In this paper we investigate if a participant with cerebral palsy displays a deficit in movement planning for simple pointing and gesture actions that are required to interact with a touchscreen. We performed a repeated measures case study with one participant with CP, and one typically developed (TD) participant. Measurements of the relative timing of eye and hand movements were made to see how they vary when participants have the opportunity to preplan a movement (by knowing where a target will appear), and to see if they were repeatable. As expected, the typically developed participant changed their coordination patterns when they could preplan a movement. This did not occur for the participant with cerebral palsy and suggests he has a reduced ability to preplan movements, or at least a preference to avoid doing so. This implies gesture based interaction to imagined targets could be less accessible to people with cerebral palsy. Visual affordances may help overcome this potential barrier. The relative timing of movements varied from session to session for the participant with CP, but not the TD participant.
Work towards identifying characteristics of sandwich storytelling based tangible systems for Chinese Primary School English instruction starts with principles determined for Chinese primary school children when learning English. These principles are considered in the context of sandwiched storytelling. A review of a number of tangible projects for education presents the scope of tangible systems as they are applied in education. These lead to emerging themes, such as scale, that determine constraints on interaction design. A snippet from the traditional story the Three Little Pigs is used to reflect on characteristics of the design and implementation of this tangible system.
Together with the use of rapid prototyping techniques and efforts to reduce the production cost, wearable and mobile electronic devices are brought to the market faster than ever, with less time spent on actual usability testing of these devices for prolonged use. Due to this, the usability lifespan of such electronic devices has reduced significantly where consumers might be moving or upgrading on to using newer electronic devices more often than they really need to. Therefore, this paper focuses on identifying key characteristics of usability that may encourage prolonged use of an activity monitoring device. Also, to observe and record any user acceptance and/or usability issues that may arise from using an activity monitor over a prolonged period.
Perhaps the term computer 'memory' has led people to believe that human memory has to be perfect and infallible. Many people worry when they realise they forget and some turn to recording and collecting as much as they can, e.g. photos or videos through life logging or personal data as seen in the quantified-self trend. Some people assume that by collecting they can avoid forgetting or at least have access to the information anytime later. And that is where they are wrong. First of all, recordings are not equivalent to memories, and memories 'can not be stored'. Secondly it has already been shown that people collect too much and organize too little for them to be able to find information later [1]. Thirdly, human memory works best when we forget... a lot. What I want to talk about is my vision [2] that we can use design research to support human remembering by supporting our memory's functions [3], which include a directive function (using the past to guide present and future thoughts and behaviours, e.g. solving problems), a self-representative function (creating a sense of self over time) and a social function (developing and nurturing relationships, through sharing of personal experiences). It is important to realise that in order to support these functions there is no need to improve our remembering capabilities, however it could benefit from the right type of support. Since remembering is a reconstructive process, individual memories are subject to change, continuously, and what someone experiences as a memory does not have to be the same as what happened or what other people remember from the experience. Bits of information from the original experience can be used to stimulate and facilitate the reconstruction process. These so-called memory cues [4], which can be anything: from a photo, a song to a person or a location, are at the core of our research. We use a people-centred approach to study memory cues in everyday life, which informs the design of interactive systems that present these memory cues. Since these cues are often digital, while people prefer material objects [e.g. 5], we combine material and digital in our studies and designs.
This paper describes an experiment conducted as part of a larger project investigating the possibilities of using a virtual environment for users performing day-to-day computing tasks. The experiment is a user study analyzing the performance of reading tasks typical of a general purpose computing environment conducted in immersive virtual reality headsets. Results of this study are evaluated, and suggest that reading tasks can be performed with near equivalent performance in the virtual environment when compared to performance values obtained from baseline tasks on a traditional display.
