Timo Kuula

Cross-use of smart phones and printed books in primary school education

The adoption of new technologies in primary schools has fallen behind in terms of childrens everyday use of technology. The use of mobile phones has been proposed as a promising field for learning. To date, the mobile learning technologies have rarely been integrated with current educational practices, however. Here, we present the results of our intervention study in which a mobile hybrid media system that combines the use of the traditional printed book with the mobile phone was used in English as foreign language (EFL) education in primary school. The results revealed an increase in learning motivation but also some conflicts when the boundaries of the school world and everyday life were blurred through the use of new technology.

Playful learning with hybrid school books

This paper presents the preliminary results of a hybrid school book study. Books were designed and tested to make learning more playful, and to enlarge the role of printed book in school work.

Technology Acceptance of Augmented Reality and Wearable Technologies

Augmented Reality and Wearables are the recent media and computing technologies, similar, but different from established technologies, even mobile computing and virtual reality. Numerous proposals for measuring technology acceptance exist, but have not been applied, nor fine-tuned to such new technology so far. Within this contribution, we enhance these existing instruments with the special needs required for measuring technology acceptance of Augmented Reality and Wearable Technologies and we validate the new instrument with participants from three pilot areas in industry, namely aviation, medicine, and space. Findings of such baseline indicate that respondents in these pilot areas generally enjoy and look forward to using these technologies, for being intuitive and easy to learn to use. The respondents currently do not receive much support, but like working with them without feeling addicted. The technologies are still seen as forerunner tools, with some fear of problems of integration with existing systems or vendor-lock. Privacy and security aspects surprisingly seem not to matter, possibly overshadowed by expected productivity increase, increase in precision, and better feedback on task completion. More participants have experience with AR than not, but only few on a regular basis.

Simulator Sickness in Augmented Reality Training Using the Microsoft HoloLens

Augmented Reality is on the rise with consumer-grade smart glasses becoming available in recent years. Those interested in deploying these head-mounted displays need to understand better the effect technology has on the end user. One key aspect potentially hindering the use is motion sickness, a known problem inherited from virtual reality, which so far remains under-explored. In this paper we address this problem by conducting an experiment with 142 subjects in three different industries: aviation, medical, and space. We evaluate whether the Microsoft HoloLens, an augmented reality head-mounted display, causes simulator sickness and how different symptom groups contribute to it (nausea, oculomotor and disorientation). Our findings suggest that the Microsoft HoloLens causes across all participants only negligible symptoms of simulator sickness. Most consumers who use it will face no symptoms while only few experience minimal discomfort in the training environments we tested it in.

User Experience of Augmented Reality System for Astronaut's Manual Work Support

This paper introduces Augmented Reality (AR) system to support an astronauts manual work, it has been developed in two phases. The first phase was developed in Europeans Space Agencys (ESA) project called “EdcAR—Augmented Reality for Assembly, Integration, Testing and Verification, and Operations” and the second phase was developed and evaluated within the Horizon 2020 project “WEKIT—Wearable Experience for Knowledge Intensive Training.” The main aim is to create an AR based technological platform for high knowledge manual work support, in the aerospace industry with reasonable user experience. The AR system was designed for the Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality platform, and it was implemented based on a modular architecture. The purpose of the evaluation of the AR system is to prove that reasonable user experience of augmented reality can reduce performance errors while executing a procedure, increase memorability, and improve cost, and time efficiency of the training. The main purpose of the first phase evaluation was to observe and get feedback from the AR system, from user experience point-of-view for the future development. The use case was a filter change in International Space Station (ISS)—Columbus mock-up in the ESAs European Astronaut Centre (EAC). The test group of 14 subjects it included an experienced astronaut, EAC trainers, other EAC personnel, and a student group. The second phase the experiment consisted of an in-situ trial and evaluation process. The augmented reality system was tested at ALTEC facilities in Turin, Italy, where 39 participants were performing an actual real astronauts procedure, the installation of Temporary Stowage Rack (TSR) on a physical mock-up of an ISS module. User experience evaluation was assessed using comprehensive questionnaires, and interviews, gathering an in-depth feedback on their experience with a platform. This focused on technology acceptance, system usability, smart glasses user satisfaction, user interaction satisfaction, and interviews, gathering an in-depth feedback on their experience with a platform. The analysis of the questionnaires and interviews showed that the scores obtained for user experience, usability, user satisfaction, and technology acceptance were near the desired average. Specifically, The System Usability Scale (SUS) score was 68 indicating that the system usability is already nearly acceptable in the augmented reality platform.

Remote services with cyber physical robotics

Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) are integrating computation, networking, and physical processes. They provide many new opportunities to improve asset management. One of these, remote service developments are responding to changing and growing needs of customers to improve the return on assets of the systems. We have approached the needs for remote services in robot automation by setting up a pilot system to support setup and maintenance of sensor based robot systems by a remote calibration service. The main focus has been in user interface design, to support local field personnel as well as remotely located technology specialists. Iterative design example is described for a remote robot-sensor calibration procedure.

Organizational Self-Determination and New Digital Self-Study Applications as Means for Developing Nuclear Power Plant Operation Training

New learning is required from nuclear power plant operators: subtle changes to work emerge as new changes to safety improvements are introduced. This study reports challenges, trade-offs and potential solutions related to career long learning in NPP operation. A NPP operating organization was studied with two focus groups sessions (N = 9). The focus group session outline was generated based on individual (N = 2) and group interviews (N = 6) along with existing published studies and concepts of learning theory. The identified challenges reflect limited resources and limited self-determination of a specific functional group as part of bigger organization.

User-centric development of simulation based manufacturing operation planning and scheduling system

Agile production needs a management and evaluation tool for production changes, manufacturing system development, configuration and operations planning. A decision support system based on manufacturing simulation is one suitable solution. The basic idea is to combine the strengths of automatic data analysis, calculations, simulation results with the visual perception and analysis capabilities of the human user, who is doing final decisions. The use of simulation with an easy-to-use graphical user interface provides tools and methods for manufacturing scenario evaluation, scheduling optimization, and production planning even for simulation non-experts. This article shows a user-centric development process for those systems.