Oli Mival

Interaction strategies for an affective conversational agent

The development of embodied conversational agents (ECA) as companions brings several challenges for both affective and conversational dialogue. These include challenges in generating appropriate affective responses, selecting the overall shape of the dialogue, providing prompt system response times, and handling interruptions. We present an implementation of such a companion showing the development of individual modules that attempt to address these challenges. Further, to resolve resulting conflicts, we present encompassing interaction strategies that attempt to balance the competing requirements along with dialogues from our working prototype to illustrate these interaction strategies in operation. Finally, we provide the results of an evaluation of the companion using an evaluation methodology created for conversational dialogue and including analysis using appropriateness annotation.

Landscaping personification technologies: from interactions to relationships

Personification technologies are technologies that encourage people to anthropomorphize. These technologies try to get people to form relationships with them rather than simply interact with them. They may do this through having behaviours that encourage people to attribute personality or emotion to them. They may be persuasive technologies in the sense of Fogg that aim to get people to do things they would rather not do. They may promote trust. The convergence of a number of technologies is making personification technologies possible. Speech as an interaction is finally becoming robust and useable and is very influential in people attributing intelligence to devices and systems. Human language technologies allow devices to understand, or appear to understand, conversation. Interactions are becoming more natural and engaging. Avatars appear more congenial and coordinated. Building on the experience of a previous project, and drawing on the experience of a four year multi-disciplinary project, called Companions, the authors are keen to build community relationships around the notion of personification technologies. This includes the design, engineering, research (including ethics and social issues) and usability communities.

From human-computer interactions to human-companion relationships

In this paper we introduce and explore the challenges of what we believe is the next generation of interface technology; companions. Companions are intelligent, persistent, personalized, multimodal interfaces. Companions change interactions into relationships. The paper describes the characteristics of companions and the changes that are needed for interaction designers to design for companion relationships. It provides a brief history of the development of commercial companions and presents three empirical studies of companions that illustrate many of the design issues. These are elaborated in some detail and the implications for interaction design are considered.

Norms and standards in modular medical architectures

Recent Internet of Things (IoT) research has been aiming at interoperability of devices and the integration of sensor networks. The Future Internet - Private Public Partnership (FI-PPP) has created a whole array of different purpose-oriented modules with defined specifications, better known as Generic Enablers. This article gives an overview of legal, ethical and technical norms and standards to be considered when planning, developing and implementing modular medical architectures, integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) and Generic Enablers (GEs) in cutting edge, latest generation medical data networks.

User Experience (UX) Design for Medical Personnel and Patients

UX design is concerned with all the issues that go into providing an engaging and enjoyable experience for people in both the short and longer term. This is more than mere functionality and includes aesthetics, pleasure, and emotional engagement in terms of both the product and the service provided. In particular it is important to consider experiences at a physical, behavioral, and social level and in terms of the meanings people derive from their experiences. In this chapter the authors explore the ideas of UX and methods for applying a user-centered design (UCD) approach to the design of interactive medical and healthcare applications and provide guidelines and recommendations for the delivery of high-quality user experiences within medical domains.

Ethical assessment in e-Health

While innovative e-Health and m-Health technologies and solutions will eventually change the way health and social care are delivered, it raises many challenges regarding what sort of ethical concerns need to be addressed in order to provide imperative regulations and guidance to healthcare professionals and developers. This paper discusses key ethical challenges identified as part of an ongoing research project funded under the European Commissions Future Internet-Private Public Partnership (FI-PPP) initiative. The Future Internet Social Technological Alignment Research project (FI-STAR) is concerned with the validation of Future Internet technology developed under earlier FI-PPP projects and involves seven early trials in the healthcare domain. The project is supported by 26 European partners with a further extension of 10 partners or so pending. The challenges discussed in this paper include ethical-legal frameworks, privacy and international harmonization. The suggestions discussed in this paper include an overarching e-Health ethical framework, an ethical impact assessment and an ethical matrix. The ethical matrix can be used as a tool to illuminate the diverse requirements among the seven uses cases and to narrow down potential strategies to address the ethical challenges.

Exploring People's Emotional Bond with Places in the City: A Pilot Study

This paper outlines a thesis that seeks to understand how peoples experiences of places in the urban environment that are meaningful to them on a personal level, and in particular their stories and emotions connected to those personally significant places, could potentially inform the design of future technological devices and services. This urban HCI study aims to investigate the different forms this data could take, and the potential for sharing and exploring this personal data with other people using emotion maps. In this paper we introduce the methodology designed to this end, and report on some of the findings of our initial pilot study.

Design principles for collaborative device ecologies

This paper describes the ongoing investigation of interaction design issues related to collaborative activities in device ecologies, mixing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and smart meeting room technologies.

A social-technological alignment matrix

This paper refers to the term “implementation” as the process of integrating a new technology into established workfows. Especially in health care this has proven to be a very critical phase and many large-scale projects have failed on this very last mile. Although strategies such as requirements engineering, co-designing and user interaction design have been proposed to reduce the risk of end-user rejection and subsequently project failur. There is still no tool to analyze, predict and quantify user acceptance and identify critical areas which might be addressed before the start of the implementation phase in order to reduce resistance and increase the effectiveness and effciency.