Torben Wallbaum

Towards a Tangible Storytelling Kit for Exploring Emotions with Children

A key aspect of children»s development is the ability to manage personal feelings, understand others» feelings and needs, and interact positively with others. Storytelling is one approach to help children develop emotional literacy and deal with their own feelings constructively. To facilitate and complement this process, we developed an interactive storytelling prototype to help children and parents explore emotional situations. Specifically, the tangible modular toolkit, enables the re-creation of different narratives using a multi-modal user interface. We evaluated the preliminary prototype with parents and children to get feedback on the design and to help us better understand the design space. Our findings revealed how children engaged with tangible storytelling, how they explored emotional states in narratives, and what challenges they faced. We also explored the routines and practices parents used and the issues they faced while helping their children express emotions more easily.

StoryBox: Design of a System to Support Experience Sharing through Visual Stories

Being socially integrated and connected with loved ones is an important factor, especially for people living over a spatial distance. Modern communication technologies, like messengers or social networks, enable people to exchange experiences continuously. However, these technologies exclude some groups, that are not familiar with the use of such services and devices. We present and discuss requirements from interviews and a focus group for a device to engage users in an easy content creation and sharing. Based on our findings, we designed StoryBox, an early prototype that eases the way people can share experiences, memories and moods using visual stories. Further we discuss our future research agenda related to sharing visual stories and present a study design to evaluate our prototype in a two step field evaluation.

Supporting Communication between Grandparents and Grandchildren through Tangible Storytelling Systems

Grandparents and grandchildren that live apart often rely on communication technologies, such as messengers, video conferencing, and phone calls for maintaining relationships. While some of these systems are challenging for grandparents, others are less engaging for children. To facilitate communication, we developed StoryBox, a tangible device that allows sharing photos, tangible artifacts, and audio recordings of everyday life. We conducted a preliminary study with two families to identify design issues, and further refine the prototype. Subsequently, we conducted a field study with four families for up to four weeks to better understand real-world use and examine inter-generational connectedness. We found that StoryBox was accessible, simple, and helped bridge the technological gap between grandparents and grandchildren. Children communicated asynchronously in a playful and idiosyncratic manner, and grandparents shared past family memories. We provide insights on how to ease communication between different generations, engage them in sharing activities, and strengthen family relationships.

Exploring Social Awareness: A Design Case Study in Minimal Communication

Computer-mediated communication technology is ubiquitous in today»s society. However, the design of these technologies often takes a screen-based approach and requires users to adopt new usage conventions. While these methods have been widely successful in helping individuals communicate, we take a step back in this paper and explore the design implications of a simpler tangible system for keeping in touch. This system consists of a pair of artificial electronic flowers, which connect and transmit information to each other. Our contribution is not in the actual implementation, but rather in the design implications that follow. In our modest evaluation we found participants using our system in informal, relaxed and sometimes novel ways.

Contextual Assesments and Biomarker in Agitation Prediction for ADHD Patients

ADHD has an estimated worldwide prevalence of 2-3% and is one of the most frequent neurodevelopmental disorders. The disease starts in childhood and persists in up to 50% into adulthood. Many problems in an ADHD-patients life arise from the lack of self-management abilities. Technologies may be able to support adolescents and adults with ADHD by strengthening self-awareness of their symptoms, monitoring treatment and helping to develop responsibility, emotional self-regulation and self-management. In our work, we develop a modular on-body system which supports self-management of psychological disorders for young adults unobtrusively in everyday life. We present insights into the future concept of an assessment system based on contextual experience sampling and biomarkers, to predict agitated situations and enable patients to reflect on their own behaviors.

Face2Emoji: Using Facial Emotional Expressions to Filter Emojis

One way to indicate nonverbal cues is by sending emoji (e.g., 😂), which requires users to make a selection from large lists. Given the growing number of emojis, this can incur user frustration, and instead we propose Face2Emoji, where we use a users facial emotional expression to filter out the relevant set of emoji by emotion category. To validate our method, we crowdsourced 15,155 emoji to emotion labels across 308 website visitors, and found that our 202 tested emojis can indeed be classified into seven basic (including Neutral) emotion categories. To recognize facial emotional expressions, we use deep convolutional neural networks, where early experiments show an overall accuracy of 65% on the FER-2013 dataset. We discuss our future research on Face2Emoji, addressing how to improve our model performance, what type of usability test to run with users, and what measures best capture the usefulness and playfulness of our system.

Comparison of in-situ mood input methods on mobile devices

The exchange of daily moods is an important part of interpersonal communication over a distance. Mobile devices offer a platform for sharing on the go, and keeping in touch regularly. However, it is still a challenge to design an input for mood, such that the sharing easily integrates into the daily life and is engaging for a longer time. To design an input, which overcomes these challenges, we explore the use of four different methods for expressing mood on mobile devices, drawn from previous work in psychology. We aim to verify the usefulness of these methods and want to investigate this by conducting a comparative study of these four input methods, regarding the following factors: intuitiveness, inconvenience, speed of input, everyday use, expressiveness and overall suitability. Results show that use of photographs and emotion terms are suitable to describe the many facets of moods for most participants. Most of the participants prefer personalized input methods as well as combined methods. We discuss the outcomes with regard to the implications on future designs of messenger applications.

Implementing Data Protection and Information Security in AAL

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) tries to keep up user’s independence by means of applying technology, i.e., it collects, aggregates, and analyzes data recorded by a plethora of different sensors and controls actuators of a comparable variety. Setup and functionalities are various and can involve third parties as well as communication with service providers. Thereby, the category of data within the AAL system might require compliance to legislative regulations, e.g., if personal (identifiable) information is handled. Within this paper we provide an overview of the potential legal basis and requirements which are often applicable within the context of AAL systems, a.o., the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and its transformations into national legislations, respectively, and describe the conditions for a legitimate data processing in terms of informed user consent. Furthermore we describe a structured approach for AAL system analysis, which is based on BSI standards which supports in identifying the necessary information security measures in accordance to data protection requirements.

Control and personalization approach for an ICT-enabled wearable artifical kidney

We present a new control approach for a wearable artificial kidney device, which is currently under development. In contrast to conventional dialysis, this device makes use of a selective adsorption filter which enables miniaturization and thereby a mobile application also out of clinical settings. To facilitate such an unsupervised treatment the device is equipped with diverse sensing capabilities to adapt its function and so allows to maintain the hydration level as well as different concentrations in the blood. This paper elaborates on the developed combined control approach for these interacting main functions which allow the personalization of the renal support system.