Recently there has been increasing research into mobile physiological sensing devices to explore the benefits in the areas of monitoring health and well-being. However, previous works have mainly focused on functionality, and less so on affective shape, comfort use, and stable sensing. In this work, we propose a stone-type physiological sensing device for general users, rather than professional...

Innovative healthcare services and technologies show great promises for reducing individual and societal burdens, but predominantly fail to attract sufficient end user acceptance and usage. This renders the aspect of technology adoption as key weakness of most health technology development endeavors, but also as most promising area for implementing changes that can dramatically increase the lik...

Interest is growing in studying canine and human relationships, especially working canines and their role in society. Interest is also growing in designing informed, user centered interactive technologies for animals. Combining these two themes, my doctoral research looks at creating user-centered, ethnographically informed designs for working animals (working dogs). The work examines existing ...

There is increased awareness of the need for design to be driven by deep understanding of users, their activity patterns, processes, needs and external influences--understanding that can only be gained by studying user behavior in the user’s context. This requires understanding of how to plan and carry out observational studies of users, which is a new skill for many. In addition, fieldwork is ...

This paper asks what might make for a design-friendly culture as more people are implicated in the making of everyday interactive systems. The tools offered below are exercises to broaden the view at the start of a design process, even before the space of the problem is contemplated. They are intended to sit well with user-centred design processes, bringing a dash of fun with some serious inten...

In this paper we describe a system allowing users to express themselves through their full-body movement and gesture and to control in real-time the generation of an audio-visual feedback. The systems analyses in real-time the user’s full-body movement and gesture, extracts expressive motion features and maps the values of the expressive motion features onto real-time control of acoustic parame...

Information and communication tools (ICTs) have become a major influencer of how modern work is carried out. Methods of user-centered design do not however take into account the full complexity of technology and the user interface context the users live in. User interface culture analysis aims providing to designers new ways and strategies to better take into account the current user interface ...

Ten years of AmI research have led to many new insights and understandings about the way highly interactive environments should be designed to meet the requirement of being truly unobtrusive and supportive from an end-user perspective. Probably the most revealing finding is the fact that, in addition to cognitive intelligence and computing, also elements from social intelligence and design play...

Every now and then existing methods in the User-Centered Design (UCD) process evolve and new methods are being introduced. In this position paper we discuss our new approach for studying communities within the new media landscape. First, this new approach contains ways to improve the relations between the designers, researchers and developers on the one hand and the users on the other hand. Sec...

Automatic structuring is one means to ease access to large music collections – be it for organisation or exploration. The AUCOMA project (Adaptive User-Centered Organization of Music Archives) aims to find ways to make such a structuring intuitively understandable to a user through automatic adaptation. This article describes the motivation of the project, discusses related work in the field of...