TWO essential elements of classroom lecturing are the teacher and the students. This human core can easily be lost in the overwhelming list of technological supplements aimed at improving the teaching/learning experience. We start from the question of whether we can formulate a technological intervention around the human connection, and find indicators which would tell us when the teacher is no...

A theoretical framework for communication and persuasion technology is introduced, utilizing people’s emotions and personality characteristics. It uses two unobtrusive psychophysiological measures to penetrate people’s emotional space: heart rate variability and the variability of the fundamental frequency of the pitch of the voice. In addition, two experiments are described that validate these...

Wearable, unobtrusive physiological and cognitive monitoring systems have significant potential for increasing the effectiveness of military and civilian medical care by providing real-time and continuous data for key vital signs. To date, however, such systems have been constrained by the need for extensive subject preparation along with the discomfort and inconvenience of skin-adhesive electr...

In studies involving patients with special needs, the use of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings is among the most delicate measurement modalities. The quietness needed and the long preparation time can be challenging especially in young ages. Furthermore, the invasive appearance of the instrumentation involved is not appealing and can raise distrust in patients. We developed a customized E...

l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate students maj...

It is recognized that stress conditions play an important role in the definition of individual wellness and represent a major risk factor for most non-communicable diseases. Most studies focus on evaluation response to maximal while few them reports results about detection/monitoring mild stimulations. In this study, we investigate capability some physiological signs indicators (including Heart...

Blood pressure (BP) is critical in diagnosing certain cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension. Some previous studies have proved that BP can be estimated by pulse transit time (PTT) calculated by a pair of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals at two body sites. Currently, contact PPG (cPPG) and imaging PPG (iPPG) are two feasible ways to obtain PPG signals. In this study, we proposed a hybri...

In this paper, we introduce two input devices for wearable computers, called GestureWrist and GesturePad. Both devices allow users to interact with wearable or nearby computers by using gesture-based commands. Both are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, so they can be used under various social contexts. The first device, called GestureWrist, is a wristband-type input device that recogni...