Artur Henrique Kronbauer

Remote Home: A Universal Control for Residential Environments

Currently, several advances are taking place in the area of residential environments, providing convenience and pleasure to different profiles of people. With the increased use of smartphones, people will be able to use them to control their existing home appliances. In this scenario, we propose a platform structured into three layers: (i) Interaction, using a mobile application with the function of a universal remote; (ii) Connectivity, middleware responsible for managing the communication between the Interaction Layer and the Actuator Layer; and (iii) Actuators, microprocessors connected to home appliances so that they can be controlled. Some tests were conducted to validate the platform and identify its potential. The preliminary results indicated that the platform functions properly and efficiently.

A new approach to identifying the potentialities of User Experience techniques

Nowadays, there are a lot of techniques to evaluate the hedonic experiences of users with the use of technological products. The main problem is that, the fact that these techniques use different denominations for each type of feeling they can collect, make hard for evaluators to identify what exactly each technique can evaluate. Moreover, it is important to know the potential of each feeling, so the evaluators can choose the most appropriate technique for each type of evaluation. looking on that way, this article presents a new approach to identify the feelings that each User eXperience (UX) technique manages to encompass and what its potentialities are. The results of the study are promising, having as a legacy the description of the approach and the results of the evaluation of five UX techniques based on a self-report questionnaire.

Capture and Analysis of Interaction Data for the Evaluation of User Experience with Mobile Devices

In recent years, after the great proliferation of mobile devices, the relationship between usability, context and emotions of users is widely discussed in studies related to the user experience UX theme. Evaluations indicate that each user interacts with applications in slightly different ways and has different feelings about the applications installed in their smartphones. To contribute to this area of study, this paper presents a platform for the collection and analysis of data related to the user experience of mobile data. To evaluate the potential of the platform, an experiment was conducted with the participation of 68 people, for thirty days. The study results are presented and discussed throughout the paper.

Integrating kinect with openCV to interpret interaction via gestures

We can see progress in the area of Ambient Intelligence (AmIs) with the improvement of embedded systems and technologies using wireless networks. Moreover, the development of studies on interaction between human beings and electronic devices have become increasingly more natural. This new scenario favors the development of ubiquitous computing, in which the relevance of body language is gradually increasing. In this paper, we propose a model of interaction via gestures and test its efficiency through the creation of an infrastructure. In order to assess its usability we developed an experiment with potential users and identified good results. We found that by combining the images identified by Kinect and the interpretation of gestures from OpenCV, improved the gesture recognition greatly.

Therapy game: uma nova plataforma para auxiliar nas áreas de fisioterapia e terapia ocupacional

Video games are constantly evolving and new ideas for user interactions are being proposed. Within this context, innovative technological artifacts are being created in order to enable interaction flexibility, involvement in the game and rewarding experiences for the players. In recent years, the medical field has benefited from video games with new treatments in the area of physical and occupational therapy. This paper presents a low-cost technological infrastructure, capable of creating games for the area of body movement rehabilitation, utilizing an innovative wearable control that interacts with this new video game. In order to validate this proposal, we conducted initial experiments with potential users, pediatric neurologists and physical therapists. The user experience was a success and the results indicate promising usability in the medical area.

Video Game to Help in Movement Rehabilitation

The medical area has benefitted from several technological innovations over the years. A good example of this is the development of video games with natural interaction that can aid in physical and occupational therapy treatments. This article introduces a new alternative in this area with an infrastructure that contains: (i) an environment that facilitates the development of games; (ii) an inexpensive video game console, and (iii) an innovative wearable control. Preliminary usability experiments were done with users and professionals from the medical field. Promising results were obtained for both parties.

Impact of Contextual Factors on Smartphone Applications Use

The development of methodologies and techniques to evaluate smartphones usability is an emerging topic in the scientific community and triggers discussions about which methodology is most appropriate. The lack of consensus is due to the inherent difficulty on capturing context data in the scenarios where the experiments take place and on relating them to the results found. This work aims to correlate potential usability problems in mobile applications with contextual factors that may occur during users’ interactions on different devices, such as luminosity, device screen resolution, and the user’s activity while interacting with the application. The methodology applied to carry out a field experiment take the following steps: identification of contextual factors that may influence users’ interaction; use of the UXEProject infrastructure to support the automatic capture of applications’ context data; implementation of long term experiments with real users using three different mobile applications over almost one year period. In this paper, we present and discuss the results obtained during this study.