Styliani Kleanthous

Analysis of Elderly Users’ Preferences and Expectations on Service Robot’s Personality, Appearance and Interaction

Fortunately, improvements in welfare and medical care will allow life expectancy in Europe’s population to increase by the year 2050. However, it is not always the case that living longer implies a healthier, more active and independent life. In this context, technologies and products that will act as assistive companions to elderly, who are living alone at their home, are attracting a growing interest from both a research and commercial perspective. Literature reports contradictory results on the preferences of elderly towards assistive technologies and more specifically, service robots. In this paper, we are called to present an empirical study, conducted in the scope of an EU – Horizon 2020 project, in order to explore people’s perceptions, attitudes and requirements towards the idea of a future service robot for the home.

ICT Systems and Services for Ageing Well: Identification and Assessment of an Important Set (Package) of ICT Services for Active Ageing and Independent Living

Currently, the main care model for supporting elderly people living alone at home is based on informal and formal caregivers assistance. Considering the demographic changes of older population, which increases rapidly, this model is expected to pose major challenges both in the economy as well as the society. To address these challenges, there is growing attention for assistive technologies to support seniors stay active and independent, for as long as possible, in their preferred home environments. ICT systems for Ageing Well are among those initiatives. The work presented in this paper is based on the context of the Miraculous-Life project. It focuses on the identification and assessment, in terms of usefulness, technical feasibility and constrains, of a set (package) of services that an ICT system for Ageing Well should support. The results extracted from our study and provided in this paper can be considered by other projects working in the area of Ageing Well and assist the consortium to gain an insight about (i) which ICT services can provide the greater benefit to the elderly and their caregivers’ QoL, and thus reduce time and resources needed to be allocated for identifying, from scratch, the services that will be supported by their system, and (ii) the technical perspective of the ICT services and prioritize their development, as well as, facilitate better allocation of their resources, to minimize any risks that could result in failure to implement these services in the framework of their project.

Transactive Memory in Task-Driven 3D Virtual World Teams

Collaboration and knowledge sharing in small teams is very usual not only in education but also in industry, in gaming and in our lives. Interdisciplinary teams are formed and their members are expected to collaborate, exploit their capabilities and know-how towards achieving a common goal. In this work we explore whether parameters associated with the development of Transactive Memory System (TMS) can be reflected in a 3D virtual world. People from diverse background and profession brought together in teams to work towards completing an assigned task within a 3D virtual world. The results show strong associations between the parameters of a TMS, collaboration activities and communication scales examined.

Detecting Personality Traces in Users’ Social Activity

The effect that social media have in our lives nowadays is apparent. Many studies focused on how the differences we hold as people due to our personality, reflect our activities online. In this work we aim to exploit reports of previous work to implicitly build a personality model of Facebook users, based on their Facebook activity. An initial evaluation study shows that using Facebook activity data, we can extract information on user personality and at the same time points in further improvements necessary for more accurate personality prediction.

Towards Modelling the User Creative Process in a Sandbox Game

Wallas suggested a four stages model of creative process: a) preparation, b) incubation, c) illumination, d) verification, that has been widely used through the years in several disciplines. In this work we are aiming at defining pattern detection algorithms for modelling the creative process of a user based on the users activity in MineTest. A qualitative user study allowed us to define and refine patterns related to the creative process of the user while executing a creative task in the game. In addition, through the data collected, important issues have been exposed that will inform future work in the same direction.

Poster: Analyzing the Transactive Memory in Teaching Software Engineering

Software Engineering education requires offering to students practical experience via collaboration with the industry and working in teams. At the same time, students require different skills and knowledge at different levels of their studies, i.e. undergraduate versus postgraduate. In this context, Transactive Memory, referring to the shared store of knowledge, affects the dynamics in groups influencing the teaching outcome. In this paper, we present the process that we have employed in University of Cyprus, for teaching Software Engineering courses to bachelor and master students. We describe the process of team building, the different roles, and how the group dynamics can affect Transactive Memory.

Individual Differences in Music Video Interaction: An exploratory Analysis

Learning through video watching has been popular through the education community and is considered as a common choice especially for self-directed informal learning. However, the learner in this situation acts only as a passive consumer and does not receives any feedback for improving his/her performance, an element important in any educational context. Studies in music psychology reveal that gender, perceptual, and cognitive, differences, along with the level of music education of the individual, should be considered when support is generated to a person who is watching a music video for educational purposes. In this sense, individual differences should be exploited when designing an adaptive learning support aiming to suit the individual in music learning. In this line, this paper presents an exploratory study into interaction data of music experts and amateurs when they were actively watching a music video. Linguistic analysis is also employed for taking an insight into the written comments provided by participants at several timepoints in the music videos. Results reveal significant differences between genders in their interaction behavior but also in their perception processing of the music videos, reflected in their comments. Suggestions are provided based on the results on how these can be utilized for the design of personalized support in informal music education.

DermaTrack: A Skin Cancer Tracking Intelligent Application

Although, one in five humans living in high risk areas will develop skin cancer during a lifetime, there is currently no mechanism to help humans track the development of skin moles. DermaTrack, the application described in this paper offers an innovative mechanism, using a mobile application, for i) tracking skin cancer over time, and ii) share the data recorded with a specialized doctor. In this paper, we are providing an evaluation of the prototype mobile application interface developed.

A Robotic Cloud Ecosystem for Elderly Care and Ageing Well: The GrowMeUp Approach

Robotic systems in Ageing Well, like GrowMeUp, are among those assistive technologies, providing companionship and offering functionality related to the support of active and independent living, monitoring and maintaining safety, and enhancement of health and psychological well-being of the elderly. The work presented in this paper is based on the context of GrowMeUp project and focuses on presenting the main novelties introduced with the GrowMeUp system, providing a robotic cloud ecosystem, able to support, encourage and engage the older persons to stay socially involved and longer active and independent, in carrying out their daily life at home. Emphasis is given on the important issues of end user’s acceptance, usability and affordability and how technologies like cloud computing and different learning and intelligent dialoguing mechanisms are brought together in one solution to address these issues.