Weijane Lin

Developing a service robot for a children's library: A design‐based research approach

Understanding book‐locating behavior in libraries is important and leads to more effective services that support patrons throughout the book‐locating process. This study adopted a design‐based approach to incorporate robotic assistance in investigating the book‐locating behaviors of child patrons, and developed a service robot for child patrons in library settings. We describe the iterative cycles and process to develop a robot to assist with locating resources in libraries. Stakeholders, including child patrons and librarians, were consulted about their needs, preferences, and performance in locating library resources with robotic assistance. Their needs were analyzed and incorporated into the design of the library robot to provide comprehensive support. The results of the study suggest that the library robot was effective as a mobile and humanoid service agent for providing motivation and knowledgeable guidance to help child patrons in the initially complicated sequence of locating resources.

The Interaction between Human and the Home Service Robot on a Daily Life Cycle

The objective of this paper is to explore the perceived roles of home service robots between different cultures. Human preferences on interaction modes and features of a home service robot were investigated in this ongoing study. Results of the study indicated a complicated issue related to the acceptance and reliability of a social robot. And participants from Taiwan and Japan reflected their preferences on communication matters in function, service, interaction, appearance, likability, and trust issues. Participants from both cultures preferred home service robot to provide information over social services, while Taiwanese participants possessed significant preference on scheduling/planning function. For the future needs of home service robots, Taiwanese participants preferred entertainment service robots, and Japanese participants preferred caretaker robots.

Explore Elder Users’ Reading Behaviors with Online Newspaper

This study aimed to explore elder users’ reading behavior with online newspaper. The average age of twelve elder users is 68.67 years old. They were required to find news in the UDN online newspaper on the touch screen and enlarge or shrink the news pages to the appropriate size. The results showed that elder users didn’t know how to flip the pages to read other news, and they spent more time looking for the zoom in and zoom out icons comparatively. They sometimes misunderstood the meanings of other function icons. Our findings suggest that it could put instructions on the UDN online newspaper interface to show how to use the function icons, helping elder users reading news and enlarge or shrink pages easily. The function of zoom in and zoom out could replace with using two fingers to pinch the pages, just like using touchpad or smart phone. In addition, the function icons position should be consistent, elder user will not be confused when they enter into the detailed news.

The Relationship Between Robot Appearance and Interaction with Child Users: How Distance Matters

This study intends to explore child patrons’ interaction with robots by assessing the interpersonal distance under a specific context of library. In addition to the general exploration on human preference and performance in HRI, it is expected to understand more profoundly the activities and intentions people possessed through the systematical investigation of interaction context and structural measurement of interpersonal distance. Previous studies in human-robot interaction have suggested several factors that are important including robots’ appearance, users’ features and their perceptions of robots. However, studies regarding child users are few, and the understanding of children’s attitudes toward robots remains limited due to insufficient or unempirical supports. Studies regarding the human-robot interaction support that the personal space also appears inevitably that reflects human intentions to interact with the robots. In addition, another critical but less-explored factor that affect human-robot interaction is contextual effect. Contextual cues are what people sense and rely on to proceed with conversations, and cannot be overlooked in the exploration of any interaction.

Mobile Technology Use Among Sales People in Insurance Industry

In recent years, implementing mobile IT management and application are important organizational development strategies for international enterprises. This study aims to explore the insurance salesperson’s usage behavior of mobile technology and their attitude toward using mobile technology in workplace by the case study method. A total of 72 valid questionnaires were collected from local employees of an insurance company in Taiwan. The results showed: (1) Smartphones were more often used to support instant communication tasks and read individual’s learning resources and (2) were viewed as more helpful to support most tasks than tablets besides reading official learning resources. (3) Using mobile devices in workplace were regarded to improve information communication, images and individual’s workflow efficiency. The findings provided information for companies’ managers to design a more productive mobile workplace especially for sales departments that have high mobility employees.

Exploring the Key Factors for Cooperate Implementation of Mobile Technology

This article identifies how IT organizational performance can be improved in a mobile enterprise through specific management activities within The Mobile IT Conversion Process, The Mobile Use Process and The Competitive Process. Based on a comprehensive model of mobile IT business value creation, we provide a modified model including organizational culture and change management concept and recommendations for HR managers on how to manage the transformation into a mobile enterprise.

College Students’ Attitudes and Preferences of Mobile Newspaper Reading: A Comparison Between Printed and Web Page Layout

The purpose of this study is to understand college students’ attitudes and preference of newspaper reading. The two page layout of an app provided by a leading publisher of Chinese newspaper, United Daily News, was selected as the target product of the usability evaluation. The preliminary results showed that college students had no significant preference of either kind of page layout, however reading with the Web page layout demanded more cognitive and physical loading than reading printed one. And students’ performance of reading newspaper with the printed page layout was better.

Examining older users’ performance on and preference for menu designs of digital photo frames

The advancement of image technology not only has escalated the development of digital camera devices but has also changed the way people view and store photos. With the rapid increase in the number of senior citizens and gentrification of society, attention should be paid to the development of more friendly and user-centered designs of digital devices to improve older users’ experience. This study set out to examine older users’ performances and preferences for the menu design of digital photo frames. Twenty-four participants evaluated 11 different paper prototypes of digital photo frames generated from the combination of 3 design elements: size of icon, size of screen and of icons. The results of the statistical analysis showed that exhaustive but not burdensome display, habitually perceivable message structure, and slightly magnified size for both the display and icons were easily accepted and preferred more by the participants. This study concludes with suggestions for future research and design practices for digital photo frame developers.

Services, Appearances and Psychological Factors in Intelligent Home Service Robots

This study conducted a questionnaire survey to investigate the requirements and preferences toward the services and appearance of home service robot. And the psychological factors regarding human robot interaction, including likability, sincerity, trust and privacy were explored and discussed. The preliminary results show that functions of house chores, security and emergency detecting were highly expected and preferred by 267 participants. While the social and caretaking/nursing functions were not preferred as expected. The participants liked medium size robots without too many facial features. Hands and arms that extended human reach were more valued than legs and wheels that substitute human movement. Participants also valued the interface of response and information, such as the body screen on the robot. Psychological factors of likability, sincerity, trust and privacy correlated with each other significantly, and were also related to the preference of robot appearance. This study takes a clear profile of the users’ expectation on future home intelligent service robots.

Tablet Interface Design for Elder Users’ Newspaper Reading

This study recruited 12 elder users to evaluate a mobile newspaper reading app. Content-oriented and operation-oriented tasks were assigned to understand their performance and preferences of mobile newspaper reading. The preliminary results showed that active news searching was the most challenging task for the elder users who had difficulty navigating between categories and hierarchies. It is suggested that real-time push notification with printedalike page layout should be considered in tablet interface design.