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The isolation measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic brought light to discussions related to the importance of meaningful social relationships as a basic need to human well-being. But even before the pandemic outbreak in the years 2020 and 2021, organizations and scholars were already drawing attention to the growing numbers related to lonely people in the world (World Economic Forum, 2019). Loneliness is an emotional distress caused by the lack of meaningful social connections, which affects people worldwide across all age groups, mainly young adults (Rook, 1984). The use of digital technologies has gained prominence as a means of alleviating the distress. As an example, studies have shown the benefits of using digital games both to stimulate social interactions (Steinfield, Ellison & Lampe, 2008) and to enhance the effects of digital interventions for mental health treatments, through gamification (Fleming et al., 2017). It is with these aspects in mind that the gamified app Noneliness was designed with the intention of reducing loneliness rates among young students at a German university. In addition to sharing the related works that supported the application development, this chapter also presents the aspects considered for the resource's design, its main functionalities, and the preliminary results related to the reduction of loneliness in the target audience.
During the periods of social isolation to contain the advance of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, educational institutions have had the challenge to adopt technological strategies not only to ensure continuity in students’ classes, but also to support their mental health in a period of uncertainty and health risks. Loneliness is an emotional distress caused by the lack of meaningful social connections; it has increasingly affected young adults worldwide during the pandemic's social isolation and still bears psychological effects in the current post-pandemic period. In the light of this challenge, the Nonenliness App was developed as a way to bring together university communities to address issues related to loneliness and mental health disorders through a gamified and social online environment. In this paper, we present the app and its main functionalities (Beta version) and discuss the preliminary results of a pilot clinical study conducted with university students in Germany (N = 12) to verify the app's efficacy and usability, alongside the challenges faced and the next steps to be taken regarding the platform's improvement.
This work documents the rising acceptance of social robots for healthcare as well as their growing economic potential from 2017 to 2021. The comparison is based on two studies in the active assisted living (AAL) community. We first provide a brief overview of social robotics and a discussion of the economic potential of social health robots. We found that, despite the huge potential for robotic support in healthcare and domestic routines, social robots still lack the functionality to access that potential. At the same time, the study exemplifies a rise in acceptance: all health-related activities are more accepted in 2021 when in 2017, most of them with high statistical significance. When investigating the economic perspective, we found that persons are aware of the influence of cultural, spiritual, or religious beliefs. Most experts (57%), having a European background, expect the state or the government to be the key driver for establishing social robots in health and significantly prefer leasing or renting a social health robot to buying one. Nevertheless, we speculate that it might be a global financial elite which is first to adopt social robots.
Due to the increasing aging of the population, the number of elderly people requiring care is growing in most European countries. However, the number of caregivers working in nursing homes and on daily care services is declining in countries like Germany or Italy. This limits the time for interpersonal communication. Furthermore, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing during contact restrictions became more important, causing an additional reduction of personal interaction. This social isolation can strongly increase emotional stress. Robotic assistance could contribute to addressing this challenge on three levels: (1) supporting caregivers to respond individually to the needs of patients and residents in nursing homes; (2) observing patients’ health and emotional state; (3) complying with high hygiene standards and minimizing human contact if required. To further the research on emotional aspects and the acceptance of robotic assistance in care, we conducted two studies where elderly participants interacted with the social robot Misa. Facial expression and voice analysis were used to identify and measure the emotional state of the participants during the interaction. While interpersonal contact plays a major role in elderly care, the findings reveal that robotic assistance generates added value for both caregivers and patients and that they show emotions while interacting with them.
The transition from college to university can have a variety of psychological effects on students who need to cope with daily obligations by themselves in a new setting, which can result in loneliness and social isolation. Mobile technology, specifically mental health apps (MHapps), have been seen as promising solutions to assist university students who are facing these problems, however, there is little evidence around this topic. My research investigates how a mobile app can be designed to reduce social isolation and loneliness among university students. The Noneliness app is being developed to this end; it aims to create social opportunities through a quest-based gamified system in a secure and collaborative network of local users. Initial evaluations with the target audience provided evidence on how an app should be designed for this purpose. These results are presented and how they helped me to plan the further steps to reach my research goals. The paper is presented at MobileHCI 2020 Doctoral Consortium.
Loneliness, an emotional distress caused by the lack of meaningful social connections, has been increasingly affecting university students who need to deal with everyday situations in a new setting, especially those who have come from abroad. Currently there is little work on digital solutions to reduce loneliness. Therefore, this work describes the general design considerations for mobile apps in this context and outlines a potential solution. The mobile app Noneliness is used to this end: it aims to reduce loneliness by creating social opportunities through a quest-based gamified system in a secure and collaborative network of local users. The results of initial evaluations with the target audience are described. The results informed a user interface redesign as well as a review of the features and the gamification principles adopted.
This paper describes a comparative study of two tactile systems supporting navigation for persons with little or no visual and auditory perception. The efficacy of a tactile head-mounted device (HMD) was compared to that of a wearable device, a tactile belt. A study with twenty participants showed that the participants took significantly less time to complete a course when navigating with the HMD, as compared to the belt.
