Category: PhD Theses

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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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.

PhD thesis by Wan Jou She

Previous bereavement-related literature indicated that around one out of ten (9.8%) bereaved individuals could suffer from a more severe and protracted grief, entitled Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD) in the DSM-V, or Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) in ICD-11. To precisely differentiate the prolonged grievers from the normal grievers, a minimum six months is required, and to offer psychotherapeutic intervention to normal grievers indifferently could instead hamper their natural coping mechanism. The fact conicts with the fact that the severely maladapted grievers might need psychotherapeutic support in a more timely manner, and might even benefit from earlier intervention. This dilemma indicates that there is a need for a screening method in the first six months of bereavement.

Based on the above discussion, the objective of the thesis is to develop a screening method for prolonged grief disorder that is empirically tested and can be embedded in an internet-based
application.

PhD Thesis by Chao Wang

The road environment can be seen as a social situation: In each journey, we encounter other drivers and need to coordinate with them to share the infrastructure. A traditional physical communication method, such as car-body language, lights, horn and speed are the most frequently used means to exchange information, limiting both the range and the bandwidth of the connectivity. This situation may lead to two adverse effects: more conflict in sharing the road and social isolation while driving.

Nowadays, everywhere available connectivity, the broad penetration of social network services and the increasing utility of advanced humanmachine interaction technology, provide new possibilities for enhancing the communication between drivers on the road, enabling social information to pass through the steel shell of the cars without the physical restriction. In this research, we generated, prototyped and evaluated multiple novel social applications …

PhD Thesis by Kadian Davis

…This dissertation employs a user-centered design approach within a multidisciplinary framework, which includes aspects of human-computer interaction, social psychology, cognition, signal processing, and pervasive computing for the design, development, deployment, and validation of bidirectional activity peripheral displays to support social connectedness. Throughout this dissertation, we exploit a human-centered approach to actively involve impending ageing and caregiver users in our design, development, and validation process. Traditional ethnographic techniques such as interviews and observation, accompanied by contemporary techniques such as co-constructing stories were applied to acquire a holistic understanding of the users in context and assist prospective users to imagine user requirements and envision future usage possibilities within AAL environments…