Ing. Miroslav Macík, Ph.D.

We present an interactive modular tactile map tailored for older adults with vision impairments, which should help them acquire spatial knowledge of rooms and their inner equipment. As the outcome of our iterative design process, we introduced a design concept that employs skeuomorphic interactive tactile objects that can be placed on a modular interactive tactile map to resemble real rooms. Qualitative evaluation (mean age was 81.5 years) indicates our concept's ability to help our audience build spatial knowledge of rooms and their equipment.

We present Daisy, a voice-controlled conversational agent embodied as a household potted flower. Daisy has been designed for the needs of older adults, providing companionship in times of social isolation by engaging with them in casual conversation, suggesting relevant activities to keep them connected with their community and having them care for it. Daisy was created using user centered design methods. This paper describes Daisy, our experiences designing conversational agents for older adults and the considerations that are crucial when designing such agents.

We present an interactive tactile map tailored for older adults with vision impairments, which should help them to acquire spatial knowledge of complex indoor environments, like a residential care home. Interestingly current research largely omits visually impaired older adults. As the outcome of our iterative design process, we introduced the design of the tactile map that employs haptically salient key objects and large touch-sensitive segments along with the routeguidance function. Route-guidance function enriches the tactile map with the desired route information to support the route knowledge acquisition. Qualitative evaluation (mean age was 81.4 years) indicates the ability of our concept to help our audience building spatial knowledge of the indoor environment.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to lead to an improvement in pilot-aircraft interaction. The goal of the performed tests is an assessment of haptic feedback, which mediates flight parameters to the pilot. Pedals indicate side-slip angle by vibrations, whereas a sliding element inside the control stick is able to continuously indicate both angles of attack and side-slip. Design/methodology/approach - Haptic feedback applied on rudder pedals and control stick were tested on a flight simulator and flight tests in a couple of tasks. Pilot workload, readability of feedback and side-slip were then evaluated when the flight was turning. Findings - As a useful instrument for aircraft control, haptic feedback was assessed. The feedback settings were then individually perceived, and haptic feedback slightly improved side-slip while turning in a flight test; however, the results are not statistically significant. Practical implications - The tests provided promising results for human pilot performance. The training phase and personal settings of haptic feedback is an approach for improving the performance of human pilots. Originality/value - The designed and tested device is a unique tool for improving pilot-aircraft interaction. This study brings valuable experiences from its flight simulator and in-flight tests.

As the popularity of Smart Televisions (TVs) and interactive Smart TV applications (apps) has recently grown, the usability of these apps has become an important quality characteristic. Previous studies examined Smart TV apps from a usability perspective. However, these methods are mainly manual, and the potential of automated model-based testing methods for usability testing purposes has not yet been fully explored. In this article, we propose an approach to test the usability of Smart TV apps based on the automated generation of a Smart TV user interaction model from an existing app by a specialized automated crawler. By means of this model, defined user tasks in the Smart TV app can be evaluated automatically in terms of their feasibility and estimated user effort, which reflects the usability of the analyzed app. This analysis can be applied in the context of regular users and users with various specific needs. The findings from this model-based automated analysis approach can be used to optimize the user interface of a Smart TV app to increase its usability, accessibility, and quality.

We present a design of an indoor orientation terminal for visually impaired older adults. Interaction is based on buttons, tactile symbols, and audio feedback. The terminal consists of five parts dedicated to a particular function. The tactile symbols mimic real-world objects. We performed three design iterations and conduct evaluations with a total of 17 participants, their mean age was 84.2 years. The results show that usage of real-world objects and low level of symbol abstraction leads to an unambiguous pairing of user expectations and real functions. Introduction of complicated and abstract artifacts like contour objects or complex tactile map was very hard to understand and recognize. Our final design was well accepted by all participants and allowed the participants to orient themselves in the indoor environment.

We present a user modeling approach tailored to the user group of older adults with vision impairments. Our previous work with this user group has been followed by qualitative user research with the staff of a residential care facility for visually impaired older adults. We defined the structure of a user model that represents aspects related to personal psychological development and attributes that affect interaction with technologies. Furthermore, we present two generations of prototypes of administration UI for the user model. Results of the qualitative evaluation are discussed in the paper. This effort aims to help the personnel of specialized care institution in providing personalized care and make the interaction with technologies accessible for the group of visually impaired older adults with vision impairments.

