An increasing number of senior citizens and the changing nature of traditional Indian family structure call for initiatives that support the social and emotional aspects of senior citizen care. In this paper, we present our early work on designing for non-explicit reciprocal micro-communication between distributed aging parents and their adult children. Our work leverages implicit aspects of face-to-face interactions inherent in a traditional integrated family structure. We present the design and rationale of Bridge, an example manifestation. Bridge is enabled by an embedded sensor system with a smart phone as a gateway to communicate patterns of everyday activities and anomalies if any of seniors and their children to each other. Our goal is to facilitate an inter-personal and inter-generational holistic awareness of each other's environment as openings for engaging in a meaningful conversation and care across distance.
It is becoming increasingly more common for people to own botha smartphone and a tablet, providing a design opportunity to leverage the combination of these two formfactors. Our work aims to explore this by: a) defining the design space of distributed input and output solutions that rely on and benefit from phone--tablet collaboration, both physically and digitally; andb) reveal the idiosyncrasies of each particular device combination via interactive prototypes. Our research provides actionable insight in this emerging area by defining a design space, suggesting a developer's framework and implementing prototypical applicationsin such areas as distributed information display, distributed control and various configurations of these. For each of these, we present several example techniques and demonstrate an application that combinessuch techniques.
We report the results of a short term experimental study on blind participants to evaluate their performances on two different text typing techniques. BrailleTouch, a gesture based text typing technology, is objectively compared to the TalkBack-enabled Android stock keyboard which requires touch exploration to type. We found that on an average BrailleTouch was almost twice as fast as the Android stock keyboard for typing each character. At the same time, these experiments clearly establish that accuracy of the BrailleTouch technique significantly dwindles as the number of dots in a Braille cell increase due to lesser motor control over the ring finger (or the digitus medicinalis).
In conventional systems like the web-based systems, device-based systems, or desktop systems, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) spectrum encompasses of user interaction methods, interaction modes, user interface design, etc. that strive to facilitate a user to seamlessly and intuitively interact with the system to accomplish his system goals. This spectrum usually considers aspects pertaining to bringing the user to initiate interaction with the system and retaining the user's interest to keep interacting with the system as an outcome of the usability/user experience that a user obtains while interacting with the system. In the context of crowdsourcing, these aspects have individual significance and not completely user experience based. Hence, it is essential to widen the spectrum of HCI for crowdsourcing to embrace these additional aspects explicitly and provide for a comprehensive HCI paradigm for crowdsourcing In this paper, the conceptualization and definition of HCI paradigm for crowdsourcing has been described. The application of every aspect of the proposed paradigm is illustrated with respect to crowdsourcing of a typical form digitization task. The defined aspects could also serve as HCI evaluation parameters for business process task crowdsourcing
In this paper we present our experience of designingtwo tablet applications we developed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD). This paper also provides a review of apps for autism, state-of-the-art practices on user modeling and adaptation for children with special needs as well as the challenges to be addressed in order to analyze, design, implement and evaluate such an app.Our novel contribution is in in the form of simple collaborative applications for multi-touch tablets to enhance language skills for children with ASD. We have developed two iPad apps 'I Know' and 'I Can Tell' which are freely available at AppStore. We believe that these apps, though developed with an aim to enhance language skills, could also enhance social behaviors such as collaboration, expression and appreciation for pair activities.
Limited access to information, lack of motivation and unawareness of cause, precaution and prevention of Tuberculosis (TB) are some of the leading causes for in-adherence towards TB therapy. We present key findings and insights through a contextual enquiry conducted with patients and healthcare workers, in order to develop new Information Communication Technology (ICT) interventions for empowerment of TB patients in rural parts of Assam. We also propose Parichaya , a low-cost device that helps patients in utilizing their idle time during medication to learn about the disease and importance of DOTS therapy. The device aims to motivate the patients to adhere to DOTS therapy and to make informed health decisions. Using a basic recording module and push buttons, the system makes use of illustrations with embedded audio in Assamese language to spread awareness through narratives. The device, in the form of a medical kit, replaces the traditional medication blisters for TB patients.
The use of technology onboard ships is not typically studied within the HCI community due mainly to the challenges researchers face in gaining access to these environments. However, there is now a higher number of technological devices being used onboard ships to assist crew members in their daily tasks. So gaining access to these environments is even more important now since this increased use of technology has impacted the work practices of crew members. This paper is therefore a first step towards researching what technologies are now being incorporated onboard ships, their impact, and proposed future HCI solutions for the maritime domain.
