ABSTRACT
Documentation can support design work and create opportunities for learning and reflection. We explore how a novel documentation tool for a remote interaction design course provides insight into design process and integrates strategies from expert practice to support studio-style collaboration and reflection. Using Research through Design, we develop and deploy Kaleidoscope, an online tool for documenting design process, in an upper-level HCI class during the COVID-19 pandemic, iteratively developing it in response to student feedback and needs. We discuss key themes from the real-world deployment of Kaleidoscope, including: tensions between documentation and creation;effects of centralizing discussion;privacy and visibility in shared spaces;balancing evidence of achievement with feelings of overwhelm;and the effects of initial perceptions and incentives on tool usage. These successes and challenges provide insights to guide future tools for design documentation and HCI education that scaffold learning process as an equal partner to execution. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
Mobile Financial Services (MFS) has gained significant popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among marginalized and low-income, low-literate communities around the world. Such communities have not been traditionally considered while designing MFS services via smartphone apps or USSD services in featurephones. Financial constraints limit such end-users towards basic featurephones, where recent appstore support has made it possible to deploy app-based MFS solutions beyond USSD. This new featurephone platform is a relatively underexplored area in terms of addressing design issues related to aforementioned end-users while developing MFS solutions. Our work addresses this gap by presenting qualitative findings on barriers to technology access focused on MFS solutions in marginal communities. We present a prototype non-USSD, app-based solution on an appstore-supported featurephone platform designed via a human-centered approach. This work has the potential to increase the financial inclusivity of marginalized communities in cashless MFS transactions via low-cost, appstore-enabled featurephones. © 2023 ACM.
ABSTRACT
As virtual reality (VR) is labeled by many as 'an ultimate empathy machine,' immersive VR applications have the potential to assist in empathy training for mental healthcare such as depression [21]. In responding to the increasing numbers of diagnosed depression throughout COVID-19, a first-person VR adventure game called 'Schwer' was designed and prototyped by the authors' research team to provide a social support environment for depression treatment. To continue the study and assess the training effectiveness for an appropriate level of empathy, this current article includes a brief survey on data analytics models and features to accumulate evidence for the next phase of the study, an interactive game-level design for the 'Reconstruction' stage, and a preliminary study with data collection. The preliminary study was conducted with a post-game interview to evaluate the design of the levels and their effectiveness in empathy training. Results showed that the game was rated as immersive by all participants. Feedback on the avatar design indicated that two out of three of the non-player characters (NPCs) have made the intended effect. Participants showed mostly positive opinion towards their experienced empathy and provided feedback on innovative teleport mechanism and game interaction. The findings from the literature review and the results of the preliminary study will be used to further improve the existing system and add the data analytics model training. The long-term research goal is to contribute to the healthcare field by developing a dynamic AI-based biofeedback immersive VR system in assisting depression prevention. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The whole world has been witnessing the gigantic enemy in the form of COVID-19 since March 2020. With its super-fast spread, it has devastated a major part of the world and found to be the most dangerous virus of the 21st Century. All countries went into a lockdown to control the spread of the virus, and the economy dropped down to an all- time low index. The major guideline to avoid the spread of diseases like COVID- 19 at work is avoiding contact with people and their belongings. It is not safe to use computing devices because it may result in the spread of the virus by touching them. This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence- based virtual mouse that detects or recognizes hand gestures to control the various functions of a personal computer. The virtual mouse Algorithm uses a webcam or a built-in camera of the system to capture hand gestures, then uses an algorithm to detect the palm boundaries similar to that of the face detection model of the media pipe face mesh algorithm. After tracing the palm boundaries, it uses a regression model and locates the 21 3D hand-knuckle coordinate points inside the recognized hand/palm boundaries. Once the Hand Landmarks are detected, they are used to call windows Application Programming Interface (API) functions to control the functionalities of the system. The proposed algorithm is tested for volume control and cursor control in a laptop with the Windows operating system and a webcam. The proposedsystem took only 1ms to identify the gestures and control the volume and cursor in real-time. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19, imagine having a temporary lip sticker that offers the protection of an n95 mask without the uncomfortable bulk. Using green electrospun nanofibers the lip sticker filters the virus and can communicate geospatial data to your phone using embedded NFC technology. Available in different designs and skins, some fiber formations can display temperature changes on your face. This paper investigates several prototypes of the described product. © 2022 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