A Gamified and Adaptive Learning System for Neurodivergent Workers in Electronic Assembling Tasks
(2020)
Learning and work-oriented assistive systems are often designed to fit the workflow of neurotypical workers. Neurodivergent workers and individuals with learning disabilities often present cognitive and sensorimotor characteristics that are better accommodated with personalized learning and working processes. Therefore, we designed an adaptive learning system that combines an augmented interaction space with user-sensitive virtual assistance to support step-by-step guidance for neurodivergent workers in electronic assembling tasks. Gamified learning elements were also included in the interface to provide self-motivation and praise whenever users progress in their learning and work achievements.
Wow, You Are Terrible at This!: An Intercultural Study on Virtual Agents Giving Mixed Feedback
(2020)
While the effects of virtual agents in terms of likeability, uncanniness, etc. are well explored, it is unclear how their appearance and the feedback they give affects people's reactions. Is critical feedback from an agent embodied as a mouse or a robot taken less serious than from a human agent? In an intercultural study with 120 participants from Germany and the US, participants had to find hidden objects in a game and received feedback on their performance by virtual agents with different appearances. As some levels were designed to be unsolvable, critical feedback was unavoidable. We hypothesized that feedback would be taken more serious, the more human the agent looked. Also, we expected the subjects from the US to react more sensitively to criticism. Surprisingly, our results showed that the agents' appearance did not significantly change the participants' perception. Also, while we found highly significant differences in inspirational and motivational effects as well as in perceived task load between the two cultures, the reactions to criticism were contrary to expectations based on established cultural models. This work improves our understanding on how affective virtual agents are to be designed, both with respect to culture and to dialogue strategies.
Tactile Navigation with Checkpoints as Progress Indicators?: Only when Walking Longer Straight Paths
(2020)
Persons with both vision and hearing impairments have to rely primarily on tactile feedback, which is frequently used in assistive devices. We explore the use of checkpoints as a way to give them feedback during navigation tasks. Particularly, we investigate how checkpoints can impact performance and user experience. We hypothesized that individuals receiving checkpoint feedback would take less time and perceive the navigation experience as superior to those who did not receive such feedback. Our contribution is two-fold: a detailed report on the implementation of a smart wearable with tactile feedback (1), and a user study analyzing its effects (2). The results show that in contrast to our assumptions, individuals took considerably more time to complete routes with checkpoints. Also, they perceived navigating with checkpoints as inferior to navigating without checkpoints. While the quantitative data leave little room for doubt, the qualitative data open new aspects: when walking straight and not being "overwhelmed" by various forms of feedback in succession, several participants actually appreciated the checkpoint feedback.
Deafblindness, also known as dual sensory loss, is the combination of sight and hearing impairments of such extent that it becomes difficult for one sense to compensate for the other. Communication issues are a key concern for the Deafblind community. We present the design and technical implementation of the Tactile Board: a mobile Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) device for individuals with deafblindness. The Tactile Board allows text and speech to be translated into vibrotactile signs that are displayed real-time to the user via a haptic wearable. Our aim is to facilitate communication for the deafblind community, creating opportunities for these individuals to initiate and engage in social interactions with other people without the direct need of an intervener.
Deafblindness, a form of dual sensory impairment, signifcantly impacts communication, access to information and mobility. Inde- pendent navigation and wayfnding are main challenges faced by individuals living with combined hearing and visual impairments. We developed a haptic wearable that provides sensory substitution and navigational cues for users with deafblindness by conveying vibrotactile signals onto the body. Vibrotactile signals on the waist area convey directional and proximity information collected via a fisheye camera attached to the garment, while semantic informa- tion is provided with a tapping system on the shoulders. A playful scenario called “Keep Your Distance” was designed to test the navigation system: individuals with deafblindness were “secret agents” that needed to follow a “suspect”, but they should keep an opti- mal distance of 1.5 meters from the other person to win the game. Preliminary fndings suggest that individuals with deafblindness enjoyed the experience and were generally able to follow the directional cues.
Interaction and capturing information from the surrounding is dominated by vision and hearing. Haptics on the other side, widens the bandwidth and could also replace senses (sense switching) for impaired. Haptic technologies are often limited to point-wise actuation. Here, we show that actuation in two-dimensional matrices instead creates a richer input. We describe the construction of a full-body garment for haptic communication with a distributed actuating network. The garment is divided into attachable-detachable panels or add-ons that each can carry a two dimensional matrix of actuating haptic elements. Each panel adds to an enhanced sensoric capability of the human- garment system so that together a 720° system is formed. The spatial separation of the panels on different body locations supports semantic and theme-wise separation of conversations conveyed by haptics. It also achieves directional faithfulness, which is maintaining any directional information about a distal stimulus in the haptic input.
