User interface design guidelines for smartphone applications for people with Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is often responsible for difficulties in interacting with smartphones; however, research has not yet addressed these issues and how these challenge people with Parkinson’s (PwP). This paper specifically investigates the symptoms and characteristics of PD that may influence the interaction with smartphones to then contribute in this direction. The research was based on a literature review of PD symptoms, eight semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals and observations of PwP, and usability experiments with 39 PwP. Contributions include a list of PD symptoms that may influence the interaction with smartphones, a set of experimental results that evaluated the performance of four gestures tap, swipe, multiple-tap, and drag and 12 user interface design guidelines for creating smartphone user interfaces for PwP. Findings contribute to the work of researchers and practitioners’ alike engaged in designing user interfaces for PwP or the broader area of inclusive design.     

Impact of digital content on young children’s reading interest and concentration for books

This study investigates the influence of digital content on mobile devices including flash animations, app books, and augmented reality (AR) books on children's reading interest and reading concentration for books. The factors responsible for the aforementioned influence were also investigated. The results from this research show that flash animation can significantly increase the interest in reading and concentration. AR books and app books led children to become more interested in storybooks but significantly decreased their reading concentration. Following a comparison of the digital content, it was concluded that all the tested prototypes could positively increase the reading interest of children in the same-storyline books. However, prototypes with a high level of interactivity could have a negative influence on children’s reading concentration. The research findings are important in determining how to design digital content for children.     

Gender influences on children’s computer attitudes and cognitions

The relative ‘explosion’ of computerised technology in recent years has been accompanied by a wealth of psychological research that has indicated a mixed response of attitudes to the now ubiquitous computer. Whilst many people hold positive attitudes about computers, many individuals express serious concerns and have been labelled ‘technophobic’. This study considers whether technophobia is a transitory phenomenon by assessing the computer attitudes and cognitions of 104 children aged 11 and 12 via self-report questionnaires. Contrary to previous reports (e.g. Rosen & Weil, 1992, Measuring technophobia: a manual for the administration and scoring of the computer anxiety rating scale (Form C), the computer thoughts survey (Form C) and the general attitudes towards computers scale (Form C). Version 1.1. California State University) the prevalence of technophobia was found to be low. Similarly the impact of psychological gender (sex and sex-role) was assessed and found, in general, not to significantly influence attitudes or cognitions towards computers. This does not support the notion that a technological gender gap is developing, nor the literature that suggests males hold more positive attitudes and cognitions than females. However, whilst in this instance it appears that the computer is viewed positively, it is tentatively suggested that looking to the future, technophobia will not be problematic.     

Serious games for basic learning mechanisms: reinforcing Mexican children’s gross motor skills and attention

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing - Early childhood is the most important and rapid period of development in a human life as it is a period where the maturation of the brain and the central nervous...     

Monitoring children’s developmental progress using augmented toys and activity recognition

Previous research has established the connection between the way in which children interact with objects and the potential early identification of children with autism. Those findings motivate our own work to develop "smart toys," objects embedded with wireless sensors that are safe and enjoyable for very small children, that allow detailed interaction data to be easily recorded. These sensor-enabled toys provide opportunities for autism research by reducing the effort required to collect and analyze a child’s interactions with objects. In the future, such toys may be a useful part of clinical and in-home assessment tools. In this paper, we discuss the design of a collection of smart toys that can be used to automatically characterize the way in which a child is playing. We use statistical models to provide objective, quantitative measures of object play interactions. We also developed a tool to view rich forms of annotated play data for later analysis. We report the results of recognition experiments on more than fifty play sessions conducted with adults and children as well as discuss the opportunities for using this approach to support video annotation and other applications.     

Goal-oriented error estimation and h-adaptivity for Maxwell’s equations

Goal-oriented error estimates, based on dual solutions, are derived for the S-parameters of a waveguide cavity resonator and a computationally cheap method is proposed to compute these. Numerical results show that the error estimators are relatively accurate, usually well within a factor 2 from the exact errors. Adaptive mesh-refinement based on these estimates recovers optimal convergence rates for complete and incomplete, first and second order, curl-conforming finite elements of Nédélec type, despite singularities at reentrant corners. It is also shown numerically that the convergence rate is independent of the element-order when singularities are present and the mesh is refined uniformly.     

On Carlson’s inequality for Sugeno and Choquet integrals

We present a Carlson type inequality for the Sugeno integral and a much wider class of functions than the comonotone functions. We also provide three Carlson type inequalities for the Choquet integral. Our inequalities generalize many known results.     

Discussing robot crime interviewers for children’s forensic testimonies: a relatively new field for investigation

The aim of this paper was to provide a background review to assist experimental, survey and field studies that will start emerging on the effects of robot crime interviewers on children and on forensic investigations. The paper captures topics such as describing how, historically, technology has determined our legal systems, criminal investigations and, of course, children’s forensic testimonies. It discusses studies that have already explored the idea of robot crime interviewers in the context of relevant ethical concerns as well as experimental studies on the different ways in which children react in an interview elicited by a human compared with a robot interviewer. The article continues by suggesting research methodological designs that could benefit studies exploring robot interviews with children such as a robot exposure phase prior to the main data collection, the robot’s “personality” and the instructions given to children for semi-autonomous interviewers. This is based on the available literature on human–robot interactions. There is an attempt here to provide a literature review and methodological suggestions to form future studies on robot crime interviewers.     