Purpose This paper aims to present a state-of-the-art review in various fields of interest, leading to a new concept of bio-inspired control of small aircraft. The main goal is to improve controllability and safety in flying at low speeds. Design/methodology/approach The review part of the paper gives an overview of artificial and natural flow sensors and haptic feedback actuators and applications. This background leads to a discussion part where the topics are synthesized and the trend in control of small aircraft is estimated. Findings The gap in recent aircraft control is identified in the pilot–aircraft interaction. A pilot’s sensory load is discussed and several recommendations for improved control system architecture are laid out in the paper. Practical implications The paper points out an opportunity for a following research of suggested bio-inspired aircraft control. The control is based on the artificial feeling of aerodynamic forces acting on a wing by means of haptic feedback. Originality/value The paper merges two research fields – aircraft control and human–machine interaction. This combination reveals new possibilities of aircraft control.

This manuscript focuses on cognitive aspects of spatial mental modeling. We examine possibilities for merging methods for sensing and modeling of cognitive capabilities and cognitive styles with the concept of cognitive infocommunications. Related aspects of cognitive psychology, the theory of senses, sensory substitution, and mental modeling are discussed. We illustrate practical impact of emerging CogInfoCom methods on people with special needs, in particular, those with vision impairment.

We presents the results of user research and first design concept of audio-book player for visually impaired seniors. The user study was conducted in a form of qualitative semi-structured interviews with six blind participants. We identified fundamental functional and nonfunctional requirements and started the design process with desribing the situational context by scenarios and storyboards, based on which we created the first design sketches.

Human factor is the most common reason for aircraft accident. Therefore, an improvement of pilot–aircraft interaction by vibrotactile feedback is a way of increasing the safety of flight. This study focuses on the ability of pilot to distinguish directional vibration of a control stick and react in a specific direction. To investigate the intuitive reaction of a pilot on directional vibration, human–machine experiment was carried out. For the experiment, aircraft control stick was replaced by a joystick. The task involved the reaction to the directional vibrations of segments mounted on the joystick by an intuitive reaction. A hypothesis that a human can distinguish directional vibration of the control stick and react in specific directions was confirmed with an error rate of approximately 5%. The experiment was carried out with a prescribed way of holding the joystick in hand. This fact limits results generalization. Future work aims at designing new feedback hardware and analyzing the influence of different ways of stick holding.

This paper focuses on supporting reading, an important activity of visually impaired older adults. More than half of people with severe vision impairment is older than 70 years. We present design concept of a physical device for audio content playback tailored to specific needs and preferences of this user group. The design is based on outcomes of our research conducted with visually impaired older adults living in a residential care institution. A qualitative user study (N = 6) focused specifically on audio content consumption has been conducted. We employed iterative development and formative evaluation to develop a prototype of the audiobook player. Two qualitative evaluation experiments have been conducted with visually impaired (N = 7, age mean = 45.6) and visually impaired older adults (N = 7, age mean = 73). We conclude the evaluation and suggest improvements for the future version and general design guidelines relevant for this specific user group.

We present a prototype of Surveillance System developed as a part of an indoor navigation system. The related indoor navigation system uses a video detection for identification of navigated users and employs various terminals. In the Surveillance System, we focused on further utilization of audiovisual data from those terminals and using computer vision we aim to increase safety and security in large public buildings. In the design and prototyping phases, we followed the User-Centered design methodology.

This work investigates the performance of older adults in tasks related to recognition of tactile symbols. We conducted experiments to evaluate different tactile symbols with varying elevation, shape form (outline, fill), and symbol preference in general. Experiments were performed with the general population of visually impaired (N = 6, age mean = 46.3) and with visually impaired older adults (N = 9, age mean = 76.8). We used both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the experiments. The results indicate that even older adults are capable of distinguishing between six different tactile symbols. Participates frequently failed to connect meanings of abstract symbols with functions of a hypothetical orientation system terminal.

