Design and evaluation of a digital wearable ring and a smartphone application to help monitor and manage the effects of Raynaud’s phenomenon

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This paper presents the iterative research, design and evaluation phases of a digital wearable health system for monitoring, managing and possibly assisting in...     

The field becomes the laboratory? The impact of the contextual digital footprint on the discipline of E/HF

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of affordable digital sensors, ubiquitous networking and computation puts us at what is only the start of a new era in terms of the volume, coverage and granularity of data that we can access about individuals and workplaces. This paper examines the consequences of harnessing this data deluge for the practice of E/HF. Focusing on what we term the ‘contextual digital footprint’, the trail of data we produce through interactions with many different digital systems over the course of even a single day, we describe three example scenarios (drawn from health care, distributed work and transportation) and examine how access to data directly drawn in considerable volume from the field will potentially change our application of design and evaluation methods. We conclude with a discussion of issues relevant to ethical and professional practice within this new environment including the increased challenges of respecting anonymity, working with n = all data-sets and the central role of ergonomists in promulgating positive uses of data while retaining a systems-based humanistic approach to work design.

Practitioner summary: The paper envisions the impact of new and emerging sources of data about people and workplaces upon future practice in E/HF. We identify practical consequences for ergonomics practice, highlight new areas of professional competence likely to be required and flag both the risks and benefits of adopting a more data-driven approach.     

Older people’s production and appropriation of digital videos: an ethnographic study

While most of today’s children, young people, and adults are both consumers and producers of digital content, very little is known about older people as digital content creators. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study, this paper reports on the digital video production and appropriation of approximately 200 older people (aged 60–85). They generated 320 videos over the course of the study. We show their motivations for engaging in digital video production, discuss their planned video making, and highlight their creativity while editing videos. We show the different meanings they ascribed to digital videos in their social appropriation of these objects, the meaningful strategies they adopted to share videos, and the impact on their perceived wellbeing. Furthermore, we outline the solutions the participants developed to overcome or cope with interaction issues they faced over time. We argue that the results portray older people as active and creative makers of digital videos with current video capturing, editing, and sharing technologies. We contend that this portrayal both encourages us to re-consider how older people should be seen within human–computer interaction and helps to frame future research/design activities that bridge the grey digital divide.     

Implications of smartphone user privacy leakage from the advertiser’s perspective

Many smartphone apps routinely gather various private user data and send them to advertisers. Despite recent study on protection mechanisms and analysis on apps’ behavior, the understanding of the consequences of such privacy losses remains limited. In this paper, we investigate how much an advertiser can infer about users’ social and community relationships. After one month’s user study involving about 190 most popular Android apps, we find that an advertiser can infer 90% of the social relationships. We further propose a privacy leakage inference framework and use real mobility traces and Foursquare data to quantify the consequences of privacy leakage. We find that achieving 90% inference accuracy of the social and community relationships requires merely 3 weeks’ user data. Finally, we present a real-time privacy leakage visualization tool that captures and displays the spatial–temporal characteristics of the leakages. The discoveries underscore the importance of early adoption of privacy protection mechanisms.     

The Interplay Between the Speaker’s and the Hearer’s Perspective

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspective.     

Accomplishing the layered modular architecture in digital innovation: The case of the car’s driver information module

Architectural theory of digital innovation contends that, to enhance physical products with digital capabilities, a layered modular architecture is required. This architecture hybridizes hierarchically arranged components of physical products with modules of digital functionality configured into layers. Despite considerable research adopting this architectural perspective on digital innovation, questions of how this hybrid architecture is accomplished organizationally and technologically lack both conceptual clarity and empirical illustration. Noting pervasive tensions that characterize digital innovation efforts and the contradictions between hierarchical and layered modular configurations, this paper seeks to answer the following research question: Given that the layered modular architecture needs to hybridize modular arrangements with opposing logics, how is it accomplished?Employing the concepts of digitalization, physical product hierarchy and digital control system to better theorize a product architecture’s movement from a modular to a layered modular architecture accompanied by organizational structures that enable this change, we abductively analyze the increasing digitization of a car’s Driver Information Module (DIM) over a 10 year period. We conclude by proposing three transformations through which the layered modular architecture is accomplished.     

The role of disclosure of personal information in the evaluation of risk and trust in young peoples’ online interactions

This study examined the relationship between the evaluation of risk, trust and disclosure of personal information in young peoples’ online interactions. A series of 18 focus groups were conducted with young people aged 9–19 years old. The results suggested that the majority of young people have a high level of awareness of the risks and potential outcomes associated with their online behaviour. Participants perceived disclosure of personal information to be important for the development of online relationships, and discussed associated strategies for evaluating trust and verifying identity. The study suggests that the perceived benefits associated with the disclosure of personal information and interacting with ‘strangers’ online may outweigh the perceived risks associated with these behaviours as the result of the importance of peer relationships and the exploration of identity during adolescence. Identified age-related differences and similarities in relation to the themes are explored, and areas for future research discussed.     

The Hidden Order of Hadrian’s Villa, and the Order of Modern Architecture

The casual violence with which the various parts of the second-century Villa of Hadrian crash into each other seems to belie any possibility of a rational plan, although an overall master plan seems a necessity. Amazingly, in the twentieth century, Le Corbusier extolled Hadrian’s Villa as the archetype of great planning. This paper will describe the clear, mathematically ordered process by which the Villa was planned, and the compositional principles of its design will be shown to be exactly those which underlie the theories of Corbusier, 1800 years later.     

Control and trajectory optimization of an aircraft’s alignment with the desired track

The synthesis of the control with the optimal trajectory length is constructed for the problem of aligning an aircraft with the desired track with the ground speed vector direction along the desired track. The solution is based on the maximum principle and involves the use of numerical methods for solving the boundary value problem and analytical investigations for determining the set of possible extremals and comparing the lengths of the trajectories when selecting the optimal one. As a result of these investigations, the switching and separation lines are determined that bound the regions in the phase space which correspond to different values of the optimal relay control.     

Design of robotic arm’s action to imitate the mechanism of an animal’s consciousness

We are attempting to develop a system so that a user is able to let robots perform an intellectual action that has a healing and friendly feeling. Based on the development process of the actions and consciousness of animals, we constructed a structure model which connects consciousness and action hierarchically, built a valuation function for action selection, and developed software to control the action of a robot. This software is called Consciousness-Based Architecture (CBA). With it, our aim is to connect a user and robot as closely as possible and to allow smooth communications between them by developing an emotional system that takes notice of consciousness. In our system, the robotic arm’s finger is outfitted with a small Web camera, which allows the arm to recognize external information so that the robot can select various actions that comply with certain factors in the outside environment. Furthermore, by using the actuator of the robotic arm, the system we have built provides a correspondence between the robot’s internal states, such as the degree of rotation angle, and the outside temperature. In the present study, a motivation model which considers the outside environment and the internal states has been built into the CBA, and the behavior of the robotic arm has been verified.     

Equiparadoxicality of Yablo’s Paradox and the Liar

It is proved that Yablo’s paradox and the Liar paradox are equiparadoxical, in the sense that their paradoxicality is based upon exactly the same circularity condition—for any frame ${\mathcal{K}}$ , the following are equivalent: (1) Yablo’s sequence leads to a paradox in ${\mathcal{K}}$ ; (2) the Liar sentence leads to a paradox in ${\mathcal{K}}$ ; (3) ${\mathcal{K}}$ contains odd cycles. This result does not conflict with Yablo’s claim that his sequence is non-self-referential. Rather, it gives Yablo’s paradox a new significance: his construction contributes a method by which we can eliminate the self-reference of a paradox without changing its circularity condition.     

Prediction of the oil injection time of FDBs in an HDD spindle motor with a tied shaft by utilizing Kirchhoff’s pressure law

We propose a method to predict the oil injection time of fluid dynamic bearings (FDBs) with a tied shaft by applying Kirchhoff’s pressure law. Since the oil is injected by capillary phenomenon, the volume flow rate can be calculated by utilizing Kirchhoff’s pressure law. Then, we calculated the oil injection time of the FDBs with a tied shaft by dividing the volume flow rate by the clearance volumes of the journal bearing, the thrust bearing, and the recirculation channel (RC), respectively. We generated simulation models of the FDBs used in a 2.5″ HDD spindle motor with a tied shaft. The total oil injection times of the FDBs with and without a RC were 0.302 and 0.335 s, respectively. Also, we verified the proposed method by measuring the oil injection time of FDBs with a RC. We applied the proposed method to predict and improve the oil injection time of the FDBs with a tied shaft due to the variation of major parameters affecting the oil injection time.     

Reinventing the archive in the age of digital reproduction: Walid Raad’s the Atlas Group*

Taking the Atlas Group (1989–2004) as a case study, this paper examines the aesthetic, political and technological possibilities of the digital archive. The Atlas Group is a fabricated digital archive founded by the Lebanese-American media artist Walid Raad, and it deals with the illusive history of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1991). The digital takes an important role in Raad’s fictional archive, as it creates a tangible indexical fantasy that I would call the para-index. The para-index (an indexical sign without a referent) works to bring back Lebanon’s forgotten past by simulating / prefiguring its sensible form. Critic Rosalind Krauss calls this prefiguration of an aesthetic form within medium’s inherent technical property ‘the reinvention of the medium’ in this post-medium era. This paper aims to articulate how the Atlas Group reinvents the archive in this age of digital reproduction, and how this reinvention illuminate Lebanon’s unknown history.     

On the measurement of privacy as an attacker’s estimation error

A wide variety of privacy metrics have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the level of protection offered by privacy-enhancing technologies. Most of these metrics are specific to concrete systems and adversarial models and are difficult to generalize or translate to other contexts. Furthermore, a better understanding of the relationships between the different privacy metrics is needed to enable more grounded and systematic approach to measuring privacy, as well as to assist system designers in selecting the most appropriate metric for a given application. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for privacy-preserving systems, endowed with a general definition of privacy in terms of the estimation error incurred by an attacker who aims to disclose the private information that the system is designed to conceal. We show that our framework permits interpreting and comparing a number of well-known metrics under a common perspective. The arguments behind these interpretations are based on fundamental results related to the theories of information, probability, and Bayes decision.     

Valiant’s model and the cost of computing integers

Let (n) be the minimum number of arithmetic operations required to build the integer from the constants 1 and 2. A sequence x_n is said to be easy to compute if there exists a polynomial p such that for all It is natural to conjecture that sequences such as or n! are not easy to compute. In this paper we show that a proof of this conjecture for the first sequence would imply a superpolynomial lower bound for the arithmetic circuit size of the permanent polynomial. For the second sequence, a proof would imply a superpolynomial lower bound for the permanent or P PSPACE.     

Impact of digital content on young children’s reading interest and concentration for books

This study investigates the influence of digital content on mobile devices including flash animations, app books, and augmented reality (AR) books on children's reading interest and reading concentration for books. The factors responsible for the aforementioned influence were also investigated. The results from this research show that flash animation can significantly increase the interest in reading and concentration. AR books and app books led children to become more interested in storybooks but significantly decreased their reading concentration. Following a comparison of the digital content, it was concluded that all the tested prototypes could positively increase the reading interest of children in the same-storyline books. However, prototypes with a high level of interactivity could have a negative influence on children’s reading concentration. The research findings are important in determining how to design digital content for children.