Animation sketching tools have been shown to make creating animations fast and easy, but editing an animation can make it more complex and harder to modify. To preserve simplicity and flexibility while editing animations, we explored the use of flexible grouping structure and multiple centers for rotation and scaling. We built a modified version of the K-Sketch animation sketching system, which allows grouping structure and center of rotation and scaling to change over time. The modified K-Sketch preserves simplicity when centers change by automatically converting existing motions about the old center to motions about the new center. We evaluated our method by examining traditional and novel grouping methods and center management methods under difficult editing scenarios. We then built video prototypes of these scenarios and gathered feedback from animators.
Human error occupies a large part of the medical accidents. Although pointing and calling is one of the countermeasures of Nurses' error, it is reported that the enforcement of pointing and calling is not thorough from the busyness of nurses' daily work. We propose the pointing and calling detection system for nurses. It requires the user to wear a small wireless sensor attached to one's upper arm and a wireless microphone attached to one's head, however it does not require for the user to equip any device to one's forearm, and does not need a camera. The logged history of the pointing and calling detection by this system contributes the conformation of the proper procedure of nursing service at the time of the coaching to a new nurse from senior nurse and the looking-back at the time of writing nursing record. The result of the preliminary pointing and calling detection experiment, which was conducted by twenty nurses in the simulated environment at Toyama prefectural Koshi Rehabilitation Hospital, Japan, suggests the feasibility of our detection method.
Manipulation of 3D objects is important for collaboration and education, where a presenter might wish to manipulate a 3D object to present it to an audience. We present Mesh-Grab and Arcball-3D; two ray-based techniques for manipulating remote 3D objects using a handheld wand and present the results of a formal evaluation session where we compared them against the state-of-the-art in direct interaction techniques. In a 6-DOF docking task, our proposed techniques performed slightly slower than Scaled HOMER but overall, participants showed preference towards Arcball-3D and complained about fatigue and awkward arm postures on Scaled HOMER. In addition to the users' preference, as ray-based techniques do not require full-range rotation, we conclude that they are a viable alternative to direct interaction.
We present Plane-Casting, a novel technique for 3D object manipulation from a distance that is especially suitable for smartphones. We describe two variations of Plane-Casting, Pivot and Free Plane-Casting, and present results from a pilot study. Results suggest that Pivot Plane-Casting is more suitable for quick, coarse movements whereas Free Plane-Casting is more suited to slower, precise motion. In a 3D movement task, Pivot Plane-Casting performed better quantitatively, but subjects preferred Free Plane-Casting overall.
Mobile phone is mostly common communicating device in recent time but blind people have limited accessibility to that device. Due to the lack of their visual perception, blind people have different preferences towards interacting with a device. This work aims to find an effective interaction mode to access mobile phone by the visually impaired people in India. In Indian subcontinent people popularly use keypad-based handsets and are well habituated with the key based interaction. But the presence of a huge number of keys in keypad plays negative impact in interaction procedure for our target users. We explored how the detection time for a particular key in a jumble of keys varies with different keypad conditions where target users searched for a key only through the tactile sense. We report the preferable keypad type for our blind mobile users where detection for a particular key is made faster and less error prone. We found that the detection time for a particular key was significantly less and the detection was much accurate in a keypad containing only the functional keys rather than QWERTY or traditional 4x3 keypad.
Present paper describes the overall architecture, design and evaluation process of an Interactive Voice Response based Commodity Price Retrieval System for semiliterate or illiterate farmers. Here users just need to dial a 24x7 helpline number to get market wise latest price information on recognition of district and commodity names in Bangla language. Telephonic speech data has been collected automatically from all geographical regions of West Bengal to cover major dialectal variations. Sustained efforts have been given in real-time speech data collection, transcription, system design, evaluation and field trial analysis. Additionally to meet users' expectations in field conditions, distinctive error recovery methods like Signal Analysis and Decision, Confidence Measure and Polling, Complementary Information, Runtime model generation etc. are incorporated to confirm performance enhancement in final trial. This system is providing excellent value-addition to the already existing AGMARKNET website managed by ministry of agriculture, India; as no computers, internet, or even reading/writing skills are required for this application.
Almost everyone today owns some type of mobile device that is not only being used for routine tasks such as making phone calls, but also for more advanced tasks such as social networking. Advances in hardware technology have seen the cost of mobile devices reduce considerably. However, even with the advanced capabilities and relatively low cost, there is still limited use of these devices in industrial environments. In this paper we discuss observations made from several field studies conducted that examine the challenges faced by personnel working in three different process industry environments. We then present design directions for how mobile devices could be used more effectively to enhance their work practice. This paper therefore provides both a rare glimpse for other researchers into industrial working conditions which are often difficult to gain access to, and a possible way forward for how mobile devices could effectively enhance users working experiences.
