We introduce a vision-based arm gesture recognition (AGR) system using Kinect. The AGR system learns the discrete Hidden Markov Model (HMM), an effective probabilistic graph model for gesture recognition, from the dynamic pose of the arm joints provided by the Kinect API. Because Kinect&#x2019;s viewpoint and the subject&#x2019;s arm length can substantially affect the estimated 3D pose of each joint, it is difficult to recognize gestures reliably with these features. The proposed system performs the feature transformation that changes the 3D Cartesian coordinates of each joint into the 2D spherical angles of the corresponding arm part to obtain view-invariant and more discriminative features. We confirmed high recognition performance of the proposed AGR system through experiments with two different datasets.

Hyesuk Kim

Incheol Kim

Dynamic Arm Gesture Recognition Using Spherical Angle Features and Hidden Markov Models

The present aim was to investigate functionality of vibrotactile stimulation in mimicry-based behavioral regulation during physical exercise. Vibrotactile stimuli communicated instructions from an instructor to an exerciser to perform lower extremity movements. A wireless prototype was tested first in controlled laboratory conditions (Study 1) and was followed by a user study (Study 2) that was conducted in a group exercise situation for elderly participants with a new version of the system with improved construction and extended functionality. The results of Study 1 showed that vibrotactile instructions were successful in both supplementing and substituting visual knee lift instructions. Vibrotactile stimuli were accurately recognized, and exercise with the device received affirmative ratings. Interestingly, tactile stimulation appeared to stabilize acceleration magnitude of the knee lifts in comparison to visual instructions. In Study 2 it was found that user experience of the system was mainly positive by both the exercisers and their instructors. For example, exercise with vibrotactile instructions was experienced as more motivating than conventional exercise session. Together the results indicate that tactile instructions could increase possibilities for people having difficulties in following visual and auditory instructions to take part in mimicry-based group training. Both studies also revealed development areas that were primarily related to a slight delay in triggering the vibrotactile stimulation.

Jani Lylykangas

Jani Heikkinen

Veikko Surakka

Roope Raisamo

Kalle Myllymaa

Arvo Laitinen

Vibrotactile Stimulation as an Instructor for Mimicry-Based Physical Exercise

The physical support of a home automation system, joined with a simplified user-system interaction modality, may allow people affected by motor impairments or limitations, such as elderly and disabled people, to live safely and comfortably at home, by improving their autonomy and facilitating the execution of daily life tasks. The proposed solution takes advantage of the Near Field Communications technology, which is simple and intuitive to use, to enable advanced user interaction. The user can perform normal daily activities, such as lifting a gate or closing a window, through a device enabled to read NFC tags containing the commands for the home automation system. A passive Smart Panel is implemented, composed of multiple Near Field Communications tags properly programmed, to enable the execution of both individual commands and so-called scenarios. The work compares several versions of the proposed Smart Panel, differing for interrogation and composition of the single command, number of tags, and dynamic user interaction model, at a parity of the number of commands to issue. Main conclusions are drawn from the experimental results, about the effective adoption of Near Field Communications in smart assistive environments.

Susanna Spinsante

Ennio Gambi

NFC-Based User Interface for Smart Environments

Agent-based simulation of people&#x2019;s behaviors and minds has become increasingly popular in recent years. It provides a research platform to simulate and compare alternative psychological and social theories, as well as to create virtual characters that can interact with people or among each other to provide pedagogical or entertainment effects. In this paper, we investigate computationally modeling people&#x2019;s coping behaviors and in particular in relation to depression, in decision-theoretic agents. Recent studies have suggested that depression can result from failed emotion regulation under limited cognitive resources. In this work, we demonstrate how reappraisal can fail under high levels of stress and limited cognitive resources using an agent-based simulation. Further, we explored the effectiveness of reappraisal under different conditions. Our experiments suggest that for people who are more likely to recall positive memories, it is more beneficial to think about the recalled events from multiple perspectives. However, for people who are more likely to recall negative memories, the better strategy is to not evaluate the recalled events against multiple goals.

Mei Si

Should I Stop Thinking About It: A Computational Exploration of Reappraisal Based Emotion Regulation

Head-mounted displays and other wearable devices open up for innovative types of interaction for wearable augmented reality (AR). However, to design and evaluate these new types of AR user interfaces, it is essential to quickly simulate undeveloped components of the system and collect feedback from potential users early in the design process. One way of doing this is the wizard of Oz (WOZ) method. The basic idea behind WOZ is to create the illusion of a working system by having a human operator, performing some or all of the system&#x2019;s functions. WozARd is a WOZ method developed for wearable AR interaction. The presented pilot study was an initial investigation of the capability of the WozARd method to simulate an AR city tour. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 21 participants performing a simulated AR city tour. The data analysis focused on seven categories that can have an impact on how the WozARd method is perceived by participants: precision, relevance, responsiveness, technical stability, visual fidelity, general user-experience, and human-operator performance. Overall, the results indicate that the participants perceived the simulated AR city tour as a relatively realistic experience despite a certain degree of technical instability and human-operator mistakes.

G&#xfc;nter Alce

Mattias Wallerg&#xe5;rd

Klas Hermodsson

WozARd: A Wizard of Oz Method for Wearable Augmented Reality Interaction&#x2014;A Pilot Study

In this paper, we propose a model to predict the locations of the most attended pictorial information on a web page and the attention sequence of the information. We propose to divide the content of a web page into conceptually coherent units or objects, based on a survey of more than 100 web pages. The proposed model takes into account three characteristics of an image object: chromatic contrast, size, and position and computes a numerical value, the attention factor. We can predict from the attention factor values the image objects most likely to draw attention and the sequence in which attention will be drawn. We have carried out empirical studies to both develop and determine the efficacy of the proposed model. The study results revealed a prediction accuracy of about 80&#x25; for a set of artificially designed web pages and about 60&#x25; for a set of real web pages sampled from the Internet. The performance was found to be better (in terms of prediction accuracy) than the visual saliency model, a popular model to predict human attention on an image.

Ananya Jana

Samit Bhattacharya

Design and Validation of an Attention Model of Web Page Users

In several application contexts in multimedia field
(educational, extreme gaming), the interaction with the user requests
that system is able to render music in expressive way. The
expressiveness is the added value of a performance and is part
of the reason that music is interesting to listen. Understanding
and modeling expressive content communication is important for
many engineering applications in information technology (e.g.,
Music Information Retrieval, as well as several applications in the
affective computing field). In this paper, we present an original
approach to modify the expressive content of a performance in a
gradual way, applying a smooth morphing among performances
with different expressive content in order to adapt the audio expressive
character to the user&#x2019;s desires. The system won the final
stage of Rencon 2011. This performance RENdering CONtest is
a research project that organizes contests for computer systems
generating expressive musical performances.

Sergio Canazza

Giovanni De Poli

Antonio Rod&#xe0;

CaRo 2.0: An Interactive System for Expressive Music Rendering

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Advances in Human-Computer Interaction is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes theoretical and applied papers covering the broad spectrum of interactive systems.

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Advances in Human-Computer Interaction - Table of contents 2015

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction | Hindawi

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Advances in Human-Computer Interaction is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes theoretical and applied papers covering the broad spectrum of interactive systems.

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction