Plinio Thomaz Aquino Junior

Behavioral Persona for Human-Robot Interaction: A Study Based on Pet Robot

With the advancement of technology robots have become more common in every day applications, like Paro and GOSTAI Jazz for health care or Pleo and Genibo for entertainment. Since these robots are designed to constantly interact with people, during the development process it should be considered how people would feel and behave when they interact with those artifacts. However there might be some issues in collecting this type of data or how to efficiently use it in the development of new features. In this study we report a process for creating Personas that will help in the design of subject-focused applications for robots interactions.

sEMG feature evaluation for identification of elbow angle resolution in graded arm movement

Automatic and accurate identification of elbow angle from surface electromyogram (sEMG) is essential for myoelectric controlled upper limb exoskeleton systems. This requires appropriate selection of sEMG features, and identifying the limitations of such a system.This study has demonstrated that it is possible to identify three discrete positions of the elbow; full extension, right angle, and mid-way point, with window size of only 200 milliseconds. It was seen that while most features were suitable for this purpose, Power Spectral Density Averages (PSD-Av) performed best. The system correctly classified the sEMG against the elbow angle for 100% cases when only two discrete positions (full extension and elbow at right angle) were considered, while correct classification was 89% when there were three discrete positions. However, sEMG was unable to accurately determine the elbow position when five discrete angles were considered. It was also observed that there was no difference for extension or flexion phases.

Automa-Persona: A Process to Extract Knowledge Automatic for Improving Personas

During the development of a product, it is necessary for a designer to attempt the special needs of devices and also the target users. To help designers with the problem to attend users’ needs, a technique called Personas is applied during the project. Usually, the Personas creation process is manual, lengthy and also it doesn’t have a attendance during the project. With this objective in mind, this paper presents a process to automatize and to address the users needs through Personas during the whole project.

Similar or not similar: this is a parameter question

There is much information of users to be analyzed to develop a personalized project. To perform an analysis, it is necessary to create clusters in order to identify features to be explored by the project designer. In general, a classical clustering algorithm called K-Means is used to group users features. However, K-Means reveals some problems during the cluster process. In fact, K-Means does not guarantee to find Quality-Preserved Sets (QPS) and its randomness let the entire process unpredictable and unstable. In order to avoid these problems, a novel algorithm called Q-SIM (Quality Similarity Clustering) is presented in this paper. The Q-SIM algorithm has the objective to keep a similarity degree among all elements inside the cluster and guarantee QPS for all sets. During the tests, Q-SIM demonstrates that it is better than k-means and it is more appropriate to solve the problem for user modeling presented in this paper.

Behavioural Variables Analysis in Mobile Environments

Due to the recent proliferation of mobile applications, it has become essential to obtain a better understanding of how people use their devices and applications. However, it is not always possible to reproduce the chaotic environment where the interactions between users and applications take place. Based on this fact, the present study presents a mechanism for the collection and connection of variables of interaction touches, navigation between screens, etc. and variables of mobility sensor data, such as GPS, by the means of an experiment performed in the application made available at application stores and used by real users, performing daily tasks. With the analysis of the data collected it is expected to understand user behavior during interaction and determine usage patterns associating the variables of mobility with the variables of interaction that provide new ideas for interface projects.

Psychological Personas for Universal User Modeling in Human-Computer Interaction

Applying techniques to understand the user needs and expectation in product development is important practices for find consistent strategies. However, available techniques need human interaction, is a psychologist examining a profile or usability expert capturing information about users group. In this situation, data collection and analysis require a large effort and cost to make the purpose of knowing the user needs. This paper aims to create a set of personas from psychological profiles theory that define a generic model, clustering information about knowledge, skills, impulses and concerns, outlining action patterns of users diversity that exist today. This set of personas can be used in global solutions, considering universal usability aspects. Finally, the worldwide acceptance of psychological profiles allows updated and consistent personas, decreasing cost and increasing quality.

On Source Code Completion Assistants and the Need of a Context-Aware Approach

Source code completion assistance is a popular feature in modern IDEs. However, despite their popularity, there is little research about their key characteristics and limitations. There is also little research about the way software developers interact with code completion assistants, especially when considering the different techniques assistants use to populate the list of possible completions. This paper presents a study about the features of currently available code assistants and an experiment targeting professional Java developers familiar with the Eclipse platform that aims to collect and interpret usage data of two popular code completion assistants during the execution of three programming tasks. Results indicate that half the interactions with code assistants are either dismissed, interrupted or the completion proposals displayed have no direct contribution to the completion of the programming task. In that sense, we argue that code assistants still have a long road to pursue, since they seem to diminish the importance of the ultimate goals of the task at hand and also lack the ability of identifying and exploring the concepts of context-aware computing theory. The results of this paper can drive future HCI research to the design of adaptive code completion assistants that are able to respond to end user behaviors and preferences.

Framework Interface Components for Accessibility Issues in E-Commerce

The accessibility support absence in the design of web sites is related to insufficient training of developers, project budget constraints, and the lack of techniques to support development activities that take into account accessibility. This paper presents a component framework developed from the viewpoint of accessibility, based on an interaction pattern language and on an accessibility guideline targeted to complete vision loss. An additional contribution is the development of a components development process that meets accessibility requirements, based on interaction patterns, using a process for the components specification and the usability engineering lifecycle elements.

Gamification Aspects in the Context of Electronic Government and Education: A Case Study

The user experience, product quality and confidence in the institution are critical success factors in the use of services in e-government. The usability evaluation and analysis of user interaction in e-government, usually occurs in a timely manner and limited to few users. One way to provide the user immediate feedback and get usage statistics of a continuously service is using the technique known as gamification. The objective of this study is to propose a method to select and apply electronic game elements as motivational factors in access to information produced by the government and then test the impact of these elements. Thus, this research focuses on scenarios where e-government services have an emphasis on providing information to citizens and enabling a two-way interaction. It is intended to identify gamification mechanisms such as points, badges, levels, rankings and others and apply them to the application’s tasks and user’s different motivations when they are immersed on a virtual environment. The purpose of this work is to develop an experiment gamification technique in the stages known as improved information services and transactional services of e-government which allow two-way interaction with citizens. This article presents ways to motivate the user and improve citizens feedback. The results demonstrate the successful use of gamification technique in e-government scenarios that provide educational services to citizens.

A large-scale analysis of the use of session in a mobile application

Due to the recent proliferation of mobile applications, it has become essential to obtain a better understanding of how people use their devices and applications. The session usage contains the user behavior therefore, the present study aims to analyze which are the most representative session groups in the context of an application that is part of a taxi request platform by the means of an experiment performed in the application made available at application stores and used by real users, performing daily tasks.