Brotate and Tribike: Designing Smartphone Control for Cycling

The more people commute by bicycle, the higher is the number of cyclists using their smartphones while cycling and compromising traffic safety. We have designed, implemented and evaluated two prototypes for smartphone control devices that do not require the cyclists to remove their hands from the handlebars - the three-button device Tribike and the rotation-controlled Brotate. The devices were the result of a user-centred design process where we identified the key features needed for a on-bike smartphone control device. We evaluated the devices in a biking exercise with 19 participants, where users completed a series of common smartphone tasks. The study showed that Brotate allowed for significantly more lateral control of the bicycle and both devices reduced the cognitive load required to use the smartphone. Our work contributes insights into designing interfaces for cycling.Comment: 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '20), October 5--8, 2020, Oldenburg, German

Intonation in Robot Speech: Does it Work the Same as with People?

Human-robot interaction (HRI) research aims to design natural interactions between humans and robots. Intonation, a social signaling function in human speech investigated thoroughly in linguistics, has not yet been studied in HRI. This study investigates the effect of robot speech intonation in four conditions (no intonation, focus intonation, end-of-utterance intonation, or combined intonation) on conversational naturalness, social engagement, and people's humanlike perception of the robot collecting objective and subjective data of participant conversations (n = 120). Our results showed that humanlike intonation partially improved subjective naturalness but not observed fluency, and that intonation partially improved social engagement but did not affect humanlike perceptions of the robot. Given that our results mainly differed from our hypotheses based on human speech intonation, we discuss the implications and provide suggestions for future research to further investigate conversational naturalness in robot speech intonation