Denna studie har som syfte att ta fram ett designförslag på ett ögonrörelsestyrt infotainment-system samt utvärdera detta. Fokusen ligger på den funktionella design och dess för- och nackdelar. Studien tar upp tre olika designförslag varav ett valdes att göra en prototyp av. Prototypen skapades med hjälp av HTML5, Javascript och Python. Detta kopplades sedan samman med ett ögonrörelsesystem tillhörande Smart Eye AB. Prototypen användartestades och utvärderades med hjälp av en bilsimulator. Utvärderingen gjordes med hjälp av en enkät samt SUS-formulär. Enkäten resulterade i en kvalitativ utvärdering av prototypen medan SUS-värdet (69,88) pekar på att förbättringar bör göras för att öka den upplevda användbarheten. Studien innehåller även framtida förbättringsförslag för vidare utveckling.

Advertising has been a common element in the web experience for years. Advertisers can use many strategies to reach their intended consumer, and can appeal to for example rationality, emotion or ethics. Using theories on the composition of ads, their context and the web user, this paper presents a study testing two types of advertising appeals – an ethical appeal and a financial appeal. The experiment tested for the effect of these appeals on outcome measures of attitude, trust and credibility, and attributions. The results show some differences between the attitudes toward the ad between the conditions, where the financial appeal produced more positive attitudes. The results also suggest a relationship between the credibility and trust measures, and the overall positive attitude toward the brand. The results are discussed in terms of credibility and perceived veracity of claims associated with the appeal.

In order to support a standardized and uniform documentation one can use different types of aids such as influencing attitudes, provide training and customize tools for documentation. This study looks at documentation in elderly care from the personnel’s perspective and seeks to better understand their view of and experience with documentation in relation to the aids described above. By holding semi-structured interviews with 12 people working with elderly care qualitative data were obtained and later analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). A range of different thoughts and attitudes towards documentation were found, some that could facilitate documentation, but also some that could hinder a good documentation practice. Also different insecurities were found such as lack of experience/knowledge about documentation, technology or language. Colleagues are a great resource for helping and educating personnel but it might be hard for them to explain some things they do if they aren’t aware of how they do it. It might also take time to readjust to new procedures such as a common information structure, especially for the experienced workers that have formed routines for how to do things. Contextual factors are important and the documentation systems have the ability to make or break the users.

Projektet startade på uppdrag av eHälsoinstitutet i Kalmar. Syftet var att ta fram ett webbaserat utbildningsgränssnitt för äldre läkemedelsanvändare. Arbetets omfattning har inneburit att ta designa ett gränssnitt som skall uppfylla vissa krav för användbarhet inom olika kriterier. Problemets utgångspunkt har varit att försöka undersöka vilka faktorer som kan stimulera och vara viktiga för användbarhet i gränssnitt emot en äldre målgrupp med åldersrelaterade svårigheter. För att belysa problemet har olika metoder åtagits såsom Normans designprinciper, gestaltlagar, observationer och intervjuer. Med hjälp av dessa har intressant data kunnat tas fram som senare analyserat, utvärderats och visualiserats. Resultaten har genererat intressanta företeelser om användbarhet utifrån flera perspektiv. En del har varit konkreta, medan andra mer abstrakta. Vad som framkommit av betydelse är att designprinciper får anses vara en viktig källa för god användbarhetsdesign och positiva upplevelser för de äldre.

Abstract Context-awareness, a state where the device is aware of the situation in which it is used, is a technology which has gained an increasing amount of attention in recent years. A context-aware device can infer the use condition, and adapt its behavior according to the circumstances. Mobile handheld devices, which have been highly adopted by large user groups, especially in the form of mobile phones, constitute an interesting platform for context-awareness. They are used in different kinds of situations, where the preferences of users may vary, and where different features are prioritized. While the increasing complexity and growing number of features set challenges to intuitive and easy use of devices, context-awareness may offer solutions to more efficient use of mobile applications and services. This thesis investigates the interaction issues with context-aware mobile devices. The research has been exploratory including several separate case studies, where interaction and usability matters have been charted. These studies consider topics such as location-awareness, user-defined settings of context-aware applications, and information sharing and privacy. In addition to these case studies, the author has sough to draw a bigger picture on interaction and usability issues with context-aware mobile devices, and incorporated the findings to a more general framework. Through presenting the case studies it is concluded that context-awareness can improve the usability of mobile devices, but careful design in the application development phase must be emphasized. The usability risks identified through case studies relate to numerous themes, such as diminished user control, increased number of interruptions, information overflow, users' subjective understanding of context attributes and privacy threat. As context-aware technology employs greater risks, e.g. due to the uncertain nature of context recognition, the user-centric design practices and testing in the authentic environment of the context-aware applications should be stressed. The author proposes design guidelines, which have been developed based on the findings from distinct case studies. The design guidelines aim to offer tangible help to application designers, who may not be acquaint with the special characteristics of context-awareness, and intend to prevent potential usability problems identified through the individual studies. Moreover, an evaluation for the design guidelines and their iteration to the presented form is demonstrated.

