20160410 Article Summary

VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that GathersOpinions from the Public at Events

This paper gives an introduction to an interactive machine called VoxBox. The idea of VoxBox has come from the fact that people are very reluctant to do surveys. In order to increase the participation of people, they have made this tangible machine that gathers public opinions. VoxBox is consisted of various switches that show different questionnaires. People can view their progress status, and they are given incentives as well. When they complete the given survey they can also review the result as well as the research findings. 

Touchless Interaction in Surgery

The issue lies in maintaining sterility while having hands-on control over the medical image in the surgical setting. So the best solution could be developing touch-less interactive device that allows surgeons to have directly manipulate and navigate the images. And recent innovation of "Kinect" has made it easier to develop such device. One example is the Sunnybrook system from a hospital in Toronto. They use Kinect sensors  to review MRI and CT images in the operating theatre. However, the number of gestures they can use is limited. Though it sounds like a constraint to this design, limited gesture actually poses more positive sense. That is, it may increase the learnability of the system. It may also reduce "gesture bleed" where the system misinterprets a set of kinetic information. Nevertheless, beyond its positive aspect of simplicity, Sunnybrook system also raises problems when it needs more complicated manipulation. So the recent researches have suggested using multi-hand gesture combinations and even voice recognition system. There are other concerns as the socio-technological concerns "including collaboration and control, engagement and disengagement, and image inspection with one hand, two hands, and hands-free." Overall, the paper gives an overview of the feasibility of the touch-less interaction in surgery and its possible challenges as well.  

20160403 Article Summary

The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

The article starts the discussion on the Haptic Creature Project with a brief mention on the lack of attention given to the interaction design concerning touch in comparison with that concerning vision and audition. Then it states that it will focus on mainly four research areas regarding the given project. That includes socially interactive robotics, affect, touch and human-animal interaction.
In its discussion on socially interactive robotics the article says that affect display has been used for social interaction. Yet, this too has been focused primarily on the vision and audition. So their method for affect display is to utilise tactile information. Thus they came up with the idea of "affective touch." However, they found that this has made users feel discomfort in various ways. Thus, they have decided to focus on human-animal interaction. Therefore, the Haptic Creature.
This Haptic Creature has three major design consideration. First is using the modality of touch. Second is having organic design. That is to make it feel real when interacting with it. And the last is zoomorphism. Though it borrows different traits from animals, it does not constrain itself to a single species. 
The main goal of creating this Haptic Creature was to discover "the use of affect touch in socially interactive robotics." And the main focus was on "display, recognition and influence of this form of touch."

"Moon Phrases": A Social Media Facilitated Tool for Emotional Reflection and Wellness

The article introduces its topic by stressing the importance of emotional wellbeing. And it gives examples of the attempts people make to examine and ensure their psychological conditions. It then argues that this examining process should be taken more often and more regularly. It also explains that it should utilise the data which tell the most out of a person's emotional state. Thus it draws a very defined solution that they should use social networking system for checking and ensuring emotional condition for users. The design concept that they came up with is developing this system called "Moon Phrases." This system collects data from Twitter. Through analysing the social interaction displayed in the user's social media behaviour, Moon Phrases helps users reflect on their emotional state and bring about suggestions for their emotional wellness. Basically, Moon Phrases becomes a "behavioural fingerprint" of users.