Many behavioral interventions have attempted to increase sports performance. These interventions include: goal setting and feedback, behavioral coaching, and acoustical guidance. The use of technological devices in all areas of life continues to steadily increase. Therefore, behavioral interventions should also adapt to meet these changes in technology. One such intervention is in-vivo audio feedback in which participants receive live feedback about their current performance while practicing the skill. In-vivo audio feedback has not yet been rigorously evaluated as a means of improving sports performance. This study used a multiple baseline across participants design to evaluate the effects of in-vivo audio feedback on cycling performance. Results from this study suggest that in-vivo audio feedback was an effective method for improving cycling performance for individuals wishing to increase their average cycling speed.

The purpose of this experiment was to study the effect of audio feedback from an electromyograph on reading speed and comprehension. The subject reduced as much audio feedback, and thus laryngeal tension, as possible, thus permitting more efficient reading. After baseline, the subject received twelve half-hour practice sessions, six ten-minute testing sessions on easy, or light, material and six ten-minute testing sessions on difficult material. A post-test without feedback was given after training and a follow-up test, without feedback, was given. This method of training permits a higher rate of reading speed, while allowing the subject to process complex information and maintain a constant level of recall.

Recent changes to the UK higher education sector, including a rise in numbers and diversification of the student body, resultant larger class sizes and student: staff ratios, greater modularisation of courses with fewer coursework assignments, and students having less face-to-face contact with teaching staff, have presented numerous challenges. The parallel rise in the use of digital technologies in professional practice, despite calls for their adoption in order to personalise learning, can often be seen to exacerbate the perceived dehumanising effect of this massification. Amid a growing discourse highlighting the importance of feedback to student learning, the focus of this study centres on the use of digital audio feedback with first year undergraduates. Eschewing the positivist approaches that are prevalent in learning technology studies, the aims of the research are to understand the student experience of audio feedback in order to inform both professional practice and policy. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with first year Education Studies undergraduates, the research is a phenomenological study of the lived experience of participants through open and honest dialogue in order to arrive at a situated and negotiated understanding. In conducting a deeper and structural investigation that researches with people, the study moves beyond any technologically deterministic view, and sets any understanding in the wider context of students’ own interpretation of the feedback process, and as such shifts the discourse from technological affordance to pedagogical experience. Whilst the use of audio feedback is seen to alleviate the failures of communication often identified in the feedback process, the findings are also seen to be significant in terms of dialogic perception, studentship and engagement, as well as facilitating a shift from statement to discourse and the possibility of establishing more meaningful learning relationships with students.