Augmented Reality is a relatively new advertising medium, which up until now has only seen limited commercial success. The applications and value thereof, as an effective marketing communications tool has not been understood or quantified in the context of an industry which is currently going through profound changes. To this end, this research attempts to answer some of the critical questions facing practitioners and academics within this field. Using audience engagement as a measure of efficacy, independent test groups were subject to various types of Augmented Reality as well as more traditional, media advertisements. Through the experiments, the impacts of contextual relevance, media integration and message style on Augmented Reality advertising, were tested. The findings strongly support contextual relevance as a key characteristic for a successful Augmented Reality advertising implementation. In addition, it was found that this medium also had a significant impact on the audience’s visual and emotive levels of engagement with the subject matter. It was also found through the testing and analysis that the most receptive population group for Augmented Reality advertising are young female Millennials. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / lmgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) have difficulties in learning social and communication skills. This leads to impairments in social interaction, including lack of understanding others’ intentions, emotions, and mental states, and impairments in communication both verbal and nonverbal. One of the most widely used interventions that addresses social and communication skills is the “social story”. A social story aims to support children with ASC in coping with their own behaviour. Practitioners use social stories to present specific scenarios and to help children understand how they should respond. However, the development of social stories is time consuming, and teachers comment that it is difficult to share them as a resource for others or to customise them to individual children, using their current tools. This thesis explores how a social story authoring tool can be designed, developed and evaluated. The final aim is to better support practitioners in writing, using and assessing social stories for children with ASC compared with their current approaches. A series of studies with practitioners and researchers was carried out to inform the design of a social story authoring tool and to evaluate it. A framework for social stories was built with the purpose of informing the design. Based on this framework, a prototype was iteratively designed and developed. The final prototype (ISISSImproving Social Interaction through Social Stories) was evaluated with practitioners with experience in social story interventions. The evaluation showed that ISISS is perceived by practitioners to be a considerable improvement over their current approaches. The methodology employed in this research combines Action Research, User-Centred Design and Participatory Design. Practitioners and researchers were empowered with different roles at different research stages in order to maximise their contributions to the development process.

In the recent years, there has been a tremendous growth in data. Numerous research and technologies have been proposed and developed in the field of Visualization to cope with the associated data analytics. Despite these new technologies, the pace of people’s capacity to perform data analysis has not kept pace with the requirement. Past literature has hinted as to various reasons behind this disparity. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate specifically the usage of Visualization in the field of engineering. We conducted the research with the help of a survey identifying the places where Visualization educational shortcomings may exist. We conclude by asserting that there is a need for creating awareness and formal education about Visualization for Engineers.

This thesis bring together different disciplines – philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cybernetics and the performing arts – in a transdisciplinary investigation that raises new questions about the human mind and our relationship with computers and machines in a way that contributes to and helps elucidate the human computer interaction (HCI) debate. It chooses transdisciplinarity as the methodology best able to mobilize new ideas and generate a different approach to HCI, one that will develop fresh insights and produce critical ways of thinking about the problems of contemporary life in relation to our interaction with technologies (in the broadest sense of the term). The thesis reconciles the artificial with human nature by using transdisciplinary methods to reduce the friction between human beings and computers. It does this by revisiting early mechanical machines and automatons (from mythology and science), as well as exploring the subject in relation to elements of the performing arts. In the process, the thesis confronts the concepts of ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ intelligence, and explores various models of mind and intelligence, as well as examining the physicality or materiality of artefacts in terms of their congruence with the paradigm of the ‘embodied mind’. The preliminary studies and literature review carried out for the research revealed that the model of the mind currently proposed by HCI as the basis for theories of how humans interact with computers is unsatisfactory, limited and very problematic, not least because it is a disembodied and representational conception of the human mind. In order to relieve HCI of this problematic issue, the thesis introduces the concept of the ‘embodied mind’, which brings a deeper understanding of how the mind works; its recognition that the human mind, body and the world are interrelated entities gives us a new insight into how we can improve our interactions with machines and computers. To achieve this, the research explores the conceptualization of human characteristics such as intelligence and cognition, and confirms 7 that these concepts are subject to change, manifested in different forms, distributed, situated and contextualized. Intelligence is not interpreted as a literal entity, as it is in cognitive psychology, or as a quality that belongs to or empowers human beings alone, but inspired by the philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI), the thesis argues that it is a manifestation that ‘emerges’ when favourable conditions facilitate interactions between agents and artefacts. Through a focused analysis and interpretation of early automatons, robots, and artificial and mechanical machines, the study explores the concept that technology is both a practice and an imaginative idea, and not just a concrete manifestation of a solution to human problems. It perceives automatons, especially ‘fraudulent’ automatons, as true archaeological discoveries, evidence of the fact that our human ambitions and ideas are not limited by the technological expressions of different eras; they represent a special repository of the desire to capitalize on and make such ideas manifest even when the technology for their materialization is not yet available. The thesis also brings ventriloquism and puppetry into the discussion, as both objects and performative practices, in order to highlight the human relationship with the material environment, as well as related aspects of human and non-human agency. This indicates that cybernetics could prove a useful framework for an understanding of elements of the relationship between the human and the artificial. The thesis therefore tackles the problems and limitations imposed by cognitive science, computer science and psychology, currently the main disciplines concerned with improving human relationships with computers and machines, but more specifically, it offers a more historically and philosophically informed contribution to the study of HCI.

In this thesis an eye-directed controller is developed that slaves the narrow field display within a split-foveal-peripheral-display system to the operator's gaze position. A neural network controller is proposed that directly maps the gaze position to the narrow field projection co-ordinates without the need for any axis or co-ordinate transformations. A novel image feature-extraction algorithm, for extraction of the pupil-purkinje difference measure, has been developed that exhibits robust and reproducible real-time performance. By providing foveal and peripheral vision in a far-field teleoperator through the eye-directed split-foveal-peripheral-display, visual information is sufficiently and naturally provided for the establishment of telepresence. / Dissertation (M Eng (Electronic Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted