Wilko Heuten

Tactile wayfinder: a non-visual support system for wayfinding

Digital maps and route descriptions on a PDA have become very popular for navigation, not the least with the advent of the iPhone and its Google Maps application. A visual support for wayfinding, however, is not reasonable or even possible all the time. A pedestrian must pay attention to traffic on the street, a hiker should concentrate on the narrow trail, and a blind person relies on other modalities to find her way. To overcome these limitations, we developed a non-visual support for wayfinding that guides and keeps a mobile user en route by a tactile display. We designed a belt with vibrators that indicates directions and deviations from the path in an accurate and unobtrusive way. Our first user evaluation showed that on an open field without any landmarks the participants stayed well to given test routes and that wayfinding support is possible with our Tactile Wayfinder.

Sensor-Based Identification of Opportune Moments for Triggering Notifications

Todays smartphones will issue a notification immediately after an event occurs, repeating unanswered notifications in fixed time intervals. The disadvantage of this issue-and-repeat strategy is that notifications can appear in inconvenient situations and thus are perceived as annoying and interrupting. The authors study the mobile context as inferred through a phones sensors for both answered and ignored notifications. They conducted a large-scale, longitudinal study via the Google Play store and observed 6,581 notifications from 79 different users over 76 days. Their derived model can predict opportune moments to issue notifications with approximately 77 percent accuracy. Their findings could lead to intelligent strategies to issue unobtrusive notifications on todays smartphones at no extra cost. This article is part of a special issue on managing attention.

Interactive 3D sonification for the exploration of city maps

Blind or visually impaired people usually do not leave their homes without any assistance, in order to visit unknown cities or places. One reason for this dilemma is, that it is hardly possible for them to gain a non-visual overview about the new place, its landmarks and geographic entities already at home. Sighted people can use a printed or digital map to perform this task. Existing haptic and acoustic approaches today do not provide an economic way to mediate the understanding of a map and relations between objects like distance, direction, and object size. We are providing an interactive three-dimensional sonification interface to explore city maps. A blind person can build a mental model of an areas structure by virtually exploring an auditory map at home. Geographic objects and landmarks are presented by sound areas, which are placed within a sound room. Each type of object is associated with a different sound and can therefore be identified. By investigating the auditory map, the user perceives an idea of the various objects, their directions and relative distances. First user tests show, that users are able to reproduce a sonified city map, which comes close to the original visual city map. With our approach exploring a map with non-speech sound areas provide a new user interface metaphor that offers its potential not only for blind and visually impaired persons but also to applications for sighted persons.

PocketNavigator: studying tactile navigation systems in-situ

In this paper, we report about a large-scale in-situ study of tactile feedback for pedestrian navigation systems. Recent advances in smartphone technology have enabled a number of interaction techniques for smartphone that use tactile feedback to deliver navigation information. The aim is to enable eyes-free usage and avoid distracting the user from the environment. Field studies where participants had to fulfill given navigation tasks, have found these techniques to be efficient and beneficial in terms of distraction. But it is not yet clear whether these findings will replicate in in-situ usage. We, therefore, developed a Google Maps-like navigation application that incorporates interaction techniques proposed in previous work. The application was published for free on the Android Market and so people were able to use it as a navigation system in their everyday life. The data collected through anonymous monitoring suggests that tactile feedback is successfully adopted in one third of all trips and has positive effects on the users level of distraction.

The Lower Saxony research network design of environments for ageing: towards interdisciplinary research on information and communication technologies in ageing societies

Worldwide, ageing societies are bringing challenges for independent living and healthcare. Health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare and sensor-enhanced health information systems offer new opportunities for care. In order to identify, implement and assess such new information and communication technologies (ICT) the ‘Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing’ (GAL) has been launched in 2008 as interdisciplinary research project. In this publication, we inform about the goals and structure of GAL, including first outcomes, as well as to discuss the potentials and possible barriers of such highly interdisciplinary research projects in the field of health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare. Although GALs high interdisciplinarity at the beginning slowed down the speed of research progress, we can now work on problems, which can hardly be solved by one or few disciplines alone. Interdisciplinary research projects on ICT in ageing societies are needed and recommended.