We present Breathing Friend – a portable and tangible device that uses haptic interaction to unobtrusively stimulate mindful breathing as efficient stress coping method. Its design is optimized for holding in user’s hands. By changing its shape, it sends haptic signals to the user. Several studies were conducted where we explored and verified the form factors of the artifact, interaction methods, therapeutic effect, fitting to everyday life, and influence on the breathing pattern.

Coboard flowers is an audio-visual public installation for Prague Spring International Music Festival. An interactive visualization with floral motive was shown. The interactivity was based on face detection of the user, enabled by a computer vision algorithm. The control signals are the position, distance, gender, and age of the users. The visualization is accompanied by adaptive music.

Older adults challenged with vision impairments require special care, often served in residential care institutions. This paper presents outcomes of a user study to reveal everyday needs and problems of clients of such institution. The study was organized as semistructured interviews with residential home clients (N = 6) and staff (N = 6). Our findings indicate that most needs can be already addressed by specific care given in residential institutions. However, we identified areas where ICT could be beneficial for better orientation and well-being of clients. We draw results to motivate and frame design directions.

We present a prototype of Surveillance System developed as part of an indoor navigation system. By employing computer vision, it aims to increase the safety and security in large public buildings. The related indoor navigation system for hospitals uses a video detection for identification of navigated users. For purposes of a Surveillance System, we utilize video streams from various navigation system terminals. Our design is based on a user study with hospital employees (N = 6) and security staff (N = 7). Proposed prototypes have been evaluated with representatives of the target user audience; Lo-Fi prototype (N = 3), Hi-Fi prototype (N = 7). Results of the evaluation suggest that the Surveillance System can contribute to improving hospital safety and security and increasing staff efficiency.

In this paper we introduce CoBoard1 Flowers, an audio-visual public installation for Prague Spring International Music Festival. An interactive visualization with floral motifs is shown and is controlled by a face detection technology, enabled by a computer vision algorithm. The visualization is controlled by the estimated position, distance, gender, and age of the participants. The visualization is accompanied by adaptive music. The solution has been qualitatively evaluated (N=6). The installation has been used in the total of 453 interactive sessions during 14 concert evenings.

Senioři jsou nedílnou součástí populace, a tudíž jsou ovlivňováni vývojem společnosti. Jedním z aspektů je přizpůsobování vývoji společnosti v oblasti informačních technologií. Lidé se musí naučit zacházet s těmito technologiemi, poněvadž tyto technologie stále více pronikají do jejich každodenního života. S rozvojem informačních technologií vznikají i nové formy komunikace s počítači (nebo se zařízeními, která jsou počítací řízena). Dostáváme se tak k jiným formám komunikace než je komunikace založená na využívání klávesnice a myši. Ve většině případů tyto nové formy komunikace usnadňují práci s počítačem a mají tak potenciál pro využití seniory. Tak jako byli v minulosti senioři seznamováni s možnostmi klasické komunikace (klávesnice + myš) bude v současné době třeba seznamovat seniory i s novými možnostmi komunikace s počítači. Při vytváření prostředků pro nové formy komunikace hraje primární roli zkoumání konkrétních potřeb uživatelů (v našem případě seniorů). Na základě těchto zjištění jsou pak za použití systematických metod návrhu nová zařízení pro komunikaci navrhována a realizována. V příspěvku budou prezentována některá řešení, která jsou výsledkem výzkumu na ČVUT.

Indoor environments like hospitals are typically very complex and hard to navigate even for healthy individuals. Factors like bad health status, higher stress level, and possible impairments can make the orientation in hospitals even more challenging. We describe the evolution of context-sensitive navigation system that provides adaptive indoor navigation without forcing users to use sophisticated smartphones or other specialized personal navigation devices. Instead, various networked navigation terminal installed at appropriate spots in the indoor environment are used to guide users to their destination. User study (N=10) and on-site study in a big hospital have been conducted. Prototypes including hospital visit preparation website, smart kiosk and waiting room kiosk, were developed and evaluated. These prototypes have been evaluated with target user audience, LoFi prototype (N=6) and HiFi prototype (N=12). The results suggest usability and utility of our navigation systems for the target user audience.