As people age memory capabilities are reduced, thus reminder system can benefit older adult users. However, the uptake of reminder system is still low. In our previous work, we proposed a mental model of older adults for a reminder system. We presented this model using design principles: simplicity, flexibility, recognizability and familiarity. However, in this research, we were only interested to investigate the simplicity element of the user model. To do this, we evaluated two reminder applications -- Calendar and Task which were chosen based on other design principles: flexibility and familiarity. We had six older adult users who evaluated the interfaces based on usability principles: ease of use, ease of learning and user friendliness. The results showed that none of the reminders were considered as easy to use thus classified as unfriendly. What we learned from our study was that older adults only considered 'easy-to-use' if the interfaces were perceived simple enough for them and producing simple design requires a hard work and is a time-consuming process.
Glassbeam Support is a cloud based Machine log data analytics and search application. It allows Data centers, Networking servers, OEMs and IT Enterprises to quickly search for data sources and insights related to any machine. Due to the complexity of data within log files, the existing interface supported a lot of features, which were not aligned to actual user behavior. This made the product complex and various features were left unexplored. The existing system presented itself with inefficient navigation and performance latency issues. Glassbeam required a complete re-design of 'Search', which could be intuitive and scalable to different kinds of log files across domains. To achieve this, an 'Object Oriented' user experience design framework was used where a 'Central Object' around which the entire application and functionalities could be aligned. The redesigned application reduced the time to narrow down to problems and troubleshoot issues in minutes instead of days. The overall usability of the system was enhanced and it supported a broader number of use cases. It empowered enterprises with end-to-end log data analytics, support their support, RnD and Sales forecasting activities.
This paper introduces AstroGrasp, an educational tangible user interface that aims at facilitating collaborative hands-on learning of basic astronomy concepts of eclipses and the cause of seasons. AstroGrasp allows users to explore the concepts of eclipse and seasons by physically manipulating hemispherical tokens of the Earth and the moon. Leveraging the benefits of physical manipulation and continuous real-time digital feedback, AstroGrasp is aimed at providing an effective, constructive and engaging learning experience.
In this paper the authors design, develop and test two Smartphone applications for Indian agriculture workers. The problem under concern necessitates the need to take into consideration the low literacy level of Indian farmers. The authors also present results from two surveys, one with the farmers and other with phone dealers catering to a majority farmer population, indicating the economic and educational constraints that come into the picture while developing assistance tools for them. A detailed mobile phone market study over the past few years is also presented discussing recent trends. The resulting designs for the two apps are a result of a participatory study with farmers, where multiple design iterations were performed to come down to the final design. Testing of the final app designs confirmed recommendations from previous work in the area and also revealed certain new design considerations based on how the users perceive and understand numbers. The paper therefore, presents design recommendations that have been tested with farmers and can be used to develop effective Smartphone apps for rural workers, particularly in the area of agriculture.
The concept of UX has become so popular that ISO standard (ISO9241-210 [8]) has incorporated the concept But this standard has many points to be criticized: 1. The concept of UX is not clear, 2. The process model of HCD does not cover the whole aspects of UX, including service. 3. The treatment of "satisfaction" is not adequate. All these points are not just the problems of the standard but the difficult aspects of the concept of UX itself. Hence, a new paradigm was proposed as to the concept of experience that includes the user experience for products and the recipient experience for services. Finally, parameters that manufacturers or service providers can manipulate were positioned in the psychological process that includes the concept of the level of aspiration and the adaptation level.
We introduce MK-Pad (Mouse+Keyboard Pad), a technique for entering text and performing mouse operations using a tablet device for distance interaction. MK-Pad uses the screen of a 10.1" tablet touchscreen to host a soft keyboard and turns the screen into a large multi-touch trackpad. The multi-touch capabilities of the tablet make it possible to avoid the need for explicit mode switching between text-entry and mouse operations. Similarly, because of the relatively large size of the tablet display, we are able to map the entire external screen onto the tablet display and this provides users with both absolute and relative cursor positioning: tapping causes the cursor to jump to the corresponding location, providing rapid movement across large distances, while clutching using relative mode supports fine positioning control. We conducted two studies. We use data from the first study to inform the design of MK-Pad. In the second study we compare MK-Pad against the standard mouse and keyboard. The results show that MK-Pad has potential and a good alternative to mouse and keyboard for distance interaction with large displays.