The allure of using everyday objects to interact with virtual systems has been around since the beginnings of HCI. There have been many exciting research projects. Without exception they report increase user engagement and a fun user experience; positive attributes for learning and gaming systems. A few of the projects have even made it to products. However there are still major challenges to overcome in order to be able to use any everyday object as an interactive device. There appear to be some cognitive advantages to manipulating physical objects. However these advantages are not yet well understood and more research is needed to flesh out our understanding. In the meantime we can posit that the advantages come from the increased sensory engagement -- tactile, proprioceptive and kinesthetic, the true 3D visual space, our social norms of collaboration and turn-taking and our understanding of the physical world. As an example, recall when you have been sitting with a friend, colleague or child and one of you has grabbed the salt and pepper to represent the sun and earth, or such. Today and alternative might be to pull out a tablet and look for an animation. The animation will likely be more accurate, but less engaging. Which would be understood better, remembered more clearly? Could a blend of the two, with the salt and pepper used as tokens to manipulate the virtual animation, be built? Of course we could do this with current technologies, just not in the cafe. To sense the salt and pepper we could use image processing. This needs a minimum of two cameras to accurately sense the position and orientation. However picking up and moving the objects partially obscures them making tracking more difficult. A better set up is about 4 cameras -- and well behaved participants. Alternatively we could sense the objects on or near to a surface using a range of sensing technologies. The limitations with the surface sensing approach are distance from the surface and fidelity of the positioning. We could blend cameras and surface sensing. Is near field radio waves a possibility? The second challenge is how and where to provide feedback to the user on the effect of their actions on the virtual world. Should we show the world on a 2D display, through augmented or virtual reality headsets, have actuated tangibles that will travel the paths for the sun and earth? Clearly, to do this in the wild with current technologies, the setup time would be considerable and the moment would be lost. The challenge with light-tangibles is to be able to play out the scenario above without spending a 'month of Sundays' designing and building the system and going to the lab to test it. In this talk I will explore the challenges and possibilities of light-weight tangible interaction. Will there be a day when we can simply pick up the salt and pepper and play out the scenario?
Mobile eBook readers and reader applications are readily available and are marketed as convenient for accessing personal eBook collections. Different brands of readers and apps are frequently evaluated and compared in consumer, trade, and popular magazines, but rarely in academic studies. This present study examines nine personal digital library (pDL) interfaces, from which design cues are drawn and paper prototypes of pDL for eBooks are developed. The paper prototypes are evaluated in a usability study to elicit the eBook display preferences of users.
Research output metrics, in particular for peer-reviewed publications are of increasingly high importance for academics' careers. In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and related fields of research, like Computer Graphics and Multimedia, simple to use and objective measures like Thomson Reuter's impact factors aren't applicable. Ranking lists like the Australian ERA and CORE try to provide an alternative, but are often criticized for being subjective. We are proposing an additional, alternative rating system which is entirely based on Hirsch indices by assigning four categories of quality (A*, A, B, C) to certain ranges (30+, 20-29, 10-19, 0-9) of H5 indices gathered from Google Scholar. We describe our methodology, results, limitations, and opportunities of this proposed "CHINZ" rating.
An effective learning system is indispensable for human beings with a limited life span. Traditional learning systems schedule repetition based on both the results of a recall test and learning theories such as the spacing effect. However, there is room for improvement from the perspective of remembrance-level estimation. In this paper, we focus on on-line handwritten data obtained from handwriting using a computer. We collected handwritten data from remembrance tests to both analyze the problem of traditional estimation methods and to build a new estimation model using handwritten data as the input data. The evaluation found that our proposed model can output a continuous remembrance-level value of zero to 1, whereas traditional methods output a only binary decision. In addition, the experiment showed that our proposed model achieves the best performance with an F-value of 0.69.
In New Zealand, English is the language that dominates contemporary technologies. Usability testing was completed on a range of applications, available with a Māori-language interface, to gauge levels of awareness, engagement and perception. Nearly all of the respondents were unaware of the availability of these interfaces but most indicated they would prefer to use the Māori-language versions. In terms of engagement and usability, users initially engaged using Māori but switched to English when they wanted to quickly complete the task at hand. Few remained fully engaged with the Māori-language interfaces. High levels of language switching were reported and some frustration as the participants encountered new and unfamiliar uses of words. At face value the feedback suggests the translated interfaces contained unnecessary complications and that better design and content might have enhanced the user experience. However, there is evidence that extended use would enable users to become more familiar with the interfaces alluding to initial barriers created by a previous competence in another language -- in this case English. With this previous competence in mind it might be more useful to employ design concepts that would alleviate initial difficulties and serve to keep the user engaged in the target language for longer periods of time.
CHINZ is the annual conference of the New Zealand Chapter of the Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the ACM. In this paper we analyse the history of CHINZ through citations, authorship and online presence. CHINZ appears to compare well with the larger APCHI conference on citation-based measures. 42% of CHINZ papers were found as open access versions on the web.
This paper investigates research work related to the modelling and simulation of household electricity consumption with a view to developing a simulation to evaluate the effectiveness of demand-side management mechanisms. The eventual aim of the research is to be able to model household consumption down to the level of individual appliance use in order to explore and assess the impact of different demand-side strategies, both in individual household consumption, and on overall grid balance. The focus of this paper is to survey relevant research on simulation of household consumption, potential demand-side strategies and their impact, and modelling techniques for residential consumption. From this review, the paper provides a number of pointers for future effort in the area of modelling the impact of demand-side management strategies and techniques.