Soft keyboards have become ubiquitous, especially with the introduction of the iPad. This study aims to determine for experienced touch typists whether there are characteristics of soft QWERTY keyboards that can make them easier to use and why those characteristics provide an advantage. Two characteristics would appear to be of central importance. First, hard keyboards provide home row positioning information that is not as easily provided by soft keyboards. Second, hard keyboards also provide auditory and tactile feedback when a key is depressed, something not generally provided with soft keyboards. In order to test the hypothesis that the absence of home row positioning and key strike feedback information can reduce expert touch typists’ speeds on soft keyboards, expert touch typists were run in two experiments. In Experiment 1, soft and hard keyboards in landscape and portrait mode were evaluated. The hard keyboards had the standard home row positioning and key strike feedback whereas the soft keyboards had neither. If these are important elements in typing speed, then experienced hard keyboard typists should type less quickly when using soft keyboards than when using hard keyboards. Moreover, if reducing the footprint of the keyboard, from landscape to portrait, requires more eye movements, then typists using both hard and soft keyboards should be slower when using the portrait size keyboard than when using the landscape size keyboard. Perhaps not surprisingly, experienced hard keyboard touch typists do less well when entering information on soft keyboards without home row positioning information or auditory feedback. Moreover, both groups appear to type more slowly in keyboards laid out in a portrait format than they do in keyboards laid out in a landscape format. In summary, the results from Experiment 1 suggest that both home row positioning information and auditory key strike feedback should speed performance. In Experiment 2, an attempt was made to determine just how much of a gain can be made in the typing speed of more experienced soft keyboard users if home row positioning information (tactile feedback), auditory feedback, or both are added. Participants were run in four conditions: auditory key strike feedback (with and without) was crossed with tactile home row positioning information (with and without). Participants included expert level hard keypad QWERTY touch typists who have had at least five hours’ typing experience with an iPad. Participants were given four passages to type, all of equal length and all balanced for letter frequency. Participants typed one passage in each of the four conditions. The passage sequence was counterbalanced across participants. Typing speeds for each of the passages was measured and averaged across participants within conditions. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to determine whether there was a main effect of position or feedback. In order to determine why it is that home row positioning and key strike feedback alters performance, eye behaviors, movement times and task completion times are calculated. If home row position information is important, soft keyboards without this information may have a larger number of glances that a typist directs at the keyboard. These glances will help the typist determine either whether a finger is positioned over the correct home key (the launch key) or whether the location of the key to be typed next (the target key) is in the expected position. If key strike feedback is important, soft keyboards without this information should have longer movement times where the typists do not need to glance at the keyboard. This follows since the typist will process less quickly the fact that a finger has landed on a key. Key press and key release times will be included each time a character, number or spacebar is depressed or releases. The finger movement time between any pair of keys i and j will be derived from the key press and key release times. This time will be measured from the moment the finger leaves the launch key i until the moment that the finger arrives at the target key j. Task completion times were defined as the difference between the first key press in a passage and the last key release. Finger movement times, inter-keystroke intervals and task completion times were recorded using a program developed in JAVA 2SE. Eye movements are recorded with aid of an ASL Mobile EYE tracker. Analyses of the finger movement times and task completions times in Experiment 2 indicated that participants were fastest when both position information and auditory feedback were included. When just finger movement times are considered, there was a significant effect of auditory feedback but not of positioning information. This was what was expected given that the speed of finger movement times is arguably largely a function of how quickly a typist perceives that a movement has been completed, something that auditory feedback, but not positioning information provides. When just the task completion times were analyzed, position information had a significant effect. The effect of auditory feedback was only marginally significant. It was expected that both factors would be significant. Perhaps the power was too small. Finally, when the eye movements were analyzed, the total scanning time was shortest when both position information and auditory feedback were available. The effects of both were statistically significant. In summary, on the basis of the results from Experiment 1 it appeared likely that auditory feedback and positioning information accounted in part for the faster typing times of touch typists on hard keyboards as opposed to soft keyboards. In Experiment 2, this hypothesis was evaluated. Finger movement and task completion times were fastest when both auditory feedback and positioning information were present. The effect of auditory feedback appeared to impact only the finger movement times. The effect of both auditory feedback and positioning information appeared to impact the task completion times. However, the effect of auditory feedback on task completion times was only marginal. Finally, it was clear that much of the reduction in task completion times occurred because the time that the touch typists spent scanning the keyboard was smaller when both auditory feedback and positioning information was available. It is recommended in the future that soft keyboards have both sets of feedback available, auditory (through simulated key clicks) and tactile (through home row positioning information). The gains in typing speed with these additions were models (about 10%), considered over the entire population of users the impact could be considerable.

Rehabilitation treatments used for fear avoidance need to be further developed to be more adaptable to the different needs of patients. Fear avoidance is a condition whereby people avoid performing certain movements because they afraid of the pain they will experience or think they will experience from performing the movement. There is a need for exercises in fear-avoidance treatments to be fun, motivating and effective. This is to encourage the patients to continuously do exercises in the treatment. In this master thesis project, the experience of having audio feedback in music whilst performing exercises is investigated. A proof-of-concept prototype using one way of presenting audio feedback was built and used in experiments to investigate the experience. The prototype was built in Java and uses a camera-based motion capture system and markers to track movements. The results show that 100% of the participants thought about movements they had made when feedback was given, 60% claimed the feedback made them feel more aware of how they should move, and 70% said that the music with audio feedback was fun and/or exciting. The conclusion is that the use of music encouraged the participants to perform the exercises, and the feedback made them more conscious of the movements in the exercises and they reflect about the movements they made. / Rehabiliteringsmetoder som används vid behandling av rörelserädsla behöver vidareutvecklas för att behandlingar ska kunna anpassas bättre efter olika behov hos patienter. Rörelserädsla är ett tillstånd där en person undviker att utföra vissa rörelser för att hon är rädda för smärtan som hon upplever eller tror hon kommer uppleva när rörelsen utförs. Det finns behov av att övningar som utförs i behandlingar är roliga, motiverande och effektiva i att behandla rörelserädsla. Detta för att uppmuntra patienter som lider av rörelserädsla att utföra övningar de fått i rehabiliteringsbehandlingen. Detta masterarbete undersöker upplevelsen av att ha auditiv återkoppling i musik medan övningar utförs. En proof-of-concept prototyp som använder en typ av ljudfeedback byggdes och användes i experiment för att undersöka detta. Prototypen är byggd i Java och använder ett system för kamera-baserad rörelseföljning samt markörer för att följa rörelser. Resultaten visar att 100% av deltagarna tänkte på rörelser de utfört då ljudfeedback gavs i musiken, 60% tyckte att de blev mer medvetna om hur de skulle göra rörelserna och 70% sa att musik med ljudfeedback var kul och/eller spännande. Slutsatsen är att användandet av musik uppmuntrade deltagarna till att utföra övningarna samt att återkopplingen gjorde att de blev mer medvetna om rörelserna i övningarna och reflekterade kring rörelser de gjorde.

