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Designing with Fantasy in Augmented Reality Games for Learning

PhD Thesis, Tengjia Zuo

Contemporary young generations face numerous 21st-century learning challenges. Young students living in a technologically and information-rich culture benefit from advances in educational technology yet are distracted by the clutter that information technology brings. Previous work suggested that educators showed concerns about the effect of learning with digital technology in schools, and many students were disengaged and unsatisfied with e-learning environments.

T. Zuo, Designing with Fantasy in Augmented Reality Games for Learning, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2023. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Technology Boosts People with Dementia’s Psychosocial Well-being

Yuan Feng gained her PhD Cum Laude at the department of Industrial Design on July 7th 2022. See the original article on TU/e website by Nicole van Overveld (Communication Advisor)

The PhD-research of Yuan Feng focuses on promoting the well-being of a vulnerable population in our society – people with dementia – using interactive technologies. Collaborating with the Vitalis Berckelhof, a Dutch residential care for elderly with and without dementia located in Eindhoven, Feng gave clients living there a way to relive the pasts and get closer to outdoor nature through simulated sensory experiences with rich interaction possibilities.

Y. Feng, Rich Interaction for People with Dementia: Designing Interactive Systems with Rich Interaction for Enhancing Engagement of People with Dementia Living in Long-term Care Facilities, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2022. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Enhancing Social Interaction among Nursing Homes Residents with Interactive Public Display Systems

Kai Kang, Bart Hengeveld, Caroline Hummels, Jun Hu

Positive peer interaction in nursing homes has been consistently recognized as essential to residents’ life quality. However, low rates of resident-to-resident interaction were found to be pervasive. Our research explores the potential of applying public display systems to promote residents’ unplanned co-located interaction. This article describes the design and assessment of “Reading-to-Sharing” (R2S): a tabletop display system intended to improve nursing home residents’ social interaction by enhancing their public reading experience. R2S was assessed via supervised field trials, in which the participants were invited to experience R2S in real-life settings with necessary assistance. The objectives were mainly to investigate the participants’ engagement with R2S, user experience and the potential impact on residents’ social behaviors and feelings. The result showed that R2S was capable of engaging the participants in content viewing and sharing. It was effective in catalyzing and facilitating their social interaction. The participants’ perceived user experience was primarily favorable. Although R2S was anticipated to increase the participants’ mutual closeness, no statistically significant change was seen. The key implications were highlighted to guide the design of public display systems in this context.

K. Kang, B. Hengeveld, C. Hummels, and J. Hu, “Enhancing Social Interaction among Nursing Homes Residents with Interactive Public Display Systems,” International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, pp. 1-17, 2022.
FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2021.2016234
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AffectiveViz: Designing Collective Stress Related Visualization

PhD Thesis, Mengru Xue

Stress is a cultural phenomenon that is socially distributed in organizations. Collective stress, the stress within a group or an organization, describes the stress perceived by the whole group or organization. Similar to individual stress, excessive collective stress may affect individuals’ health as well as social collaborations, so the management of these stressors is equally essential. Current solutions for collective stress are mainly distributed in the social psychology field. These approaches contain subjective bias, require specific attention, and can hardly be applied in office workers’ busy working routines. With the aid of technologies, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers provide users with actionable, data-driven self-insight to help them change their behavioral patterns for wellbeing. However, such technological interventions are mainly designed for individual stress management instead of a workgroup. Therefore, we see an opportunity to use technology to facilitate people to catch every nuance of change, to balance the subjective bias, and to improve office workers’ understanding of collective stress toward coping with it.

M. Xue, AffectiveViz: Designing Collective Stress Related Visualization, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2021. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Design Guidelines for Augmented Reality Serious Games for Children

PhD Thesis, Jingya Li

Today’s children are born in a world with rapid growth of multimedia technologies and are used to handling all kinds of digital devices, they furthermore appear to be attracted to digital games and spend a lot of time with them. Consequently, digital games for educational purposes, also known as serious games, have become an increasingly important method for learning and instruction. However, empirical evidence of serious games being more motivating is still lacking, and as many serious games focus on single-player instruction, serious gameplay can sometimes be a physically and socially isolating experience.