As the operation of buildings accounts for around 30% of global CO2 emissions, reducing their energy consumption is considered crucial for climate change mitigation. Aware of this significance, the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community has conducted research on energy consumption for over 15 years. However, compared with domestic environments, commercial organisations are comprised of complex mixed-use buildings, and the socio-technical understanding of space and resulting energy use are relatively under-explored. In this late-breaking work, we present the initial findings of a longitudinal analysis that uses building energy data from a period covering the COVID-19 lockdown measures to help identify the energy associated with these buildings and their users. Viewing the pandemic as a unique, grand-scale 'energy intervention', the resulting consumption patterns are used to inform questions about leverage points for achieving change, stakeholder agency vs. infrastructure demand;and highlight the importance of putting energy data in context. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
Games have always been popular for connecting people, from local single-player and couch co-op, to massively multiplayer online. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, remote games that involved and fostered social interactions and connections were a highlight among strategies for staying connected. For this year's games and play SIG, we come together to discuss the relevant and timely topic of social and playful technologies, and how they can be designed to best foster meaningful social connections over a distance. We bring together attendees from not only the games community, but also those in the broader field of CHI focusing on social and playful technologies. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
Featured ApplicationThe study could be used for sitting posture monitoring in a work-from-home setup. This could also be used for rehabilitation purposes of patients who has posture-related problems.Human posture recognition is one of the most challenging tasks due to the variation in human appearance, changes in the background and illumination, additional noise in the frame, and diverse characteristics and amount of data generated. Aside from these, generating a high configuration for recognition of human body parts, occlusion, nearly identical parts of the body, variations of colors due to clothing, and other various factors make this task one of the hardest in computer vision. Therefore, these studies require high-computing devices and machines that could handle the computational load of this task. This study used a small-scale convolutional neural network and a smartphone built-in camera to recognize proper and improper sitting posture in a work-from-home setup. Aside from the recognition of body points, this study also utilized points' distances and angles to help in recognition. Overall, the study was able to develop two objective datasets capturing the left and right side of the participants with the supervision and guidance of licensed physical therapists. The study shows accuracies of 85.18% and 92.07%, and kappas of 0.691 and 0.838, respectively. The system was developed, implemented, and tested in a work-from-home environment.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic caused in the human-computer interaction (HCI) research field. Specifically, we aim to investigate how the HCI empirical research methodology changed due to the restrictions caused by COVID-19. For this reason, we analyzed all the papers published in the 2021 edition of The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), which is generally considered the premier international conference for the field of HCI. Through the analysis of CHI papers, we identified four main effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on HCI research: influence on participants;influence on apparatus;influence on experiment procedure;other influences. These effects are described in detail and broken down into additional subcategories. Moreover, papers on pandemic-related topics were also identified. In addition, we performed some comparisons with the previous and successive edition of the conference, and extended some analysis, e.g categorization, to CHI 2022 papers. The analysis found that 23% of CHI 2021 papers and 36% of CHI 2022 papers reported some influences of the pandemic, the most common being a change in the procedures researchers used to interact with participants in their studies, in most cases based on remote communication technologies.
ABSTRACT
The interest in virtual learning is not new;however, it has become a hot topic since the outbreak of COVID-19. In the area of human-computer interaction (HCI), there have been few educational experiences conducted in fully online mode. This paper examines a virtual flipped classroom-based approach, which was adopted to support HCI teaching-learning by using online tools. We conducted two case studies at a Brazilian University and carried out qualitative data analysis. We also investigated how this approach affected the experience of undergraduate and graduate students, together with the skills it enabled them to acquire. The results revealed a high degree of satisfaction and motivation felt by students when they adopted this approach and a change in their mindset about the importance of HCI in their future job activities as professionals. Skills related to effective work in group management and innovative thinking were also stimulated by our approach.
ABSTRACT
Physical distancing is a key measure to slow the spread of many highly infectious diseases, e.g. COVID-19. Streetscape interventions such as pedestrian signage can contribute to ensuring distances are kept, but it is unclear to what extent people comply with these in practice. This paper tackles this question using an immersive video environment to realistically simulate real-life streetscapes in the lab. In a controlled user study, we augmented panoramic video footage with pedestrian one-way street signage and recorded route decisions to assess compliance with distance keeping measures. Our results indicate that such signage affects routing decisions and can thus help pedestrians to avoid crowded situations where distance keeping is difficult. We also identified further factors affecting decisions and a correlation between intention to comply and actual compliance. The experimental method we used enabled us to effectively and safely carry out a study of a phenomenon that in the real world depends on interaction with the physical environment. This method may have applications in other areas in which simulations of physical environments are important.
