The Interactions magazine always includes interesting articles for HCI scientists. This month while I was browsing through ACM DL, I came across a very interesting article called "The invisible User" in the last issue of this magazine. Two scientists from Trinity College Dublin talk about their research on technology for mental health care. It is a good article and shows how technology can make difference in people's life. In brief, it presents a number of applications that are developed to support particularly teenagers with mental health disorders and discusses the lessons learnt throughout these projects. I strongly recommend this article.

The Invisible User

The World Health Organization estimates that approximately one million people per year commit suicide. Mental disorders such as depression are responsible for more than 90 percent of these deaths. In fact, depression is the leading cause of disability in the developed world, and the human and economic cost of mental illness is reaching crisis proportions. The stigma surrounding mental health issues exacerbates the problem, and many people are unable or reluctant to engage in and access effective treatment. Technology can help address these key problems of access and engagement, particularly for younger people. Interaction design has an important role in developing innovative and worthwhile applications that support the user in an effective way. Given the scale of the problem, even small changes in the effectiveness of mental health services could have a big impact.......

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1620693.1620697
Full Proceedings: Interactions, Volume 16, Issue 6 (November + December 2009), 2009.

Labels: HCI, interaction, Mental health

This is the first left-field of 2009, I hope you all had a great holiday. This month, as I was browsing the ACM DL, I found out that there is a very interesting annual conference on children and interaction called the international conference on Interaction design and children. In 2008, they had the seventh international conference in Chicago. I found a paper in their 2008 proceedings entitled PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease. This paper mainly presents the design and motivation of a tool called PointAssist. This tool helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty in pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. When I read this paper I thought it could be useful for people who work on improving the input usability for disabled people.

PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist, a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463689.1463757
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children, Pages 202-209, 2008.

Labels: Children, clicking, interaction, pointing

Have you ever thought about the relationship between having constraints and creativity? I have recently found an article called "Creativity Loves Constraints" which was published on BussinessWeek. Basically, the author, who is the Google's vice president of search products and user experience, believes that it helps to have some constraint to see a lot of innovation. Having this article in mind, I turned to ACM DL and found this short paper "Simplicity in interaction design" presented at the first international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction TEI '07. This paper presents a design exercise which forces designers to imagine alternative ways to represent information when there is a specific constraint. This exercise shows how an arbitrary constraint can give new insight to design. These two articles made me think: in accessibility community, "don't we all do these kind of exercises all the time?". Simplicity in interaction design

Attaining simplicity is a key challenge in interaction design. Our approach relies on a minimalist design exercise to explore the communication capacity for interaction components. This approach results in expressive design solutions, useful perspectives of interaction design and new interaction techniques.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226997
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the first international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction TEI '07

Labels: constraint, Creativity, design, interaction, simplicity

As I was browsing through the ACM DL, I came across this paper called "Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags" and actually got very excited about the idea of Pheromone-Based Interaction. The paper explains this interaction paradigm as follows: "Ants and other social insects interact by spreading chemical markers (i.e., pheromones) as they move in the environment and by being directed in their actions by the perceived concentrations of pheromones. This simple mechanism of local interactions mediated by the environment, called stigmergy, enables ants to globally self-organize their collective activities in a seemingly intelligent way and to adaptively act in an unknown environment". In summary, ants use this interaction model as a way of coordinating their activities, especially for food foraging. This paper presents a scenario where digital pheromones are stored in RFID tags and then used by humans/robots to find forgotten-somewhere objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. I thought this work could be an interest to people working on object tracking for disabled users and ofcourse to people like me who are interested in using interaction models from nature in new technological developments. Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags

Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-aware coordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to coordinate the activities of situated autonomous agents is still very limited. In this article, we present a simple low-cost and general-purpose implementation of a pheromone-based interaction mechanism for pervasive environments. This is realized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones and by having humans or robots spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding physical environment. We exemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This application allows robots and humans to find forgotten-somewhere objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computing scenarios, discuss related work in the area, and identify future research directions.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1242060.1242061
Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, Vol. 2, No. 2, Article 4, Publication date: June 2007

Labels: interaction, pervasive, phermone, RFID, tracking