J. LI, Design Guidelines for Augmented Reality Serious Games for Children, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2021. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Perceptual Crossing with Artificial Eyes

PhD thesis by Siti Aisyah Binti Anas

Nowadays, objects are embedded with various sensors, making the objects knowledgeable and smart, gradually reducing users’ need to intervene. As a result, these intelligent objects that work quietly in the background are perceived as passive and reactive objects when interacting with users. The lack of communication between the objects and the users impedes the objects from being smarter and understanding the users’ requirements. Recently, many researchers actively and continuously research to improve the users’ interaction and engagement with the objects. The research objectives are to increase and improve the users’ awareness when interacting and engaging with the objects. Hence, it is essential to design useful feedback or feed-forward methods to indicate the objects’ internal operation state and facilitating communication with engaging users. Another different method, direct manipulation of the objects that exploits the human skills, also enhanced the interaction and engagement between the objects and the users. Looking at that, yet most human-object communication adopts one-directional communication, where the human always acts as the initiator when interacting and engaging with the objects. Thus, it is questionable and remains arguable to understand the objects’ smartness that could initiate and continuously communicate with the users.

S. A. B. Anas, Perceptual crossing with artificial eyes: Designing bidirectional and proactive human-object interaction based on the perceptual crossing paradigm, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2021. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Design for Story Sharing: Connect Seniors with their Children

PhD Thesis by Cun Li

The world is graying. The worldwide population over age 65 is expected to more than double from 357 million in 1990 to 761 million in 2025. Within the context of the ageing society, social isolation is widespread among older adults. Among all their social relationships, the older adults rank connections with family members second only to health, as the most important area of their lives. Given that one of the most precious characteristics of older adults is their memory of events, people, and places, storytelling could act as an effective way to keep them stay in touch with their children. However, while younger seniors are embracing online social technologies, their parents, many of whom are still living, are neglected in this trend; these non-tech-savvy elders are targeted in this research. Based on the situation described above, the research presented in this thesis attempts to answer the research question: How can interactive technology facilitate intergenerational storytelling, specifically for non-tech-savvy older adults?

C. Li, Design for Story Sharing: Connect Seniors with their Children, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2021. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote

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Segmentation of Panels in d-Comics

PhD Thesis by Xinwei Wang

“Comics are a storytelling medium. There are several practices which revolve around this medium: “the industry that produces comics, the community that embraces them, the content which they represent, and the avenues in which they appear [@Cohn2005]”. For over a hundred years, comics were presented on paper-based carriers such as magazines and books. With the development of new technologies, the comics industry has the opportunity to embrace a new carrier – the digital environment in electronic devices.”

To read more:

X. Wang, Segmentation of Panels in D-Comics, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2019. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Social glasses : designing gaze behaviors for visually impaired people

Gaze has important social meanings in face-to-face communication. A sighted person often uses various eye gestures to convey nonverbal information that a blind conversation partner cannot access and respond. In many examples, the eyes of blind people seem unattractive, and often with deformities, which make the eye appearances less appealing to sighted people. These factors influence the smooth communication between blind and sighted people.

Our research is to simulate the gaze for blind people, aiming at improving the quality of face-to-face communication between blind and sighted people. In this dissertation, the purpose of simulating the gaze includes two aspects: to assist blind people to perceive the gaze from the sighted and to simulate the appropriate gaze for blind people as a visual reaction.

S. Qiu, Social glasses : designing gaze behaviors for visually impaired people, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2019. FULLTEXT: PDF REFERENCE: BibTeX EndNote
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Designing Biofeedback for Managing Stress

PhD Thesis by Bin Yu

Mainly provoked by increasing stress-related health problems and driven by recent technological advances in human-computer interaction (HCI), the ubiquitous physiologically-relevant information will potentially transform the role of biofeedback from clinical treatment to a readily available tool for personal stress management. The primary motivation for this thesis is to bring biofeedback
techniques closer to everyday use so that the average people can harness it more intuitively, effortlessly and comfortably.

B. Yu, Designing Biofeedback for Managing Stress, PhD Thesis, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 2018.
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