Are you being addressed?: real-time addressee detection to support remote participants in hybrid meetings

A meeting assistant agent for (remote) participants in hybrid meetings has been developed. Its task is to monitor the meeting conversation and notify the user when he is being addressed. This paper presents the experiments that have been performed to develop machine classifiers to decide if “You are being addressed��? where “You��? refers to a fixed (remote) participant in a meeting. The experimental results back up the choices made regarding the selection of data, features, and classification methods. We discuss variations of the addressee classification problem that have been considered in the literature and how suitable they are for addressing detection in a system that plays a role in a live meeting

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

Time-related feedback messages for changing activity behaviour of patients with COPD

Background: The promotion of physical activity in daily life is an important aspect in the treatment of COPD patients [1]. We developed a telemedicine application – the Activity Coach – that aims to increase activity levels and to balance activities over the day. Activity levels are measured using a triaxial accelerometer, and time-related feedback text messages are provided on a smartphone. The objective of this study was to investigate how COPD patients responded to the feedback messages on a short-term notice. Conclusions: COPD patients significantly change their activity level on a short-term notice in response to time-related feedback messages provided on a smartphone. Ambulant feedback messages might therefore be a valuable component of telemedicine interventions that aim to improve activity behaviour of COPD patients

An ontology-based recommender system to promote physical activity for pre-frail elderly

The increasing ageing population and the prevalence of chronic diseases have introduced new challenges to healthcare systems motivating researchers to use telemonitoring solutions for providing care. In some solutions, a special focus has been given to promoting physical activity as it can decrease \ud the risk of becoming frail and prevents further health complications. The focus of this research is to keep seniors physically active by designing and developing an intelligent system that recommends exercises tailored to an individual’s health status, goals and preferences hence aiming for an adaptive personalized solution

Elckerlyc goes mobile - Enabling natural interaction in mobile user interfaces

The fast growth of computational resources and speech technology available on mobile devices makes it possible to entertain users of these devices in having a natural dialogue with service systems. These systems are sometimes perceived as social agents and this can be supported by presenting them on the interface by means of an animated embodied conversational agent. To take the full advantage of the power of embodied conversational agents in service systems it is important to support real-time, online and responsive interaction with the system through the embodied conversational agent. The design of responsive animated conversational agents is a daunting task. Elckerlyc is a model-based platform for the speci﬿cation and animation of synchronised multi-modal responsive animated agents. This paper presents a new light-weight PictureEngine that allows to run this platform in mobile applications. We describe the integration of the PictureEngine in the user interface of two different coaching applications and discuss the ﬿ndings from user evaluations. We also conducted a study to evaluate an editing tool for the speci﬿cation of the agent’s communicative behaviour. Twenty one participants had to specify the behaviour of an embodied conversational agent using the PictureEngine. We may conclude that this new lightweight back-end engine for the Elckerlyc platform makes it easier to build embodied conversational interfaces for mobile devices

A Context-Aware Adaptive Feedback System for Activity Monitoring

An active lifestyle is an important factor in the prevention of deconditioning and many negative secondary effects in chronic diseases (e.g. COPD). A number of studies have been conducted with the aim of gaining insight into the daily activity patterns of these patients. Current research is focussing on motivating patients to stay physically active and balancing their activity patterns by using an activity sensor combined with remote monitoring and smart, personalised feedback