This paper describes the development of an interactive spreadsheet model (INT-VIS) developed to give users quick access to bespoke visualization representations of data from a dairy demonstration farm. Dairy farming has a long history in New Zealand with the country exporting ninety-five percent of the annual milk production. Demonstration Farms, such as the one which is the focus of this paper, have been established by educational institutes and industry groups as a way of promoting best practice dairying for this fast growing industry. One of the aims of such farms is to produce and share data so that other farmers will benefit from the information sourced. Typically, the information from the South Island Dairy Development Centre (SIDDC) demonstration farm at Lincoln University is collected weekly, entered into a spreadsheet, graphs and charts produced on an adhoc basis and shared with stakeholders by way of pdf documents on the organisation website. This paper describes the first steps in developing an interactive spreadsheet model to allow users to create their own bespoke visualizations.
Despite significant advances in medicine, diabetes mellitus remains a major health problem among diabetes patients (diabetics). Diabetes in Malaysia has become increasingly critical along with diabetes complications. Diabetes Self-Management Applications (DSMA) are impactful patient-centered tools that has immense potential in enabling diabetics to manage their health conditions and thereby prevent complications. This study identifies factors that influence the intention to adopt DSMA by diabetics in Malaysia. The aim is to develop a research model to represent the adoption of DSMA amongst diabetics in Malaysia. Previous work is reviewed to develop the proposed model which comprised of constructs from established models and othper constructs from the literature. To test the developed model, a quantitative approach was employed and established questionnaires were administered as research instrument for data collection. The findings indicate that Perceived Financial Risk, Perceived Privacy and Security Risk, Technology Anxiety and Facilitating Conditions have significantly positive relationship with the intention to adopt DSMA. Findings from this study serve as a guideline for DSMA developers in understanding the core factors that influence the adoption and use of diabetes health applications by diabetics.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems provide access to information over the phone by responding to a pre-defined menu either through key presses or voice commands. Despite being in use for a long period, IVR systems are still considered time-consuming and frustrating to use. In this work, we show that a significant portion of the call duration goes in selecting the correct menu option. Since the menu options are presented sequentially, more time is required to access menu options appearing later in the sequence, therefore, to reduce this, relevant menu options must appear early in the sequence. In this paper, we present our data driven prediction algorithms for adaptive rearrangement of menu options so that the relevant options appear early. We also show that adaptive approaches to decide the menu structure outperform existing static menu based IVR system. We have designed, deployed, and evaluated our schemes in the real world study.
Stereoscopic display technologies are becoming increasingly commonplace in cinemas, homes and offices. It appears that this form of presentation, also referred to as 3D, is more and more supplementing and substituting monoscopic (2D) forms. However, there is only little evidence for the actual usefulness of stereo presentations. We are investigating users' preferences for stereoscopic PowerPoint-style slide presentations, in particular which presentation elements are perceived as useful. In an empirical within-subject study with 20 participants comparing monoscopic with stereoscopic slide presentations we found early evidence that there is only little difference in the users' preferences, that text and images are preferred to be watched monoscopically and that graphs, diagrams and 3D models might be preferred in stereo, but may confuse the viewers.
Visualization of energy consumption patterns is expected to enforce ecologically responsible behavior. Visualization performs a vital role by assisting residential end-users to understand and manage their energy consumption in a sustainable manner. The main objective of visualizing energy consumption is to inculcate awareness among residents and to encourage energy conserving behavior. A robust design is essential to achieving an effective visualization. This article discusses the preliminary research work on identifying the design requirements for visualization followed by the future direction in this area of research.
We have extended the tag cloud metaphor to allow it to be applied to information and software visualisation. A number of issues, such as wide variation in tag length, have been addressed. We have developed a tool, TAGGLE, which implements our approach. In this paper, we present our visualisation technique and discuss the heuristic evaluation and report preliminary results from user trials employed to evaluate the approach and TAGGLE itself.
Stereoscopic visualization creates illusions of depth through disparity between the images shown to left and right eyes of the viewer. While the stereoscopic visualization is widely adopted in immersive visualization systems to improve user experience, it can also cause visual discomfort if the stereoscopic viewing parameters are not adjusted appropriately. These parameters are usually manually adjusted based on human factors and empirical knowledge of the developer or even the user. However, scenes with dynamic change in scale and configuration can lead into continuous adjustment of these parameters while viewing. In this paper, we propose a method to adjust the interpupillary distance adaptively and automatically according to the configuration of the 3D scene, so that the visualized scene can maintain sufficient stereo effect while reducing visual discomfort.
This paper explores the potential features and functionality of software to support 'literary tourism'---a type of cultural tourism that focuses on real-world settings associated with fictional works and the authors' lives. We explore the research literature on literary tourism to create a set of five literary tourist personas, and to tease out potential design and functionality for applications to support these different categories of literary tourists. We then analyze a set of current websites and applications aimed at the literary tourist against the personas, as a test of the usefulness of the categories in identifying potential gaps in literary tourism support.
