Category: Uncategorized

By Jing Li et. al.

Exergaming interventions have been shown to improve physical and cognitive functions in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, designing exergames specifically targeting the motor and social skills of children with ASD remains an important open area. To address this gap, we developed WonderFish, a social exergame incorporating bodily interplay theory explicitly developed and designed to engage children with ASD alongside their parents. This paper presents the design and evaluation of WonderFish across four game modes, assessing its impact on children’s motor and social skills, parent-child interactions, and user experience with eight pairs of children with ASD and their parents. We conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses, including game scores, physiological data, behavioral observations, surveys, and interviews. The results indicate that the game mechanism effectively elicited targeted motor and social behaviors during parent–child collaboration across the different modes. However, while parent-child dyads showed high levels of engagement, their interaction dynamics varied notably between the four modes.

by Tianqin Lu et al.

The global incidence of chronic diseases is rising, posing substantial social and economic challenges. These conditions necessitate effective long-term self-care, which can be supported by digital interventions using remote measurement technologies, like smartphones and wearables. This systematic review investigates the motivational strategies within digital technologies to improve self-care adherence for chronic illnesses, particularly cardiovascular diseases and diabetes mellitus. A literature search was conducted, focusing on studies from 2004 to 2024. A total of 17 studies met the inclusion criteria. The reviewed interventions targeted medication adherence, lifestyle modifications, and symptom tracking. Findings suggest that motivational strategies, such as feedback, health literacy, reminders, and motivational messages, goal-setting, social interaction, gamification, and rewards can improve patient adherence to self-care behaviors. However, their effectiveness relies on theoretical grounding, data-driven features, and personalization. Future research should prioritize integrating robust theories and developing standardized metrics for adherence to enhance the reliability and impact of digital interventions.

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) degrades sleep quality and is associated with serious health conditions. Instead of the gold-standard polysomnography requiring complex equipment and expertise, a non-obtrusive device such as ballistocardiography (BCG) is more suitable for home-based continuous monitoring of OSAS, which has shown promising results in previous studies. However, often due to the limited storage and computing resource, also preferred by venders, the high computational cost in many existing BCG-based methods would practically limit the deployment for home monitoring.

… Cross-validated on 32 subjects, the proposed approach achieved an accuracy of 71.9% for four-class severity classification and 87.5% for binary classification (AHI less than 15 or not)… These findings highlight the potential of our proposed BCG-based approach as an effective and accessible alternative for continuous OSAS monitoring.

Qianhui Wei, Jun Hu & Min Li

Mediated social touch (MST) is a popular way to communicate emotion and connect people in mobile communication. This article applies MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli in two online communication modes—asynchronous and synchronous communication (texting and video calling) to enhance social presence for mobile communication. We first designed the application that included the visual design of MST gestures, the vibrotactile stimuli design for MST gestures, and the interface design for texting and video calling. Then, we conducted a user study to explore if the MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli could increase social presence in texting and video calling compared to MST gestures without vibrotactile stimuli. We also explored if the communication modes affected the social presence significantly when applying MST signals. The quantitative data analysis shows that adding vibrotactile stimuli to MST gestures helps to increase social presence in the aspects of co-presence, perceived behavior interdependence, perceived affective understanding, and perceived emotional interdependence. Adding vibrotactile stimuli to MST gestures causes no significant differences in attentional allocation and perceived message understanding. There is no significant difference between texting and video calling when applying MST signals in mobile communication. The qualitative data analysis shows that participants think MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli are interesting, and they are willing to use them in mobile communication, but the application design should be iterated based on their feedback.

• Help-seekers adjust their diction to be more empathic and tactful when they perceive co-workers as stressed.
• Help-seekers experience less negative emotional shifts when rejected by stressed rather than relaxed co-workers, suggesting empathy towards stressed individuals.
• Social messaging applications could boost workplace empathy by enabling stress status sharing, albeit with caution for relaxed status displays.
• For privacy and reduced stigmatization, using subtle haptic vibrations could be considered for signaling users’ negative or sensitive emotional states.

Best Robot Design Process Award @ IEEE RO-MAN 2023 Robot Design Competition, for the design Petting Pen for Stress Awareness and Management in Children. We are very proud of our PhD candidates Jing Li and Pinhao Wang!

See more at
http://www.mindthestep.nl/lightsit.html

Although the ‘new way of working’ has many advantages, the more intelligent use of time, space and resources often results in (even) less exercise and more stress. The solution? A cushion filled with sensors that discreetly register your breathing patterns and a light strip integrated in the monitor stand. In other words: LightSit. Have you sat without moving for too long? The block of light that repeatedly moves from left to right supports stretching exercises for your back. Suffering from stress? The alternating bright and dim light invites you to concentrate on your breathing. Information is power! 

by Olaf Corduwener. [Complete Report, PDF, 1.7M]

In his report, “…The concept is visioned to be a one-of-a-kind lighting installation that reflects the contextual status of a (public) building or space. One-of-a-kind means that it is not an actual product, but it’s tailored and made specifically for a certain place. The actual contextual status it communicates therefore also depends on the placement. The way it communicates this contextual information was approached in a rather artistic way, as in the metaphorical flowing or raining of coloured light. The metaphor ‘flow’ as in the flow of people (the context of movements) or being in mental flow (immersed in the activity; the context of activity). Coloured lighting as output was chosen for its attractiveness and diverse capabilities. The lighting is placed inside dozens of glass-formed raindrops hanging from the ceiling, animating the falling of rain in diverse colours, speed and frequency. It is not an individual drop that has a particular meaning. Instead, it’s the total picture the complete installation radiates that gives it its meaning. The different output variables (colour, diversity in colour, speed of falling, frequency of falling, etc) do not reflect different input variables, but change and work simultaneously to give an impression of the contextual status…”