Development of a multimodal reminder system for older persons in their residential home

To live a self-determined life at home is uncontroversally a desire of many ageing people. Decreases in motor and mental capabilities, however, frequently make daily activities more difficult for them. Older people often forget tasks and appointments, and decreased mobility can limit their social interaction. In this study, we investigate the way in which technological support can assist in the organisation, structuring and remembering of daily activities. Aiming at assistance seamlessly integrated into a persons household, we carried out an initial user study to investigate the technology and the kind of desired assistance of such a personal household assistant system should offer. We designed a reminder system for appointments and activities that uses different sounds, light colours or vibration patterns to represent different categories of calendar events such as upcoming tasks and appointments. The evaluation results show a preference for solely acoustic presentations or an acoustic presentation in combination with visual and tactile output. In our future work, we will refine the ambient and interactive presentation and implement and evaluate this technology in residential homes.

Supporting lane change decisions with ambient light

The number of assistance systems in cars has been increasing in recent years. While these systems are targeted at supporting the individual driver and his or her safety, they may though compete for the drivers attention, and may demand too much of the drivers cognitive resources. Based on the established multiple resource theory in recent years, the use of different multimodal displays has been investigated that give the driver attention while not overloading sensory channels. In our work, we are looking into peripheral light displays in means to present safety relevant information. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment in which a peripheral light display was used to show the distance to a closing vehicle. The display is an LED stripe, seamlessly integrated into the side door and the dashboard of the car. Two different light patterns were tested in an overtaking scenario in a driving simulator. One pattern encodes the expected time to collision to the left rear car by moving a light source towards the front left corner. The other pattern additionally adapts its brightness to a simplified model of the drivers certainty to get his or her attention in uncertain situations. In contrast to previous works, we did not focus on a warning system but on a decision aid system. We found that using the adaptive pattern led to faster decisions and therefore to a smaller probability of violating safety distances. We believe that this pattern is a good basis for patterns which are fine-tuned to individual drivers as well as better driver models.

Assisting Drivers with Ambient Take-Over Requests in Highly Automated Driving

Take-over situations in highly automated driving occur when drivers have to take over vehicle control due to automation shortcomings. Due to high visual processing demand of the driving task and time limitation of a take-over maneuver, appropriate user interface designs for take-over requests (TOR) are needed. In this paper, we propose applying ambient TORs, which address the peripheral vision of a driver. Conducting an experiment in a driving simulator, we tested a) ambient displays as TORs, b) whether contextual information could be conveyed through ambient TORs, and c) if the presentation pattern (static, moving) of the contextual TORs has an effect on take-over behavior. Results showed that conveying contextual information through ambient displays led to shorter reaction times and longer times to collision without increasing the workload. The presentation pattern however, did not have an effect on take-over performance.

PocketMenu: non-visual menus for touch screen devices

We present PocketMenu, a menu optimized for non-visual, in-pocket interaction with menus on handheld devices with touch screens. By laying out menu items along the border of the touch screen its tactile features guide the interaction. Additional vibro-tactile feedback and speech allows identifying the individual menu items non-visually. In an experiment, we compared PocketMenu with iPhones VoiceOver. Participants had to control an MP3 player while walking down a road with the device in the pocket. The results provide evidence that in the above context the PocketMenu outperforms VoiceOver in terms of completion time, selection errors, usability. Hence, it enables usage of touch screen apps in mobile contexts (e.g. walking, hiking, or skiing) and limited interaction spaces (e.g. device resting in a pocket).

WaterJewel: design and evaluation of a bracelet to promote a better drinking behaviour

A recent study revealed that every fourth German adult drinks less than 1.5 litres a day. Insufficient fluid intake can cause headache, lack of energy and lightheadedness. Signals can be used to be reminded of drinking. However, these are often missed or even deactivated because they are too obvious. On the basis of a participatory design study, we designed the fashionable light bracelet WaterJewel as an awareness display and an unobtrusive reminder for a regular fluid intake. In a four-week 12-participant study, we explored the use of WaterJewel in daily life and how it compared to a prevalent mobile drinking reminder application. Our results show that with WaterJewel participants drank more in total, more often accomplished the daily drinking goal of 2 litres, drank more regularly, and drank more often prior to the reminder event than with the mobile application. Participants rated WaterJewel as very usable and appreciated its practical and discreet design.