610091 Kognitive Systeme: Mobile and Stationary Assistive Systems and User Experience Engineering (S) (SoSe 2016)

Language:
English or German (depending on participant's decision)

General Goal of the Project:

Assistive Systems

Imagine you want to bake a cake but you cannot remember the recipe, you do not know how to use a high-tech kitchen stove to prepare a delicious meal, you cannot remember an English vocabulary in a conversation, or how to repair a bicycle. In such everyday situations it may be helpful to receive unobtrusive and intuitive support from an adaptive technical system that operates along in a largely unnoticed and restriction-free manner. These systems are of particular importance for elderly and handicapped people.

Recently, different stationary and mobile assistive systems, such as Smart Glasses (i.e., Google Glass, Microsoft Hololens), Head Mounted Displays, Virtual Reality devices (e.g., Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive) or mobile eye and motion tracking systems have been developed. These systems can provide new possibilities for recording, analyzing, and optimizing people's performances and therefore to provide individualized support, coaching or assistance in various application fields, such as sports, training environments, human-machine interaction, speech and action assistance. The development and application of these systems require not only technical know-how but also knowledge about the needs and preferences of the end users. Therefore, user experience studies are of particular importance.

The course will introduce and point out recent developments and existing opportunities for modern stationary and mobile coaching/assistive technologies as well as a few examples of the many possible applications. The participants will also learn about the most important usability/user experience techniques (such as questionnaires, interview techniques and eye tracking studies). Therefore, the participants will not only get an overall overview about different assistive systems and how they can be applied to support particular user groups (such as experts, novices, elderly or handicapped), but also how they can be evaluated and be adapted to particular user needs. The learned techniques can also be applied to other products and systems, such as websites, flyers or product design and evaluation.

At the end of the seminar the participants will put into practice what they learned by conducting small experiments in groups of 2-3 people, as well as to write a short report to explain their results and interpretations. These studies can be traditional user experience (such as questionnaire or interviews) or experimental studies (e.g. a new training/coaching approach, a speech or action assistant approach) with different technical assistive systems or, when technical knowledge is available, to develop a small software module and to evaluate it with users. Different device platforms are available for the studies, such as the ADAMAAS AR-Eyetracking Glasses (which can display situation and context dependent assistance in textual or graphical form superimposed on a transparent virtual plane in users’ field of view), the Oculus Rift for VR studies, the Epson Moverio BT-200 AR-Glasses, and an Eyetracking-Vicon interface for the simultaneous recording of gaze and motion data. Technical support for the study design and implementation will be provided and templates for empirical studies will be available.

Requirements for participation, required level

Interest in assistive technology
General technical interest
Willingness to design, to realize and to analyze small empirical user studies
Programming skills and/or modelling knowledge is recommended when a new software module shall be implemented and tested