In the world today, the portion of aging people grows continuously. Due to successfulof healthcare services, people are living longer and the number of newborn isdecreasing. This can imply that the population of young and working people isdecreasing in many countries. This leads to the mean value incrementing of the meanworld population’s age value in the whole world. It has become more and moreimportant to consideration human factors of elderly people in many businesses.Software companies have to consider design of software concerning of usability forageing people. Currently, most of the software is designed to support younger users.To support elderly users, we have to consider more on age-related differences. Thisthesis presents a literature survey, and related theories used in designing graphic userinterface for ageing people. Besides, criteria for designing software for older users arealso discussed and suggested as guidelines for future studies and development. Thepurpose is to improve older users’ potential in using information technologies, and topotentially allow older users to gain more benefit from using of computer software.A case study for software design for elderly users was implemented to verifysuggested guideline and gain deeper design understanding. The elderly volunteerswere involved in design evaluation process. The results from case study have showneffectiveness of the design guideline approach.

This paper is part of the practical bachelor’s thesis that is reporting the details of the process of creating a new website called Access: Hearing world. The website is aimed to provide information about new smartphone applications for the targeted group of users. These users consist of sign language speaking deaf and hearing impaired individuals. This paper illustrates the pilot study that gave the website its foundation and the information the website needed to take shape. Also included in the paper is that choices that were made during the process of the creation of the website and what methods were used along the way. The subliminal theory that were used during the entire process was human-computer interaction especially usability and user-friendliness. This was measured and analyzed with two analyzing methods, these were PACT and SWOT. / Denna rapport handlar om skapandeprocessen bakom en ny samlingssida för smartphoneapplikationer som är riktad till döva och hörselskadade. Denna webbsida ska kunna ge ny information om nya smartphoneapplikationer oavsett vilken plattform användarna nyttjar. Denna rapport tar upp förstudien som utfördes innan webbsidan skapades för att kartlägga behoven fanns. Den tar även upp själva utförandet av webbsidan och vilka val som gjordes under den processen. Resultatet som utgår från det test som gjordes kommer också att återges genom en PACT-analys. Därefter kommer webbsidan att diskuteras och utvärderas genom en SWOT-analys för att belysa det som är styrkan, svagheten, möjligheten och hoten med Access: Hearing world som webbsidan heter.

Desktop-based Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) interfaces have changed very little in the last 30 years, and are still limited by a lack of powerful and expressive input devices and interactions. In order to make desktop interactions more expressive and controllable, expressive input mechanisms like pressure input must be made available to desktop users. One way to provide pressure input to these users is through a pressure-augmented computer mouse; however, before pressure-augmented mice can be developed, design information must be provided to mouse developers. The problem we address in this thesis is that there is a lack of ergonomics and performance information for the design of pressure-augmented mice. Our solution was to provide empirical performance and ergonomics information for pressure-augmented mice by performing five experiments. With the results of our experiments we were able to identify the optimal design parameters for pressure-augmented mice and provide a set of recommendations for future pressure-augmented mouse designs.

The practice of health self-management offers behavioral and problem-solving strategies that can effectively promote responsibility for one's own wellbeing, improve one's health outcomes, and decrease the cost of health services. Personal informatics applications support health self-management by allowing their users to easily track personal health information, and to review the changes and patterns in this information. Over the course of the past several years, I have pursued a research agenda centered on understanding how personal health informatics applications can further support the strategies of health self-management--specifically those relating to goal-management and behavior change. I began by developing a flexible personal informatics tool, called Salud!, that I could use to observe real-world goal management and behavior change strategies, as well as use to evaluate new interfaces designed to assist in goal management. Unlike existing personal informatics tools, Salud! allows users to self-define the information that they will track, which allows tracking of highly personal and meaningful data that may not be possible to track given other tools. It also enables users to share their account data with facilitators (e.g. fitness grainers, nutritionists, etc.) who can provide input and feedback. Salud! was built on top of an infrastructure consisting of a stack of modular services that make it easier for others to develop and/or evaluate a variety of personal informatics applications. Several research teams used this infrastructure to develop and deploy a variety of custom projects. Informal analysis of their efforts showed an unmet need for data storage and visualization services for home- and health-based sensor data. In order to design a goal management support tool for Salud!, I first, I conducted a meta-analysis of relevant research literature to cull a set of proven goal management strategies. The key outcome of this work was an operationalization of Action Plans--goal management strategies that are effective at supporting behavior change. I then deployed Salud! in two fitness-related contexts to observe and understand the breadth of health-related behavior change and goal management practices. Findings from these deployments showed that personal informatics tools are most helpful to individuals who are able to articulate short-term, actionable goals, and who are able to integrate self-tracking into their daily activities. The literature meta-analysis and the two Salud! deployments provided formative requirements for a goal management interaction that would both incorporate effective goal management strategies and support the breadth of real-world goals. I developed a model of the goal management process as the framework for such an interaction. This model enables goals to be represented, evaluated, and visualized, based on a wide range of user objectives and data collection strategies. Using this model, I was able to develop a set of interactions that allow users of Salud! to manage their personal goals within the application. The generalized goal management model shows the inherent difficulty in supporting open-ended, highly personalized goal management. To function generically, Salud! requires facilitator input to correctly process goals and meaningfully classify their attributes. However, for specific goals represented by specific data collection strategies, it is possible to fully- or semi-automate the goal management process. I ran a large-scale evaluation of Salud! with the goal management interaction to evaluate the effectiveness of a fully-automated goal management interaction. The evaluation consisted of a common health self-management intervention: a simple fitness program to increase participants' daily step count. The results of this evaluation suggest that the goal management interaction may improve the rate of goal realization among users who are initially less active and less confident in their ability to succeed. Additionally, this evaluation showed that, while it can significantly increase participants' step count, a fully automated fitness program is not as effective as traditional, instructor-led fitness programs. However, it is much easier to administer and much less resource intensive, showing that it can be utilized to rapidly evaluate concrete goal management strategies.

<p>In today’s computerized society more and more companies choose to utilize new applications that can ease the way of handling the information. For many of us is imperative that the process as efficient as possible if one takes in consideration the size of savings that this new application can bring.</p><p>The developer of the evaluated system is SYSteam AB Huskvarna and they are the ones that gave us this assignment. The application that we evaluate is SCM (Secure Connection Manager). It is already used today by big companies such as Telia and Ericsson to search for errors in telephone servers placed all over the country. The reason why this application is used is to increase the efficiency of error searching without traveling to the location of the servers.</p><p>The issues that the report focuses on are the system’s usability and efficiency for the user. Since the application is already in use we must be aware that just small adjustments are going to be made afterward.</p><p>In order to evaluate an already developed system we interviewed users that are familiar with the application and were willing to be answering our questions.Those users’ opinions have been crucial to us and our evaluation.</p><p>The result is a gathering of tables and data which methodically describes every subject in our questionnaire. These subjects are the following: navigation, design, content and efficiency.  Our analyses results show a positive reaction to almost all the subjects treated in the questionnaires. Several opinions and comments during the interviews confirm this statement. </p><p>The theoretical methods used to form this opinion are the heuristics rules that we followed, but also some of the most useful principles from theory books about interaction design.</p><p>The conclusion is, as the results of our evaluation show, that the system that we evaluated (SCM) is both efficient and user-friendly.</p><p>We would like to thank all the users, which took part in our study, as well as our supervisors both at university and at SYSteam AB Huskvarna. Thank you!</p> / <p>Med dagens mer systematiserade tillvaro är det fler som väljer att införa applikationer i företag som kan underlätta informationshanteringen. För många är det viktigt att detta sker så effektivt som möjligt med tanke på de besparingar som det kan medföra.</p><p>De som har utvecklat den studerade applikationen och som också är våra uppdragsgivare är SYSteam AB i Huskvarna. Denna applikation som vi utvärderar heter Secure Connection Manager (SCM). Den används idag av bland annat företag som Telia och Ericsson för att göra felsökningar på telefonväxlar som finns utplacerade i landet. Anledningen till att denna applikation används är att det blir mer effektivt att med hjälp av fjärrstyrning kunna göra felsökningar utan att behöva åka till telestationerna som de tidigare har gjort.</p><p>Frågeställningarna som arbetet fokuserar på är om systemet är användarvänligt och effektivt för användaren. Eftersom systemet redan är i drift måste man ha i åtanke att det endast kan ske marginella justeringar i efterhand.</p><p>För att kunna evaluera ett färdigt system har vi haft hjälp av ett antal frekventa användare som villigt har ställt upp på att svara på frågor och intervjuer. Dessa testpersoner har varit av yttersta vikt för oss och för vår evaluering.</p><p>Resultatet blev en samling tabeller och data som metodiskt beskriver varje element var för sig. De element som frågeguiden är indelad i är navigation, design, innehåll och effektivitet. Analysen gav positiva resultat till de frågeställningar vi hade ställt, förutom elementet innehåll. Flera av de synpunkter och kommentarer som samlades in under intervjuerna förstärkte detta resultat.</p><p>De teoretiska metoder som hjälpte oss att bedöma detta var några av de heuristiska regler som finns att följa, men även några av de principer som finns att läsa om i böcker om interaktionsdesign.</p><p>Slutsatsen blev att av de resultat vi fick av vår utvärdering konstaterade vi att SCM är både effektivt och användarvänligt.</p><p>Vi vill gärna rikta ett tack till alla testpersoner som ställde upp och till våra handledare både på högskolan och på SYSteam AB i Huskvarna. Tack!</p>