This chapter shows how elements of gamification, i.e. game thinking and game mechanics, can be integrated into a collaborative navigation system for visually impaired persons in order encourage them to travel independently and thus improve their quality of life and self-confidence. The system supports independent navigation in unknown places by mediating help from another visually impaired person, who is familiar with the particular place. Our system utilizes a thermal user interface to introduce an additional communication channel and thus to increase the usability of the system. The system has been successfully enhanced by game elements and illustrates the potential of introducing game elements into these systems.

In this paper we introduce GraFooSha [GRAndmaFOOdSHAring] – a device that provides access to food sharing social network to senior users. GraFooSha is a physical device that incorporates deep-rooted concepts the target group is familiar with. A user study (N=4), conceptual design as well as industrial design is described in the paper. Followed by description of technical realization of mechanical, electronic and software components. The paper is concluded by evaluation with the target user audience (N=10).

Increasing demands on user interface (UI) usability, adaptability, and dynamic behavior drives ever-growing development and maintenance complexity. Traditional UI design techniques result in complex descriptions for data presentations with significant information restatement. In addition, multiple concerns in UI development leads to descriptions that exhibit concern tangling, which results in high fragment replication. Concern-separating approaches address these issues; however, they fail to maintain the separation of concerns for execution tasks like rendering or UI delivery to clients. During the rendering process at the server side, the separation collapses into entangled concerns that are provided to clients. Such client-side entanglement may seem inconsequential since the clients are simply displaying what is sent to them; however, such entanglement compromises client performance as it results in problems such as replication, fragment granularity ill-suited for effective caching, etc. This paper considers advantages brought by concern-separation from both perspectives. It proposes extension to the aspect-oriented UI design with distributed concern delivery (DCD) for client-server applications. Such an extension lessens the serverside involvement in UI assembly and reduces the fragment replication in provided UI descriptions. The server provides clients with individual UI concerns, and they become partially responsible for the UI assembly. This change increases client-side concern reuse and extends caching opportunities, reducing the volume of transmitted information between client and server to improve UI responsiveness and performance. The underlying aspect-oriented UI design automates the server-side derivation of concerns related to data presentations adapted to runtime context, security, conditions, etc. Evaluation of the approach is considered in a case study applying DCD to an existing, production web application.

Hospital environments are typically large, and even healthy individuals can need a navigation map. When we consider the combination of stress, concerns about health and convalescence, age and other factors that can affect hospital patients, it is clear that navigation can be a problem, and that assistance may be required. This paper focuses on the technical realization of an in-hospital navigation system tailored for users with limited orientation capabilities. A network of navigation spots throughout a hospital building is used to guide a user to his/her destination. A computer vision method is used for seamless user identification. Software and hardware implementation of navigation terminals, and also network communication, are discussed in this paper.

User interfaces (UI) of software applications play a crucial part in communication with users. Attractive UIs often lead to market success, and thus there is a significant incentive to provide users with malleable UIs that can adapt as much as possible to their needs. However, such UIs require significant development and maintenance efforts. In this paper, we describe a context model based on ability-based design that is well suited to the purposes of automated UI generation. We then introduce a platform that delivers adaptive UIs across various platforms. We use runtime combinatoric optimisation to support usability and to generate context-sensitive UIs. Since the development and maintenance of such UIs can be complex, our platform integrates a module for code-inspection for data-oriented applications to reduce these efforts. It also utilises a visual editor to simplify manual UI design.

Increasing demands on web user interface (UI) usability, adaptability, and dynamic behavior drives ever growing development and maintenance complexity. Conventional design approaches scale poorly with such rising complexity, resulting in rapidly increasing costs. Much of the complexity centers around data presentation and processing. Recent work greatly reduces such data complexity through the application of Aspect-Oriented UI (AOUI) design, which separates various UI concerns; however, rendering in conventional and even AOUI approaches fails to maintain this separation, often resulting in high reptitions of concern fragments due to tangling. Even worse, mixing of dynamic and immutable components greatly limits caching efficacy as each have differing lifetimes. We extend AOUI design to push down concern separation to rendering, which reduces description size, through repetition reduction, and enables separate caching of individual concerns. Our results show considerable size reduction of UI descriptions for data presentations, faster load times and extended caching capabilities.

In this workshop we describe our ongoing work on a prototype presenting heat map data to visually impaired users. We try to reduce the stress level of blind travelers by presenting information about the number of other blind persons who can help with navigation. This is reached by augmentation of the users’ environment by social proximity metaphor mediated by our heat map thermal display of the prototype.

We developed an adaptive indoor navigation system for users with limited orientation with special focus on visually impaired and senior people. A qualitative study (n = 12) was conducted investigating problems of navigation in large national hospitals. Several prototypes were designed and iteratively tested with potential users (n = 13). Findings are reported in a form of design recommendations for indoor navigation systems for users with limited orientation.

U seniorů dochází s přibývajícím věkem ke zhoršení orientace v prostoru. Se stárnutím populace bude četnost těchto problémů přibývat. Tento příspěvek se zabývá otázkou jak seniorům orientaci usnadnit za pomoci moderních technologií. Cílem příspěvku je poskytnout přehled možných řešení alespoň některých situací, se kterými se postižení senioři mohou setkat. Některá řešení jsou výsledky výzkumu prováděného dlouhodobě na ČVUT v Praze.

In this paper we introduce a prototype system for an interactive advertisement panel. Our panel prototype engages attention of passing potential customers for 50x longer time period than its printed alternative. The panel attracts his/her attention and engages him/her into a short interactive game. It uses computer vision methods to track potential customers face and to estimate potential customer’s age and gender, which can be used for better targeting and evaluation of an advertisement campaign. A proof of concept implementation of panel prototype has been qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated.

In this paper we introduce an in-hospital navigation system suitable for motor im- paired, visually impaired and elderly people. GPS localisation and Wi-Fi triangulation are often not suitable in indoor environments due to poor signal or complicated calibration. We present a navigation system that does not depend on precise electronic localisation aids. User interfaces used are automatically accustomed to target user's abilities and preferences. Four dierent terminal types are used for the navigation system prototype.

This paper introduces a framework for adaptive user interface (UI) development. Our framework facilitates development and maintenance efforts through code inspection. Information already captured elsewhere is reused in the UI rather than restated. In our approach, inspected information is transformed in multiple stages through an aspect-oriented approach. As each stage may be influenced at runtime, our approach allows systems to be built with context-aware adaptive UIs. In addition, the selection of UI elements and their layout is generated using optimal metrics. The output of our approach can be influenced by the target platform. Our approach to UI is shown in detail in a case study.

We introduce an arcade game with thermo-haptic feedback. The game demonstrates the ability of heat to deliver information for efficient navigation and orientation in space. The pressure is mapped to the level of danger of objects in the game scene. The surface becomes spiky if the nearby object is dangerous. The long-term testing of the game (7 days) showed that the thermo-haptic feedback seems to be promising feedback modality, as 51 players finished all three levels of the game and 54% of objects were correctly identified.

The research of disabilities and their effects on the usability of the user interfaces has long since been established itself in the field of the human-computer interaction. The target groups of this research mostly include people with permanent disabilities (vision-, motor-, or hearing-related). Due to a number of reasons (illness, injury, etc.), a user may enter the state of disability only for a limited amount of time (temporary disability).

In this paper we introduce a context model that incorporates concepts of ability-based design of user interfaces. The model proposed expresses what can a user do rather than describing users' disabilities. A user study that indicates validity of the proposed model has been conducted. Furthermore, usage of the model is demonstrated on a system for context-sensitive automatic user interface generation.

For elderly or disabled people it is challenging to control a variety of home devices that have different inconsistent user interfaces. Therefore it is necessary to provide a single controller with personalized user interfaces that makes the control of household devices easy. In this paper we present our User Interface Platform (UIP) and its application in an ISO-standardized smart home middleware framework Universal Remote Console (URC). URC utilizes a concept of pluggable user interfaces making it possible to use various user interface technologies to control any device connected. Integration of URC and our UIP platform enabled delivery of personalized user interfaces to various controller platforms including smart TV, smart phone, PC and tablet PC.

