Siska Fitrianie

TravelThrough: a participatory-based guidance system for traveling through disaster areas

This paper focuses on decentralized individual self-help in the aftermath of a disaster, instead of the traditionally adopted model of centralized disaster response management. It presents the results of a controlled field experiment that compares a new disaster response model involving civilians participating with smartphones with the traditional centralized model. In the new system, the affected people lead themselves to safety, and at the same time serving as distributed active sensors that share observations of the disaster area. The results show that the proposed system is more effective, preferred, and reduces the workload in guiding affected people safely to their destinations.

Constructing Knowledge of the World in Crisis Situations using Visual Language

Knowing the situational information about the current world is the precondition for setting goals and domains of actions. Special events in the world can also be used to initiate new actions or interrupt ongoing processes. A prototype of a communication interface has been developed which enables users to create visual messages to represent concepts or ideas in mind. The messages are constructed using a spatial arrangement of visual symbols. The interface has been tested by observers in a simulated crisis situation. The system processes the incoming message to build a world model by the employment of ontology. A blackboard of a dynamic ad-hoc network shares the knowledge and updates the display of the mobile devices of the users within the same region of the crisis event.

Improving Adherence in Automated e-Coaching

Non-adherence is considered a problem that seriously undermines the outcome of behavior change therapies, in particular of self-help therapies delivered without human interference. This paper presents the design rationale behind a computer system in the domain of adherence enhancing strategies in automated e-coaching. A variety of persuasive strategies is introduced and implemented in a mobile e-coaching system in the domain of insomnia therapy. The system integrates two types of interface elements, i.e. dedicated tools and natural language conversation, to simplify therapy related activities and to include social strategies to improve motivation. We focus on the crucial role of communication and adaptation.

Language-independent communication using icons on a PDA

As language is fundamental to human activities, proficiency in other languages becomes important. Besides for developing abilities for communication, the knowledge is also a tool for a survival. With the introduction of computerized mobile devices, i.e. PDAs, new opportunities for communicating in other language arose. This paper describes a new communication paradigm that is language independent using icon language on a PDA. Users can create iconic messages as realization of their concepts or ideas in mind. The proof of concept tool is able to interpret and convert the messages to (natural language) text and speech in different languages. To provide faster interactions in next icon selection, the tool has icon prediction. Our user test results confirmed that using provided icons our target users could express their concepts and ideas solely using a spatial arrangement of icons.

A Multi-modal Eliza Using Natural Language Processing and Emotion Recognition

In the human machine interaction domain adaptive life-like agents are becoming a popular interface. In order to provide a natural conversation such agents should be able to display emotion and to recognize the user’s emotions. This paper describes a computer model for a multi-modal communication system based on the famous Eliza question-answering system. A human user can communicate with the developed system using typed natural language. The system will reply with text-prompts and appropriate facial-expressions.

Mobile Phone-Delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia : A Randomized Waitlist Controlled Trial

Background This study is one of the first randomized controlled trials investigating cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) delivered by a fully automated mobile phone app. Such an app can potentially increase the accessibility of insomnia treatment for the 10% of people who have insomnia. Objective The objective of our study was to investigate the efficacy of CBT-I delivered via the Sleepcare mobile phone app, compared with a waitlist control group, in a randomized controlled trial. Methods We recruited participants in the Netherlands with relatively mild insomnia disorder. After answering an online pretest questionnaire, they were randomly assigned to the app (n=74) or the waitlist condition (n=77). The app packaged a sleep diary, a relaxation exercise, sleep restriction exercise, and sleep hygiene and education. The app was fully automated and adjusted itself to a participant’s progress. Program duration was 6 to 7 weeks, after which participants received posttest measurements and a 3-month follow-up. The participants in the waitlist condition received the app after they completed the posttest questionnaire. The measurements consisted of questionnaires and 7-day online diaries. The questionnaires measured insomnia severity, dysfunctional beliefs about sleep, and anxiety and depression symptoms. The diary measured sleep variables such as sleep efficiency. We performed multilevel analyses to study the interaction effects between time and condition. Results The results showed significant interaction effects (P<.01) favoring the app condition on the primary outcome measures of insomnia severity (d=–0.66) and sleep efficiency (d=0.71). Overall, these improvements were also retained in a 3-month follow-up. Conclusions This study demonstrated the efficacy of a fully automated mobile phone app in the treatment of relatively mild insomnia. The effects were in the range of what is found for Web-based treatment in general. This supports the applicability of such technical tools in the treatment of insomnia. Future work should examine the generalizability to a more diverse population. Furthermore, the separate components of such an app should be investigated. It remains to be seen how this app can best be integrated into the current health regimens. Trial Registration Netherlands Trial Register: NTR5560; http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/admin/rctview.asp?TC=5560 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6noLaUdJ4)

A SmartTV Platform for Wellbeing, Care and Social Support for Elderly at Home

This paper presents Care@Home, a smartTV platform integrating assistive living services for elderly in their homes. The SmartTV is acting as a user-centered ‘hub’ providing communication that connects the elderly to their formal care network, family, friends, communities, and provides services including household help, healthcare, exercise programmes and entertainment. The paper highlights Care@Home as a low-cost, personalized and open platform that is flexible and easy-to-use. We describe the human-centered design and first results from user studies.

Read-It: A multi-modal tangible interface for children who learn to read

Multi-modal tabletop applications offer excellent opportunities for enriching the education of young children. Read-It is an example of an interactive game with a multi-modal tangible interface that was designed to combine the advantages of current physical games and computer exercises. It is a novel approach for supporting children who learn to read. The first experimental evaluation has demonstrated that the Read-It approach is indeed promising and meets a priori expectations.

Talk and Tools: the best of both worlds in mobile user interfaces for E-coaching

In this paper, a user interface paradigm, called Talk-and-Tools, is presented for automated e-coaching. The paradigm is based on the idea that people interact in two ways with their environment: symbolically and physically. The main goal is to show how the paradigm can be applied in the design of interactive systems that offer an acceptable coaching process. As a proof of concept, an e-coaching system is implemented that supports an insomnia therapy on a smartphone. A human coach was replaced by a cooperative virtual coach that is able to interact with a human coachee. In the interface of the system, we distinguish between a set of personalized conversations (“Talk”) and specialized modules that form a coherent structure of input and output facilities (“Tools”). Conversations contained a minimum of variation to exclude unpredictable behavior but included the necessary mechanisms for variation to offer personalized consults and support. A variety of system and user tests was conducted to validate the use of the system. After a 6-week therapy, some users spontaneously reported the experience of building a relationship with the e-coach. It is concluded that the addition of a conversational component fills an important gap in the design of current mobile systems.

An adaptive keyboard with personalized language-based features

Our research is about an adaptive keyboard, which autonomously adjusts its predictive features and key displays to current user input. We used personalized word prediction to improve the performance of such a system. Prediction using common English dictionary (represented by the British National Corpus) is compared with prediction using personal data, such as personal documents, chat logs, and personal emails. A user study was also conducted to gather requirements for a new keyboard design. Based on these studies, we developed a personalized and adaptive on-screen keyboard for both single-handed and zero-handed users. It combines tapping-based and motion-based text input with language-based acceleration techniques, including personalized and adaptive task-based dictionary, frequent character prompting, word completion, and grammar checker with suffix completion.