This paper explores how touch gestures with the help of audio feedback can be used to make touch screens easy to use and possible to interact with eyes-free in an in-vehicle context. Prototypes will be created and usability tested in order to investigate how the gestures and feedback performs in the context. These results will be discussed and analyzed and transformed into a few design principles that should be considered when designing gestures for use in an in-vehicle context.

The area of Human-Robot Interaction deals with problems not only related to robots interacting with humans, but also with problems related to humans interacting and controlling robots. This dissertation focuses on the latter and evaluates multi-sensory (vision, hearing, touch, smell) feedback interfaces as a means to improve robot-operator cognition and performance. A set of four empirical studies using both simulated and real robotic systems evaluated a set of multi-sensory feedback interfaces with various levels of complexity. The task scenario for the robot in these studies involved the search for victims in a debris-filled environment after a fictitious catastrophic event (e.g., earthquake) took place. The results show that, if well-designed, multi-sensory feedback interfaces can indeed improve the robot operator data perception and performance. Improvements in operator performance were detected for navigation and search tasks despite minor increases in workload. In fact, some of the multi-sensory interfaces evaluated even led to a reduction in workload. The results also point out that redundant feedback is not always beneficial to the operator. While introducing the concept of operator omni-directional perception, that is, the operator’s capability of perceiving data or events coming from all senses and in all directions, this work explains that feedback redundancy is only beneficial when it enhances the operator omni-directional perception of data relevant to the task at hand. Last, the comprehensive methodology employed and refined over the course of the four studies is suggested as a starting point for the design of future HRI user studies. In summary, this work sheds some light on the benefits and challenges multi-sensory feedback interfaces bring, specifically on teleoperated robotics. It adds to our current understanding of these kinds of interfaces and provides a few insights to assist the continuation of research in the area.

High school writing teacher self-efficacy has suffered because the workload and emotional energy of grading papers is arduous, and despite their efforts to provide formative written feedback, many teachers believe students ignore or misunderstand it. Although audio feedback holds promise for improving the clarity of instructor feedback and the self-efficacy of writing instructors in higher education, its usefulness for improving high school teacher self-efficacy has remained unexplored. This multiple case study investigated how high school teachers believed Kaizena, a digital audio feedback technology, influenced their writing instruction and self-efficacy. Participants, who were drawn from the global Kaizena user base, included a user group of 3 United States teachers and a user group of 3 international teachers to determine how both groups used Kaizena and whether differences in use occurred in either environment. Data sources included individual teacher interviews, participant journals, and artifacts such as teacher-created writing assignments and rubrics. Data analysis included both single case and cross case analyses. Single case analysis included coding and categorizing of interview and participant journal data and content analysis of artifacts. Cross case analysis included identifying emerging themes and discrepant data. Results indicated that all 6 teachers both believed they gave more high quality, personalized feedback to students in less time with the audio feature of Kaizena than with written feedback and did, in fact, provide documents confirming this higher quality. As a result, using Kaizena positively influenced their self-efficacy. This study contributes to positive social change by providing insights into a feedback tool that could improve high school writing instruction.