In this paper we describe a preliminary study in which we investigate whether for simple tasks the effect of the power law of practice (learning curve) would be overruled by the effect of fatigue. Our approach is based on the KLM method. Its predictions are compared with measured data. A new data collection tool was implemented as a Facebook application that allowed to perform a remote data collection and analysis of the user behavior. While the learning curve was identified in our data, the effect of fatigue was not confirmed.

The process of data visualisation can be very complex and an urgent need for interactive control of this process is imminent. Solution to this problem is in the field of user interfaces by means of which the user can efficiently control all aspects of the visualisation. One of the fields where a lot of challenges for development of new user interfaces exist is data visualisation in heterogeneous environment. In such case data are visualised on various devices that have different capabilities. This fact influences not only the results of the visualisation process but also design and implementation of user interface for each particular device. In situation when an application is capable to run on various devices it is rather problematic to manually create individual user interfaces, one for each device. In this paper a concept and results of automatic generation of user interfaces in a heterogeneous environment is described.

Multiple attempts [1-5] to use automatic user interface generation were performed, but none of them is widely adopted. The main issues of design and implementation are the overall complexity of input (input models) to the user interface generators, platform dependency, and corresponding poor scalability. From users' perspective, automatically generated user interfaces often look too artificial, form-like and over-complicated. Current methods of the automatic design do not allow the developers to explicitly specify the importance of individual elements of the input model and the desired "look and feel" of the resulting user interface. The former problem does not allow the user interface generators to construct the user interface where the elements are positioned based on their actual importance or even omitted (e.g due to screen size constraints). The latter problem makes all user interfaces look alike and thus diminishing the potential to articulate a user experience.

In this work we present current status of our work on technology for client-server applications. This technology follows the design philosophy "Write once, run everywhere" by supporting multiple client platforms managed by a single server side logic. Main focus in this paper is on the server side, its extensibility and integration with platform widely used as a basis for smart homes - URC - Universal Remote Console. Our approach has been already used in two EU-funded projects where it was adopted by three external institutions in the framework of the project consortium. We will describe keystones of the architecture and the framework for extending server-side by custom user interfaces, data and application logic in detail.

Pervasive computing [1] brings the technology closer to the users by enabling the users to use daily-life devices (mobile phones, TVs, touch screen walls, etc.) for controlling their environment and accessing information virtually anywhere. Interacting with such devices does not remind users of classical computers and enables them to more naturally interact with the controlled system, if user interface is designed properly. These devices usually operate in networked environments with every controlling and controlled device connected to a central hub. Bringing easy-to-use applications to such environments faces the challenge of highly heterogeneous, dynamically changing environment and necessity to deploy applications to controlling devices with very different features (display size, input methods, operating systems, etc.).

This paper describes a User Centered Design driven development of a system for modern digital home based on the ISO/IEC 24752 standard: Universal Remote Console - URC. The primary target group - elderly users - has problems accepting certainm devices and their respective user Interfaces. We show that certain user interfaces are acceptable despite the fact thet they convey a complex set of functionalities in a modern digital home.

In this poster we present a technology for developing client-server applications in heterogeneous environments such as applications with multiple client devices running on different platforms. We developed a language for describing user interfaces and for communication between client and server. The language is focused on clear separation of application logic, data and presentation. The application logic is common for all clients and is always deployed on the server side that does not require reimplementation of application for each particular client technology.

A way that would enable us to deploy any user interface on any platform and bind it to server-side application logic as simply as possible. We developed a XML-based protocol called UIProtocol that is used for communication between client and server. It is used to transmit user interface structure and data contained in user interface from server to client. It is also used to notify server when user interacts with the interface. UIProtocol strictly separates interface structure, dynamic data displayed in the interface and application logic

i2home focuses on intelligent household based on industrial standards. Elderly people can take advantage of home automation to prolong their independent live and enhance their safety and security.

In this paper we describe the design, development and evaluation of user interfaces for a modern digital home based on the ISO/IEC 24752 standard: Universal Remote Console-URC. Two target groups were addressed: seniors aged 65 years and above and people suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Our goal is to design user interfaces (UI) for our target groups that make use of all available modalities, such as, graphics, voice, and video. We provide a set of recommendations and design patterns for developing UIs for seniors and Alzheimer's disease patients. We present the results of tests of user interfaces designed for smart home environment.