ABSTRACT
The popularity of the online teaching model increased during the COVID-19, and virtual reality online education is now firmly established as a future trend in educational growth. Human–computer interaction and collaboration between virtual models and physical entities, as well as virtual multi-sensory cognition, have become the focus of research in the field of online education. In this paper, we analyze the mapping form of teaching information and cue information on users' cognition through an experimental system and investigate the effects of the presentation form of online virtual teaching information, the length of the material, users' memory of the information, and the presentation form of information cues on users' cognitive performance. The experimental results show that different instructional information and cue presentation designs have significant effects on users' learning performance, with relatively longer instructional content being more effective and users being more likely to mechanically remember the learning materials. By studying the impact of multi-sensory information presentation on users' cognition, the output design of instructional information can be optimized, cognitive resources can be reasonably allocated, and learning effectiveness can be ensured, which is of great significance for virtual education research in digital twins.
ABSTRACT
This study introduces initial results concerning a collaborative learning mobile application to mitigate 8th-grade students' learning loss and learning variability. COVID-19's impact on the education system and its shortcomings before, during and after the pandemic was the starting point of this study. The interactive system's concept and design are derived from a collaborative reflection expressed on the school community's daily needs while teaching and learning during the unpredictable circumstances created by the pandemic. Also, by a state-of-the-art comparison of the scarce K-12 e-mentoring systems in combination with the ubiquitousness of various technological mediums, namely mobile devices like smartphones, and their fundamental role in e-mentoring programs could create successful bonds based on knowledge transmission. The OWL CLUB mobile application seeks to curate the knowledge exchange in a more humane and positive digital experience in an educational community. It also allows for creating and growing a space that encourages new genuine connections in a digital positive learning environment for students and their community. © 2023, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.
ABSTRACT
Tawakkalna is an application developed by the Saudi Arabian government to manage the spread of COVID-19 in the country. Even now that the pandemic is under better control, Tawakkalna continues to offer numerous services to its users. People of all age groups, including children and adults, rely on the application on a daily basis. It is important to evaluate the perceived usability of the Tawakkalna (COVID-19 KSA) application. Accordingly, this study aims to evaluate its perceived usability from the perspective of users belonging to all age groups and to identify whether any particular age group is facing difficulties with using it. The study used two existing and well-known questionnaires: The System Usability Scale (SUS) and the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX). The study performed descriptive and inferential statistical analysis to present an in-depth understanding and comparison of the survey results. A total of 395 responses were received. The SUS score is 71.1. The UMUX score is 72.0. The results indicate that, overall, the SUS and UMUX scores support each other and grade Tawakkalna's perceived usability as good. The results also indicate that the mean rank of the UMUX score is higher for the 18-30 age group than for all the other age groups. In addition, children under age 12 and adults greater than age 50 face challenges while using Tawakkalna. Finally, this study presents recommendations to improve the application's usability. © 2023 Shimaa Abdullah Nagro. This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
ABSTRACT
The sudden change in our workplace practices from face-to-face work to work from home setup due to the pandemic has brought positive and negative impacts on our overall health. In literature, the use of deep learning and specialized cameras in the estimation of the human pose is popular even if there is a need for high computational resources and complex models. For this purpose, this study developed an intelligent and interactive system utilizing a human estimation model with the use of distinct keypoint such as thoracic, thoraco lumbar, and lumbar points in the spine. An objective type of a dataset captured in a work from home environment with the knowledge and guidance of Licensed Physical Therapists to assess proper and improper sitting posture was developed. The study developed and implemented a small-scale convolutional network and low-cost smartphone camera to recognize body key points. Once all the feature points' locations were extracted, additional features such as cosine similarity and point distances were calculated. Next, feature selection and optimization were utilized to classify proper and improper sitting postures. As a result, the study developed (2) datasets and (2) models with an accuracy of 85.18 and 92.07% and kappa of 0.691 and 0.838 respectively. © 2023 Jheanel Estrada and Larry Vea. This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
ABSTRACT
The lack of social activities in the elderly for physical reasons can make them feel lonely and prone to depression. With the spread of COVID-19, it is difficult for the elderly to conduct the few social activities stably, causing the elderly to be more lonely. The metaverse is a virtual world that mirrors reality. It allows the elderly to get rid of the constraints of reality and perform social activities stably and continuously, providing new ideas for alleviating the loneliness of the elderly. Through the analysis of the needs of the elderly, a virtual social center framework for the elderly was proposed in this study. Besides, a prototype system was designed according to the framework. The elderly can socialize in virtual reality with metaverse-related technologies and human-computer interaction tools. Additionally, a test was jointly conducted with the chief physician of the geriatric rehabilitation department of a tertiary hospital. The results demonstrated that the mental state of the elderly who had used the virtual social center was significantly better than that of the elderly who had not used it. Thus, virtual social centers alleviated loneliness and depression in older adults. Virtual social centers can help the elderly relieve loneliness and depression when the global epidemic is normalizing and the population is aging. Hence, they have promotion value © 2022 Beijing Zhongke Journal Publishing Co. Ltd
ABSTRACT
Due to the huge surge in remote work all over the world caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, today's work is largely defined by tools for information exchange as well as new complex problems that must be solved. Design Thinking offers a well-known and established methodological approach for iterative, collaborative and interdisciplinary problem solving. Still, recent circumstances shed a new light on how to facilitate Design Thinking activities in a remote rather than an analog way. Due to Design Thinking's high production of artifacts and its focus on communication and interaction between team members, the theory of Distributed Cognition, specifically the Distributed Cognition for Teamwork (DiCoT) framework, provides an interesting perspective on the recent going-remote of Design Thinking activities. For this, we first highlight differences of analog vs. remote Design Thinking by analyzing corresponding literature from the recent years. Next, we apply the DiCoT framework to those findings, pointing out implications for practical facilitation of Design Thinking activities in an analog and remote setting. Finally, we discuss opportunities through artificial intelligence-based technologies and methods.
