary importance for the effectiveness of these systems. Technical challenges ahead are to support more personal and context-aware feedback, more variations as well as the possibility for more interaction with the coaching system