Utilization of Visual Information Perception Characteristics to Improve Classification Accuracy of Driver’s Visual Search Intention for Intelligent Vehicle

Understanding and predicting a driver’s behaviors in a vehicle is a prospective function embedded in a smart car. Beyond the patterns of observable behaviors, driver’s intention could be identified based on goal-driven behaviors. A computational model to classify driver intention in visual search which is finding a target with one’s eyes as moving selective attention across a search field, could improve the level of intelligence that a smart car could demonstrate. To develop a computational cognitive that explains the underlying cognitive process and reproduces drivers’ behaviors, particular parameters in human cognitive process should be specified. In this study, 2 issues are considered as influential factors on a driver’s eye movements: a driver’s visual information processing characteristics (VIPCs) and the purpose of visual search. To assess an individual’s VIPC, 4 psychological experiments—Donders’s reaction time, mental rotation, signal detection, and Stroop experiments—were utilized. Upon applying k-means clustering method, 114 drivers were divided into 9 driver groups. To investigate the influence of task goal on a driver’s eye movement, driving simulation was conducted to collect a driver’s eye movement data under the given purpose of visual search (perceptual and cognitive tasks). The empirical data showed that there were significant differences in a driver’s oculomotor behavior, such as response time, average fixation time, and average glance duration between the driver groups and the purposes of visual search. The effectiveness of using VIPC for grouping drivers was tested with task goal classification model by comparing the models’ performance when drivers were grouped by typical demographic data such as gender. Results show that grouping based on VIPC improves accuracy and stability of prediction of the model on a driver’s intention underlying visual search behaviors. This study would benefit future studies focusing on personalization and adaptive interfaces in the development of smart car.     

Supporting children’s place-based observations and explanations using collaboration scripts while learning-on-the-move outdoors

International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - Our research conducted two iterations of a mixed methods design-based research project with 87 youths, to improve...     

Extending Gardiner’s code for Hieroglyphic recognition and English mapping

Multimedia Tools and Applications - “Knowledge is power”… Writing is the main way to preserve the humanity knowledge across the ages. Therefore, an automatic and accurate mapping...     

On the Hopcroft’s minimization technique for DFA and DFCA

We show that the absolute worst case time complexity for Hopcroft’s minimization algorithm applied to unary languages is reached only for deterministic automata or cover automata following the structure of the de Bruijn words. A previous paper by Berstel and Carton gave the example of de Bruijn words as a language that requires $O(nlogn)$ steps in the case of deterministic automata by carefully choosing the splitting sets and processing these sets in a FIFO mode for the list of the splitting sets in the algorithm. We refine the previous result by showing that the Berstel/Carton example is actually the absolute worst case time complexity in the case of unary languages for deterministic automata. We show that the same result is valid also for the case of cover automata and an algorithm based on the Hopcroft’s method used for minimization of cover automata. We also show that a LIFO implementation for the splitting list will not achieve the same absolute worst time complexity for the case of unary languages both in the case of regular deterministic finite automata or in the case of the deterministic finite cover automata as defined by S. Yu.     

Linearity and iterator types for Gödel’s System

System Open image in new window is a linear λ-calculus with numbers and an iterator, which, although imposing linearity restrictions on terms, has all the computational power of Gödel’s System  Open image in new window . System Open image in new window owes its power to two features: the use of a closed reduction strategy (which permits the construction of an iterator on an open function, but only iterates the function after it becomes closed), and the use of a liberal typing rule for iterators based on iterative types. In this paper, we study these new types, and show how they relate to intersection types. We also give a sound and complete type reconstruction algorithm for System  Open image in new window .     

Multi-view feature selection and classification for Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In our present society, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common dementia form in elderly people and has been a big social health problem worldwide. In...     

Tangible versus graphical user interfaces for robot programming: exploring cross-age children’s preferences

This study explores children’s opinions and preferences regarding two isomorphic user interfaces that can be used for introductory programming activities, a tangible and a graphical one. The first system (tangible) comprises 46 cube-shaped blocks that represent simple programming structures and can be interconnected to form the programming code. The second system (graphical) presents on-screen the same programming space to the user (icons similar in appearance and operation with the tangible blocks). These two operationally equivalent user interfaces were given to three children groups of different ages (5–6, 7–8 and 11–12 years) to program the behavior of a Lego NXT robot. Children in dyads were let to interact with both systems, and during the activity, data were collected regarding children’s first-sight preference, enjoyment and easiness-to-use. The quantitative and qualitative analysis followed indicated that the tangible interface was more attractive especially for girls, and it was more enjoyable and finally characterized as easier to use only by younger children who were less experienced with computers. On the contrary, for older (11–12 years old) children, the tangible even though was more enjoyable, it was not considered as the easiest-to-use user interface. Taking into account the lack of empirical evidences related to the tangible user interfaces, this study discusses not only the potential usability advantages but also the disadvantages of tangible user interfaces for children.     

Antonelli’s Dome for San Gaudenzio: Geometry and Statics

In this brief note the authors describe the studies undertaken to date regarding the dome of the Basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara designed by Alessandro Antonelli, with particular emphasis on the geometry and statics of the external dome. Following a brief summary of the events and vicissitudes attendant on the construction of the dome, the structure will be examined from the point of view of the geometry, the construction techniques, and the materials used, in order to clarify the static behaviour and the stability of the whole set of structural and constructive elements of which the dome is composed. These studies have allowed us to obtain the necessary information for evaluating the complex and ambitious structural achievement of a significant element of Antonelli’s basilica.