<p>IMIS (Integrated Mobile Information System for Diabetic Healthcare) aims at providing healthcare on both stationary and mobile platform, which is based on Engström’s triangle model in Activity Theory. It focuses on the need for communication and information accessibility between care-providers and their shared patients. Based on the identified need in the target area, IMIS has decided to construct a network-based communication system to support communication and accessibility to patients’ journal. Since the system integrates various roles from the heath care organization, it is a challenge to provide a useful software program to the group members. In order to facilitate the application and enhance the Human-Computer interaction of the system, agent technology is applied to increase the flexibility factor so that the system could be self-adapted to a wider range group of users.</p><p>Besides, this thesis also introduces the approach of using social-psychology — Activity theory in HCI, and discuss the integration of these different disciplines. The Multi-agents System is applied with Gaia methodology from micro perspectives. From the macro perspective Activity theory constructs the coordination mechanism of the different agents. A prototype is applied based on the different model of our research.</p>

As wearable computers become more ubiquitous in society and work environments, there are concerns that their use could be negatively impactful in some settings. Previous research indicates that mobile phone and wearable computer use can impair walking and driving performance, but as these technologies are adopted into hazardous work environments it is less clear what the impact will be. The current research investigated the effects that head mounted display use has on high angle climbing, a task representative of the extreme physical demands of some hazardous occupations (such as firefighting or search and rescue work). We explored the effect that introducing a secondary word reading and later recall task has on both climbing performance (holds per meter climbed and distance covered), and word reading and recall (dual-task effects). We found a decrease in both climbing performance and word recall under dual task conditions. Further, we examined participant climbing motion around word presentation and non-word presentation times during the climbing traverse. We found that participants slowed around word presentations, relative to periods without word presentation. Finally, we compared our results to those found in previous research using similar dual-tasking paradigms. These comparisons indicated that physical tasks may be more detrimental to word recall than seated tasks, and that visual stimuli might hinder climbing performance more than audible stimuli. This research has important theoretical implications for the dual-tasking paradigm, as well at important practical implications for emergency response operations and other hazardous working environments.

With its mixing of real and virtual, Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that has attracted lots of attention from the science community and is seen as a perfect way to visualize context-related information. Computer generated graphics is presented to the user overlaid and registered with the real world and hence augmenting it. Promising intelligence amplification and higher productivity, AR has been intensively researched over several decades but has yet to reach a broad audience. This thesis presents efforts in bringing Augmented Reality to mobile phones and thus to the general public. Implementing technologies on limited devices, such as mobile phones, poses a number of challenges that differ from traditional research directions. These include: limited computational resources with little or no possibility to upgrade or add hardware, limited input and output capabilities for interactive 3D graphics. The research presented in this thesis addresses these challenges and makes contributions in the following areas: Mobile Phone Computer Vision-Based Tracking The first contribution of thesis has been to migrate computer vision algorithms for tracking the mobile phone camera in a real world reference frame - a key enabling technology for AR. To tackle performance issues, low-level optimized code, using fixed-point algorithms, has been developed. Mobile Phone 3D Interaction Techniques Another contribution of this thesis has been to research interaction techniques for manipulating virtual content. This is in part realized by exploiting camera tracking for position-controlled interaction where motion of the device is used as input. Gesture input, made possible by a separate front camera, is another approach that is investigated. The obtained results are not unique to AR and could also be applicable to general mobile 3D graphics. Novel Single User AR Applications With short range communication technologies, mobile phones can exchange data not only with other phones but also with an intelligent environment. Data can be obtained for tracking or visualization; displays can be used to render graphics with the tracked mobile phone acting as an interaction device. Work is presented where a mobile phone harvests a sensor-network to use AR to visualize live data in context. Novel Collaboration AR Applications One of the most promising areas for mobile phone based AR is enhancing face-to-face computer supported cooperative work. This is because the AR display permits non-verbal cues to be used to a larger extent. In this thesis, face-to-face collaboration has been researched to examine whether AR increases awareness of collaboration partners even on small devices such as mobile phones. User feedback indicates that this is the case, confirming the hypothesis that mobile phones are increasingly able to deliver an AR experience to a large audience. / On the day of the defence date the status on articles III and VIII was: Accepted.

