Since 15 March 2021, this page is not updated anymore and serves purely as an archive of previous activities. The webpage of Christian Sandor’s new team is now located at: here.

Alvaro Casinelli’s new team webpage will be announced soon. In the meantime, you can find out more about his work at https://www.alvarocassinelli.com.

Practical Use of a Remote Movable Avatar Robot with an Immersive Interface for Seniors

Abstract

Societal aging is an inevitable social problem in many developed countries. In order to manage this issue, it is necessary to drastically change the welfare security and labor system of relevant societies. We have proposed mosaic-type work'' in which a singlevirtual worker” is synthesized based on individual workers and seniors through seamless information sharing. In this paper, we specifically focus on the spatial part of the mosaic, namely, the spatial mosaic,'' for enabling seniors to work without the burden of movement. Towards the actualization of this concept, we aimed to develop senior-friendly mobile avatar robots that can fit into seniors' daily lives. First, we analyzed problems of seniors' telecommunication with telepresence robots, and two elemental interfaces, thephysically operable interface” and the ``acoustic zooming interface.” The former is a senior-friendly interface that the seniors can manipulate with their motion, and the latter enables the user to listen to sounds in a specified area that the user can adjust. In order to discuss integrated interface designs, we conducted two exploratory experiments to evaluate the performance of these systems.

Publication
Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Aging and Assistive Environments