Mikael Drugge

Wearable systems in nursing home care: prototyping experience

Productivity in nursing care is a major concern in all residential facilities, as is improving the quality of care. Pervasive computing offers great promise in this area. In this paper we discuss requirements analysis, multiphase prototyping, and effective use of commercial off-the-shelf technologies to improve communication and situation awareness in nursing teams. We developed a wearable prototype with only a person-month of development time, using existing electronic meeting technologies for its multimodal communication platform.

A Study on Users’ Preference on Interruption When Using Wearable Computers and Head Mounted Displays

An important part of making a wearable computer unobtrusive is the user interface and the way it interrupts the user. The amount of interruption that have to be made on the users primary task should be minimized. Usage without interruption is of course best for the performance of the primary task but is often not possible as many tasks that the wearable computer is involved in do need interaction with the user. It is therefore important to understand what type of interruption that will benefit the user most. The question about which interruption that causes the least amount of stress for the user is as important as which interruption that gives the best performance. This paper continues on previous work where performance of the users was measured for different types of interruption. In this paper subjective data is analyzed to understand how to build user interfaces for wearable computers and head mounted displays that considers stress and other subjective variables

Methods for interrupting a wearable computer user

A wearable computer equipped with a head-mounted display allows its user to receive notifications and advice that is readily visible in her field of view. While needless interruption of the user should be avoided, there are times when the information is of such importance that it must demand the users attention. As the user is mobile and likely interacts with the real world when these situations occur, it is important to know in what way the user can be notified without increasing her cognitive workload more than necessary. To investigate ways of presenting information without increasing the cognitive workload of the recipient, an experiment was performed testing different approaches. The experiment described in this paper is based on an existing study of interruption of people in human-computer interaction, but our focus is instead on finding out how this applies to wearable computer users engaged in real world tasks.

Experiences of using wearable computers for ambient telepresence and remote interaction

We present our experiences of using wearable computers for providing an ambient form of telepresence to members of an e-meeting. Using a continuously running e-meeting session as a testbed for formal and informal studies and observations, this form of telepresence can be investigated from the perspective of remote and local participants alike. Based on actual experiences in real-life scenarios, we point out the key issues that prohibit the remote interaction from being entirely seamless, and follow up with suggestions on how those problems can be resolved or alleviated. Furthermore, we evaluate our system with respect to overall usability and the different means for an end-user to experience the remote world.

HotWire: an apparatus for simulating primary tasks in wearable computing

In this paper we present a novel apparatus for simulating real world primary tasks typically found in wearable computing. Additionally, we report on a preliminary interruption study using the new apparatus in a laboratory experiment and compare its results with previous work to show its applicability for research in human-computer interaction for wearable computers.