Panos Markopoulos

Interaction Design for Rehabiliation

Well-known trends pertaining to the aging of population and the rising costs of healthcare motivate the development of rehabilitation technology. There is a considerable body of work in this area including efforts to make serious games, virtual reality and robotic applications. While innovative technologies have been introduced over the years, and often researchers produce promising experimental results, these technologies have not yet delivered the anticipated benefits.

The causes for this apparent failure are evident when looking a closer look at the case of stroke rehabilitation, which is one of the heaviest researched topics for developing rehabilitation technologies. It is argued that improvements should be sought by centering the design on an understanding of patient needs, allowing patients, therapists and care givers in general to personalize solutions to the need of patients, effective feedback and motivation strategies to be implemented, and an in depth understanding of the socio-technical system in which the rehabilitation technology will be embedded. These are classic challenges that human computer interaction (HCI) researchers have been dealing with for years, which is why the field of rehabilitation technology requires considerable input from HCI researchers, and which explains the growing number of relevant HCI publications pertaining to rehabilitation.

The talk reviews related research carried out at the Eindhoven University of Technology together with collaborating institutes, which has examined the value of tangible user interfaces and embodied interaction in rehabilitation, how designing playful interactions or games with a functional purpose., feedback design. I shall discuss the work we have done to develop rehabilitation technologies for the TagTrrainer system in the doctoral research of Daniel Tetteroo [2,3,4] and the explorations on wearable solutions in the doctoral research of Wang Qi.[5,6]. With our research being design driven and explorative, I will discuss also the current state of the art for the field and the challenges that need to be addressed for human computer interaction research to make a larger impact in the domain of rehabilitation technology.

Shumin Zhai

Modern Touchscreen Keyboards as Intelligent User Interfaces: A Research Review

Essential to mobile communication, the touchscreen keyboard is the most ubiquitous intelligent user interface on modern mobile phones. Developing smarter, more efficient, easy to learn, and fun to use keyboards has presented many fascinating IUI research and design questions. Some have been addressed by academic research and practitioners in industry, while others remain significant ongoing research challenges.

In this IUI 2017 keynote address I will review and synthesize the progress and open research questions of the past 15 years in text input, focusing on those my colleagues and I have directly dealt with through publications, such as the cost–benefit equations of automation and prediction, the power of machine/statistical intelligence, the human performance models fundamental to the design of error-correction algorithms, spatial scaling from a phone to a watch and the implications on human–machine labor division, user behavior and learning innovation, and the challenges of evaluating the longitudinal effects of personalization and adaptation.

Through this research program review, I will illustrate why intelligent user interfaces, or the combination of machine intelligence and human factors, holds the future of human-computer interaction, and information technology at large.

George Samaras

Utilizing Human Cognitive and Emotional Factors for User-Centered Computing

Intelligent interactive systems should not ignore the individuality of the user. The "one-size-fits-all" approach, especially in user interaction, is not appropriate when user satisfaction and acceptability is a primary goal. Each user has unique human cognitive processing styles and abilities. In addition, emotions change over time, which possibly affect the user's cognitive state and the overall interaction process. Unsurprisingly, the users' ability to control their emotions is another essential factor in adapting user interfaces, applications and data delivery.

How can an interactive system adapt to human cognitive and emotional factors with the aim to deliver a personalized and more usable interface? Is there a user interface to an application or system that is equally effective to all types of users? How can we place the human in the center of every day's interaction and task activity?

This keynote speech will present some approaches that our work at the DMAC Lab/SCRAT Group has addressed on how individual differences in human cognitive processing and emotional factors place the user in the center of every day interaction.