Nowadays, the wide majority of Europeans uses smartphones. However, touch displays are still not accessible by everyone. Individuals with deafblindness, for example, often face difculties in accessing vision-based touchscreens. Moreover, they typically have few fnancial resources which increases the need for customizable, low-cost assistive devices. In this work-in-progress, we present four prototypes made from low-cost, every-day materials, that make modern pattern lock mechanisms more accessible to individuals with vision impairments or even with deafblindness. Two out of four prototypes turned out to be functional tactile overlays for accessing digital 4-by-4 grids that are regularly used to encode dynamic dot patterns. In future work, we will conduct a user study investigating whether these two prototypes can make dot-based pattern lock mechanisms more accessible for individuals with visual impairments or deafblindness.
Co-Designing Assistive Tools to Support Social Interactions by Individuals Living with Deafblindness
(2020)
Deafblindness is a dual sensory impairment that affects many aspects of life, including mobility, access to information, communication, and social interactions. Furthermore, individuals living with deafblindness are under a high risk of social isolation. Therefore, we identified opportunities for applying assistive tools to support social interactions through co-ideation activities with members of the deafblind community. This work presents our co-design approach, lessons learned and directions for designing meaningful assistive tools for dual sensory loss.
Well-designed and informative product presentations can support consumers in making purchase decisions. There are plenty of facts and details about a product of interest. However, also emotions are an important aspect for the purchase decision. The unique visualization opportunities of virtual reality (VR) can give users of VR applications the feeling of being there (telepresence). The applications can intensely engage them in a flow experience, comprising the four dimensions of enjoyment, curiosity, focused attention and control. In this work, we claim that VR product presentations can create subjective product experiences for consumers and motivate them to reuse this innovative type of product presentation in the future, by immersing them in a virtual world and causing them to interact with it. To verify the conceptual model a study was conducted with 551 participants who explored a VR hotel application. The results indicate that VR product presentations evoke positive emotions among consumers. The virtual experience made potential customers focus their attention on the virtual world and aroused their curiosity about getting more information about the product in an enjoyable way. In contrast to the theoretical assumption, control did not influence the users’ behavioral intentions to reuse VR product presentation. We conclude that VR product presentations create a feeling of telepresence, which leads to a flow experience that contributes to the behavioral intention of users to reuse VR product presentations in the future.
New employees are supposed to quickly understand their tasks, internal processes and familiarize with colleagues. This process is called “onboarding” and is still mainly realized by organizational methods from human resource management, such as introductory events or special employee sessions. Software tools and especially mobile applications are an innovative means to support provide onboarding processes in a modern, even remote, way. In this paper we analyze how the use of gamification can enhance onboarding processes. Firstly, we describe a mobile onboarding application specifically developed for the young, technically literate generations Y and Z, who are just about to start their career. Secondly, we report on a study with 98 students and young employees. We found that participants enjoyed the gamified application. They especially appreciated the feature “Team Bingo” which facilitates social integration and teambuilding. Based on the OCEAN personality model (“Big Five”), the personality traits agreeableness and openness revealed significant correlations with a preference for the gamified onboarding application.
Top-level staff prefers to live in urban areas with perfect social infrastructure. This is a common problem for excellent companies (“hidden champions”) in rural areas: even if they can provide the services qualified applicants appreciate for daily living, they fail to attract them because important facts are not presented sufficiently in social media or on the corporate website. This is especially true for applicants with families. The contribution of this paper is four-fold: we provide an overview of the current state of online recruiting activities of hidden champions (1). Based on this corpus, we describe the applicant service gap for company information in rural communes (2). A study on user experience (UX) identifies the applicants’ wishes and needs, focusing on a family-oriented information system on living conditions in rural areas (3). Finally, we present the results of an online survey on the value of such information systems with more than 200 participants (4).
What emotional effects does gamification have on users who work or learn with repetitive tasks? In this work, we use biosignals to analyze these affective effects of gamification. After a brief discussion of related work, we describe the implementation of an assistive system augmenting work by projecting elements for guidance and gamification. We also show how this system can be extended to analyse users' emotions. In a user study, we analyse both biosignals (facial expressions and electrodermal activity), and regular performance measures (error rate and task completion time).
For the performance measures, the results confirm known effects like increased speed and slightly increased error rate. In addition, the analysis of the biosignals provides strong evidence for two major affective effects: the gamification of work and learning tasks incites highly significantly more positive emotions and increases emotionality altogether. The results add to the design of assistive systems, which are aware of the physical as well as the affective context.
For e-commerce retailers it is crucial to present their products both informatively and attractively. Virtual reality (VR) systems represent a new marketing tool that supports customers in their decision-making process and offers an extraordinary product experience. Despite these advantages, the use of this technology for e-commerce retailers is also associated with risks, namely cybersickness. The aim of the study is to investigate the occurrence of cybersickness in the context of the customer’s perceived enjoyment and the perceived challenge of a VR product presentation. Based on a conceptual research framework, a laboratory study with 533 participants was conducted to determine the influence of these factors on the occurrence of cybersickness. The results demonstrate that the perceived challenge has a substantially stronger impact on the occurrence of cybersickness, which can only be partially reduced by perceived enjoyment. When realizing VR applications in general and VR product presentations in particular, e-commerce retailers should therefore first minimize possible challenges instead of focusing primarily on entertainment aspects of such applications.