This PhD work was partially supported by the European LIREC project (Living with robots and interactive companions) a collaboration of 10 EU partners that aims to develop a new generation of interactive and emotionally intelligent companions able of establishing and maintaining long-term relationships with humans. The project takes a multi-disciplinary approach towards investigating methods to allow robotic companions to perceive, remember and react to people in order to enhance the companion’s awareness of sociability in domestic environments. (e.g. remind a user and provide useful information, carry heavy objects etc.). One of the project's scenarios concerns remote human-human communication enhancement utilising autonomous robots as social mediators which is the focus of this PhD thesis. This scenario involves a remote communication situation between two distant users who wish to utilise their robot companions in order to enhance their communication and interaction experience with each other over the internet. The scenario derived from the need of communication between people who are separated from their relatives and friends due to work commitments or other personal obligations. Even for people that live close by, communication mediated by modern technologies has become widespread. However, even with the use of video communication, they are still missing an important medium of interaction that has received much less attention over the past years, which is touch. The purpose of this thesis was to develop autonomous robots as social mediators in a remote human-human communication scenario in order to allow the users to use touch and other modalities on the robots. This thesis addressed the following research questions: Can an autonomous robot be a social mediator in human-human remote communication? How does an autonomous robotic mediator compare to a conventional computer interface in facilitating users’ remote communication? Which methodology should be used for qualitative and quantitative measurements for local user-robot and user-user social remote interactions? In order to answer these questions, three different communications platforms were developed during this research and each one addressed a number of research questions. The first platform (AIBOcom) allowed two distant users to collaborate in a virtual environment by utilising their autonomous robotic companions during their communication. Two pet-like robots, which interact individually with two remotely communicating users, allowed the users to play an interactive game cooperatively. The study tested two experimental conditions, characterised by two different modes of synchronisation between the robots that were located locally with each user. In one mode the robots incrementally affected each other’s behaviour, while in the other mode, the robots mirrored each other’s behaviour. This study aimed to identify users’ preferences for robot mediated human-human interactions in these two modes, as well as investigating users’ overall acceptance of such communication media. Findings indicated that users preferred the mirroring mode and that in this pilot study robot assisted remote communication was considered desirable and acceptable to the users. The second platform (AiBone) explored the effects of an autonomous robot on human-human remote communication and studied participants' preferences in comparison with a communication system not involving robots. We developed a platform for remote human-human communication in the context of a collaborative computer game. The exploratory study involved twenty pairs of participants who communicated using video conference software. Participants expressed more social cues and sharing of their game experiences with each other when using the robot. However, analysis of the interactions of the participants with each other and with the robot show that it is difficult for participants to familiarise themselves quickly with the robot while they can perform the same task more efficiently with conventional devices. Finally, our third platform (AIBOStory) was based on a remote interactive story telling software that allowed users to create and share common stories through an integrated, autonomous robot companion acting as a social mediator between two people. The behaviour of the robot was inspired by dog behaviour and used a simple computational memory model. An initial pilot study evaluated the proposed system's use and acceptance by the users. Five pairs of participants were exposed to the system, with the robot acting as a social mediator, and the results suggested an overall positive acceptance response. The main study involved long-term interactions of 20 participants in order to compare their preferences between two modes: using the game enhanced with an autonomous robot and a non-robot mode. The data was analysed using quantitative and qualitative techniques to measure user preference and Human-Robot Interaction. The statistical analysis suggests user preferences towards the robot mode. Furthermore, results indicate that users utilised the memory feature, which was an integral part of the robot’s control architecture, increasingly more as the sessions progressed. Results derived from the three main studies supported our argument that domestic robots could be used as social mediators in remote human-human communications and offered an enhanced experience during their interactions with both robots and each other. Additionally, it was found that the presence of intelligent robots in the communication can increase the number of exhibited social cues between the users and are more preferable compared to conventional interactive devices such as computer keyboard and mouse.

In my teaching and software development practice, I realized that most applications with human-computer interaction do not respond to users’ emotional needs. The dualism of reason and emotion as two fairly opposite entities that dominated Western philosophy was also reflected in software design. Computing was originally intended to provide applications for military and industrial activities and was primarily associated with cognition and rationality. Today, more and more computer applications interact with users in very complex and sophisticated ways. In human-computer interaction, attention is given to issues of usability and user modeling, but techniques to emotionally engage users or respond to their emotional needs have not been fully developed, even as specialists like Klein, Norman and Picard argued that machines that recognize and express emotions respond better and more appropriately to user interaction (Picard, 1997; Picard & Klein, 2002; Norman, 2004). This study investigated emotion from designers’ perspectives and tentatively concludes that there is little awareness and involvement in emotional design in the IT community. By contrast, participants in this study (36 IT specialists from various fields) strongly supported the idea of emotional design and confirmed the need for methodologies and theoretical models to research emotional design. Based on a review of theory, surveys and interviews, I identified a set of themes for heuristics of emotional design and recommended future research directions. Attention was given to consequences; participants in this study raised issues of manipulation, ethical responsibilities of designers, and the need for regulations, and recommended that emotional design should carry standard ethical guidelines for games and any other applications. The research design utilized a mixed QUAN-qual methodological model proposed by Creswell (2003) and Gay, Mills, and Airasian (2006), which was modified to equally emphasize both quantitative and qualitative stages. An instrument in the form of a questionnaire was designed, tested and piloted in this study and will be improved and used in future research.