ABSTRACT
Many higher education institutions moved to online learning settings due to the COVID-19 pandemic and continued using online settings entirely or in a blended learning format. Usability and design interactivity are essential components of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which need to be frequently measured and studied to ensure successful users' adoption of learning management systems (LMS) for higher education institutions and to achieve deep learning and improve students' engagement. This paper examines the usability level of the Blackboard Ultra interface perceived by two groups of users, faculty members and students at the College of Applied Studies (CAS) at the University of Bahrain (UoB). It investigates if a correlation exists between the results of each group. In addition, it studies demographic factors influencing users' perceived usability. This study uses a usability metric called Website Analysis and Measurement Inventory (WAMMI) to evaluate perceived usability. WAMMI measures five usability sub-scales: Attractiveness, Controllability, Efficiency, Helpfulness, and Learnability. Results indicate that Blackboard Ultra achieved an acceptable level of global usability score by both groups. Moreover, no significant differences were found between students' and faculty's perceptions of usability except for the efficiency sub-scale. Furthermore, the learnability sub-scale scored the least among students and faculty members, resembling a neutral usability level. The study also found that a higher frequency of BB usage resulted in higher levels of perceived usability. Based on the findings, the study proposes recommendations to improve Blackboard Ultra's usability level further among students and academic faculty members. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a sudden and widespread reorganization of public spaces, underpinned by digital technologies. The impromptu, ad hoc and collective character of this reorganization of shared places for social interactions echoes traditional practices of placemaking otherwise advocated for liveable cities, now applied to the new-physical, virtual and, increasingly, hybrid-public spaces people started to inhabit. In this article, I define the notion of 'augmented placemaking', referring to a particularly new form of digital placemaking, unleashed by the pandemic. First, I identify key new scenarios for the design of urban interfaces that emerged or gained impetus in response to COVID-19. Following that, I synthesize a model for augmented placemaking based on emerging topologies, discussing the opportunities and challenges they posed, and their potential to inform future HCI. I then conclude by proposing guidelines to inform the design process of augmented placemaking initiatives going forward. Categories and subject descriptors: cities;pervasive computing;smart cities
ABSTRACT
During the pandemic, people were asked to stay at home, which increased the demand for software. The quality of the software is improving as a result of this trend. In response, companies have accelerated their digitization processes to provide better quality software that is more accessible, user-friendly, and secure. Since the pandemic, software development teams around the world have struggled to meet deadlines during uncertain times. This poster addresses the difficulties developers and designers face in developing and managing digital health software. This is due to the growing appeal of low and no-code platforms that are becoming more accessible and user-friendly to non-programmers. The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a prototype digital health component library known as LICOR. This software development kit contains integrated digital components designed specifically for the digital health industry. It helps even non-experts create effective digital health products. The design approach was developed by combining various theories and techniques such as design system principles, domain-oriented design, micro front-ends, and microservices. The methodology is based on the design-based research approach, which combines theoretical research with working and coded software artifacts to enable real-world testing. We are interested in contributions from the community and would be happy to discuss ethical concerns, bias, and illiteracy in digital health with academics. Finally, we discuss future research opportunities and the difficulties of connecting the design phase with the development phase in digital health software development. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.