Jundong Cho

Better Posture Awareness through Flower-Shaped Ambient Avatar

Incorrect postures and long sitting sessions are among the main causes of back pain and discomfort, a problem affecting a growing portion of office workers. In the past, researchers have suggested possible ways to notify with alerts those users who sit improperly, but often such notifications are perceived as intrusive and tend to be ignored. In this paper, we present a flower-shaped physical avatar that subtly and pleasantly (through motion, colors and sounds) provides an ambient feedback to users about their postures. Compared with similar previous work, the flower-avatar described in this paper presents, through better sensing and fine-grain output capabilities, a more expressive ambient media platform that showcases the potential of media ambient avatars in health-care scenarios.

Hot & tight: exploring thermo and squeeze cues recognition on wrist wearables

Wrist worn wearable computing devices are ideally suited for presenting notifications through haptic stimuli as they are always in direct contact with the users skin. While prior work has explored the feasibility of haptic notifications, we highlight a lack of empirical studies on thermal and pressure feedback in the context of wearable devices. This paper introduces prototypes for thermal and pressure (squeeze) feedback on the wrist. It then presents a study characterizing recognition performance with thermal and pressure cues against baseline performance with vibrations.

Understanding Women's Needs in Menopause for Development of mHealth

Women are expected to spend 1/3 of their life in a menopausal state as the average life span increased. There is a large amount of studies conducted on mHealth intervention, but the amount of study conducted for this particular target group is relatively small. In order to develop a mobile intervention for wellness of menopausal women, we identify design considerations for supporting their wellness with mobile devices. We assume 9 functions we believed the target domain need to use their mobile application for their wellness and conduct interviews with a focus group including middle aged women and members of stakeholder. As a result, we were able to conclude that the mobile health intervention system would need to provide 1)SNS function that users can actively share their health information with others, 2)message function that enables application to send text information on health management, 3) reliable source from doctors, and 4)visualized personal information that users can easily understand.

WearLove: Affective Communication via Wearable Device with Gamification

In this paper, we present WearLove, a wrist-worn device and mobile application for enhancing affective communication between users. It enables two users to send a heart symbol to each others wristband monitors by touching the sensor on the band. Given that the gamification causes the user motivation, we add the gamification elements to the app. The more they express their love to each other via the wristband, the bigger a tree will be grown in the app. By using WearLove, we would like to figure out it can actually enhance the affective communication between users. Add to this, we also investigate the gamification elements in the app can evoke the user motivation for affective communication. To address these questions, three group interviews were conducted during one hour for each couple. (N = 6, 3 couples) Results indicated that WearLove may evoke user motivation for affective communication. Key findings and limitations are going to be discussed in the paper.

People's Emotional Responses to a Plant's Emotional Expression

In this paper we investigate how people emotionally respond to the emotional expression of a plant when external stimuli were given to the plant. For this purpose we built a simple LED emoticon-based device as an emotional proxy for delivering inner states of a plant, assuming the inner states of a plant can be changed depending on either positive or negative external stimuli. Our pilot study suggests that peoples attitude on plants can be influenced by observing the emotional expressions of a plant.

TakeOut: drawing application using distributed user interface for being close to real experience

Nowadays, people who use multiple devices at the same time have been on the increase. This multi-device environment gives a good opportunity to expand the limited interaction as using Smartphone only. In this study, we present TakeOut, drawing application based on cross-device interaction of the smartphone and the smartwatch. TakeOut can be interacted on the smartphone and the smartwatch as each canvas and palette. It can extend the smartphone screen and enable drawing interaction using whole the smartphone screen. Through user study, we have identified very encouraging feedback and usability of the application.

BeuPo: a digital plant that you can raise and customize with your current posture

Health problems related to back posture are an increasingly common issue in modern societies. Thanks to the advances of current IT technology, various solutions are also becoming widespread. However, despite the advantages and promising features of these technologies, only a few solutions concern how to visualize and use the data sensed by those technologies. In this paper, we designed and developed an application that uses the data calculated from the upper back posture of the user. Moreover, we enriched the user experience through various games with deeper game dynamics than those in previous applications. In this work, we show how a game can support users in preventing back-related posture problems and show in detail the game dynamics we developed.

Quantifying Children's Engagement with Educational Tangible Blocks

Playful learning is a powerful method to enhance childrens engagement with teaching material, often resulting in better learning. Several prior works demonstrated the existence of a relation between tangibles and engagement, but they did not characterize it with specific measures. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the degree of engagement with tangible blocks by quantifying childrens proactive and passive actions during a learning session. Based on a user study with 36 kindergarten children, our findings show that tangibles support a higher degree of engagement, fosters attention and collaboration, and possibly lead to more active learning.

DenTeach: A Device for Fostering Children's Good Tooth-brushing Habits

In this paper we present DenTeach, a smart brush with a doll-shaped tangible device. We designed and to foster childrens good tooth brushing habits by explicitly showing the effect of their tooth brushing on the teeth of a physical avatar in real time. A pilot study conducted with 15 children (ages between 6 and 12) shows that there was possibly positive change of their attitudes to tooth brushing and motivations for tooth brushing when they brushed their teeth with DenTeach. As future work, we plan to develop a smartphone app that interacts with DenTeach so that the children users can constantly check their tooth brushing habits with more fun.

Slowee : A Smart Eating-Speed Guide System with Light and Vibration Feedback

In this paper we introduce Slowee, a smart eating-speed guide system with light and vibration. Slowee aims to improve the users eating habits by delivering right feedback in real time to the user while eating. We designed and implemented our system, Slowee, and conducted a pilot study to investigate the usability of Slowee and obtain feedbacks from the users. Although the number of the participants is rather small (n=10), the participants gave positive feedbacks on the potentials of Slowee. We expect that our device can help maintaining appropriate eating speed and chewing numbers for patients (e.g., those who have undergone esophageal resection) as well as for those who eat fast or chew less than the recommended number of times. As future work, we plan to conduct a long-term period study to evaluate the effectiveness of Slowee on the formation of an eating habit beyond immediate action improvements.