Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons

Using Virtual Reality and Head-Mounted Displays to Increase Performance in Rowing Workouts

Technology is advancing rapidly in the domain of virtual reality, as well as in using sensors to gather feedback from our body and the environment we are interacting in. Combining these two technologies gives us the opportunity to create personalized and reactive immersive environments. These environments can be used for training of dangerous situations (e.g. fire, crashes, etc) or to improve skills with less distraction than regular natural environments would offer. The pilot study described in this paper, puts an athlete rowing on a stationary rowing machine into a virtual environment. The virtual reality receives movement data from several sensors of the rowing machine and displays those in the head-mounted display. In addition, metrics on technique are derived from the sensor data as well as physiological data. All this is used to investigate if and to which extend VR improves the technical skills of an athlete, during the complex sport of rowing. Furthermore, athletes are given subjective feedback about their performance comparing the standard rowing workout with the workout using VR. First results indicate improved performance of the workout and an enhanced experience for the athlete in the VR condition.

Exploring attitudes of healthcare professionals towards ICT-based interventions for nursing home residents with dementia: a mixed-methods approach

Background: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) could be useful for delivering non-pharmacological therapies (NPTs) for dementia in nursing home settings. Aims: To identify technology-related expectations and inhibitions of healthcare professionals associated with the intention to use ICT-based NPTs. Design: Cross-sectional multi-method survey. Methods: N = 205 healthcare professionals completed a quantitative survey on usage and attitudes towards ICTs. Additionally, N = 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted. Results: Participants were classified as intenders to use ICTs (53%), non-intenders (14%) or ambivalent (32%). A MANCOVA revealed higher perceived usefulness for intenders compared to non-intenders and ambivalent healthcare professionals (V =.28, F(12, 292)= 3.94, p <.001). Qualitative interviews revealed generally high acceptance of ICTs in the workplace. Furthermore, benefits for residents emerged as a key requirement. Conclusion: Staff trainings should stress specific benefits for residents and healthcare professionals to facilitate successful implementation and acceptance of ICTs in nursing home settings.

Exploring diverse measures for evaluating QoE in the context of WebRTC

Enabling high Quality of Experience (QoE) with video-conferencing solutions based on Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) protocols anywhere, anytime, is challenging and triggers the exploration of new ways to gain QoE insights. In this paper, we share initial observations from a within-subjects experiment (N = 22) in which 2-party WebRTC-based audiovisual conversations took place under varying technical conditions. We collected self-report data, peripheral physiological data and application-level performance statistics with the overall aim of exploring their usefulness and compatibility for assessing QoE in the context of WebRTC. Our preliminary findings indicate that the varying quality is well-reflected in the self-reported overall quality and annoyance. However, this might not apply when considering the emotional valence ratings and ECG data, implying that other factors may play a role here.

Towards Prediction of User Experience from Touch Interactions with Mobile Applications

In this work a first attempt is made to model user experience ratings with recordings of touch interactions. To measure the user experience the AttrakDiff Mini questionnaire is used providing three quality dimensions: pragmatic quality, hedonic quality and attractiveness. The feature selection for linear models shows that it is possible to predict the pragmatic quality for a test set with an (r^2) of up to 0.64. The hedonic quality and attractiveness, however, seem not to be reflected in these touch interactions in a linear way. Still, the results from this work constitute a promising direction for future research on assessing or even optimizing the user experience for apps automatically in real time.