Lukasz Piwek

The Rise of Consumer Health Wearables: Promises and Barriers

Lukasz Piwek and colleagues consider whether wearable technology can become a valuable asset for health care.

Beyond self report:tools to compare estimated and real-world smartphone use

Psychologists typically rely on self-report data when quantifying mobile phone usage, despite little evidence of its validity. In this paper we explore the accuracy of using self-reported estimates when compared with actual smartphone use. We also include source code to process and visualise these data. We compared 23 participants’ actual smartphone use over a two-week period with self-reported estimates and the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale. Our results indicate that estimated time spent using a smartphone may be an adequate measure of use, unless a greater resolution of data are required. Estimates concerning the number of times an individual used their phone across a typical day did not correlate with actual smartphone use. Neither estimated duration nor number of uses correlated with the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale. We conclude that estimated smartphone use should be interpreted with caution in psychological research.

Empirical evaluation of the uncanny valley hypothesis fails to confirm the predicted effect of motion

The uncanny valley hypothesis states that the acceptability of an artificial character will not increase linearly in relation to its likeness to human form. Instead, after an initial rise in acceptability there will be a pronounced decrease when the character is similar, but not identical to human form (Mori, 1970/2012). Moreover, it has been claimed but never directly tested that movement would accentuate this dip and make moving characters less acceptable. We used a number of full-body animated computer characters along with a parametrically defined motion set to examine the effect of motion quality on the uncanny valley. We found that improving the motion quality systematically improved the acceptability of the characters. In particular, the character classified in the deepest location of the uncanny valley became more acceptable when it was animated. Our results showed that although an uncanny valley was found for static characters, the deepening of the valley with motion, originally predicted by Mori (1970/2012), was not obtained.

Can Programming Frameworks Bring Smartphones into the Mainstream of Psychological Science

Smartphones continue to provide huge potential for psychological science and the advent of novel research frameworks brings new opportunities for researchers who have previously struggled to develop smartphone applications. However, despite this renewed promise, smartphones have failed to become a standard item within psychological research. Here we consider the key issues that continue to limit smartphone adoption within psychological science and how these barriers might be diminishing in light of ResearchKit and other recent methodological developments. We conclude that while these programming frameworks are certainly a step in the right direction it remains challenging to create usable research-orientated applications with current frameworks. Smartphones may only become an asset for psychology and social science as a whole when development software that is both easy to use and secure becomes freely available.

Audiovisual integration of emotional signals from others' social interactions

Audiovisual perception of emotions has been typically examined using displays of a solitary character (e.g., the face-voice and/or body-sound of one actor). However, in real life humans often face more complex multisensory social situations, involving more than one person. Here we ask if the audiovisual facilitation in emotion recognition previously found in simpler social situations extends to more complex and ecological situations. Stimuli consisting of the biological motion and voice of two interacting agents were used in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with visual, auditory, auditory filtered/noisy, and audiovisual congruent and incongruent clips. We asked participants to judge whether the two agents were interacting happily or angrily. In Experiment 2, another group of participants repeated the same task, as in Experiment 1, while trying to ignore either the visual or the auditory information. The findings from both experiments indicate that when the reliability of the auditory cue was decreased participants weighted more the visual cue in their emotional judgments. This in turn translated in increased emotion recognition accuracy for the multisensory condition. Our findings thus point to a common mechanism of multisensory integration of emotional signals irrespective of social stimulus complexity.

Regulating wellbeing in the brave new quantified workplace

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to lay out the conceptual issues arising alongside the rise of sensory technologies in workplaces designed to improve wellness and productivity. Design/methodology/approach This is a text based conceptual paper. The authors’ approach is to throw light on some of the emerging issues with the introduction of wearable self-tracking technologies in workplaces. Findings The paper indicates that scholars will need to put ethical issues at the heart of research on sensory tracking technologies in workplaces that aim to regulate employee behaviour via wellness initiatives. Practical implications The study explores the legal issues around data protection and potential work intensification. Social implications Privacy and personal data protection, workplace discipline are discuss in this paper. Originality/value This is an original paper. Since there is very little scholarly research in this area, it is important to begin to consider the implications of sensory technology in workplaces linked to wellness initiatives, given the probable impact it will have on work design and appraisal systems.

Automatic tracking of behavior with smartphones: potential for behavior change interventions

Abstract In the following chapter, we review recent work on harnesses the sensors embedded in smartphones to understand individuals, and consider how such techniques might be used in behavior change interventions, and the ethical and practical issues such techniques might bring about.

Auditory signal dominates visual in the perception of emotional social interactions

Multimodal perception of emotions has been typically examined using displays of a solitary character (e.g., the face–voice and/or body–sound of one actor). We extend investigation to more complex, dyadic point-light displays combined with speech. A motion and voice capture system was used to record twenty actors interacting in couples with happy, angry and neutral emotional expressions. The obtained stimuli were validated in a pilot study and used in the present study to investigate multimodal perception of emotional social interactions. Participants were required to categorize happy and angry expressions displayed visually, auditorily, or using emotionally congruent and incongruent bimodal displays. In a series of cross-validation experiments we found that sound dominated the visual signal in the perception of emotional social interaction. Although participants’ judgments were faster in the bimodal condition, the accuracy of judgments was similar for both bimodal and auditory-only conditions. When participants watched emotionally mismatched bimodal displays, they predominantly oriented their judgments towards the auditory rather than the visual signal. This auditory dominance persisted even when the reliability of auditory signal was decreased with noise, although visual information had some effect on judgments of emotions when it was combined with a noisy auditory signal. Our results suggest that when judging emotions from observed social interaction, we rely primarily on vocal cues from the conversation, rather then visual cues from their body movement.

The Quantified Workplace: A Study in Self-Tracking, Agility and Change Management

While self-and other tracking devices are increasingly common in workplaces, they are normally implemented either for explicit productivity and efficiency monitoring (warehouses) or as part of wellness initiatives (white collar and office work) rather than as part of change management. This chapter looks at one company’s project work design experiment where management provided several devices to employees to record productivity and movement and asked for daily self-reports on subjective well-being and stress. The quantified workplace study (QWS) was designed by the company to identify how productivity and resilience can be self-managed in times of transition through self-awareness and healthy lifestyles and well-being in what authors call the new era of agility.

Failing to encourage physical activity with wearable technology: what next?:

Wearable devices and associated systems that provide real-time feedback aim to encourage healthy behaviours. However, while the research base has grown considerably, results continue to paint a mixed picture when demonstrating wearables’ ability to increase levels of physical activity. Given these recent developments, this commentary explores the key reasons why wearable devices and other mobile technologies often fail to change behaviour. We also provide several suggestions that could feed into future research designs and maximise the success of subsequent interventions. These recommendations aim to stimulate interdisciplinary discussions by encouraging clinicians and researchers to consider how these technological advances can be effectively leveraged, and become a core component of preventative medicine in the 21st century.