Advanced workstations and collaborative robots: exploiting eye-tracking and cardiac activity indices to unveil senior workers' mental workload in assembly tasks.

As a result of Industry 5.0's technological advancements, collaborative robots (cobots) have emerged as pivotal enablers for refining manufacturing processes while re-focusing on humans. However, the successful integration of these cutting-edge tools hinges on a better understanding of human factors when interacting with such new technologies, eventually fostering workers' trust and acceptance and promoting low-fatigue work.

Modeling the Conversation with Digital Health Assistants in Adherence Apps: Some Considerations on the Similarities and Differences with Familiar Medical Encounters.

Digital health assistants (DHAs) are conversational agents incorporated into health systems' interfaces, exploiting an intuitive interaction format appreciated by the users. At the same time, however, their conversational format can evoke interactional practices typical of health encounters with human doctors that might misguide the users. Awareness of the similarities and differences between novel mediated encounters and more familiar ones helps designers avoid unintended expectations and leverage suitable ones.

Sharing the Space With the "Victim" Can Increase Help Rates. A Study With Virtual Reality.

A typical protocol for the psychological study of helping behavior features two core roles: a help seeker suffering from some personal or situational emergency (often called "victim") and a potential helper. The setting of these studies is such that the victim and the helper often share the same space. We wondered whether this spatial arrangement might affect the help rate.

Smart Co-housing for People With Disabilities: A Preliminary Assessment of Caregivers' Interaction With the DOMHO System.

Millions of people with motor and cognitive disabilities face hardships in daily life due to the limited accessibility and inclusiveness of living spaces which limit their autonomy and independence. The DOMHO project deals with these fundamental issues by leveraging an innovative solution: a smart co-housing apartment. Besides, the project aims at exploiting the well know effects of co-housing on individuals' health and well-being in combination with ambient assisted living technologies.

Designing "Safer Water." A Virtual Reality Tool for the Safety and the Psychological Well-Being of Citizens Exposed to the Risk of Natural Disasters.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a popular technology to recreate reality-like scenarios, including dangerous ones, in a realistic but safe way. Because of this potential, VR based research has been applied in psychology studies to provide training and education about how to behave in emergencies such as fires, earthquakes, floods, or typhoons. All these different virtual scenarios have been built to observe how people react to emergencies, what behaviors they adopted, what level of stress is generated, and finally, how to increase citizens' safety.

Facing with Collaborative Robots: The Subjective Experience in Senior and Younger Workers.

In the past few years, collaborative robots (i.e., cobots) have been largely adopted within industrial manufacturing.

Investigating the Accessibility of Voice Assistants With Impaired Users: Mixed Methods Study.

Background: Voice assistants allow users to control appliances and functions of a smart home by simply uttering a few words. Such systems hold the potential to significantly help users with motor and cognitive disabilities who currently depend on their caregiver even for basic needs (eg, opening a door). The research on voice assistants is mainly dedicated to able-bodied users, and studies evaluating the accessibility of such systems are still sparse and fail to account for the participants' actual motor, linguistic, and cognitive abilities.

The Persuasive Effect of Social Network Feedback on Mediated Communication: A Case Study in a Real Organization.

This study focuses on social feedback, namely on information on the outcome of users' online activity indirectly generated by other users, and investigates in a real setting whether it can affect subsequent activity and, if so, whether participants are aware of that. SkyPas, an application that calculates, transmits, and displays social feedback, was embedded in a common instant messaging service (Skype(™)) and used during a 7-week trial by 24 office workers at a large business organization. The trial followed an ABA scheme in which the B phase was the feedback provision phase.

Evaluating User Experience of Augmented Reality Eyeglasses.

Augmented reality based applications have been experimented with in various contexts. Typically, the interaction is supported by handled devices, which, in specific scenarios, may hinder the interaction and spoil the experience of use, as the user is forced to hold the device and to keep her eyes on it at all times. The recent launch on the market of light-weight, unobtrusive head-mounted displays may change this circumstance.

Designing a serious game for in-field interventions to promote nightlife well-being.

Nightlife well-being interventions, although much needed, face several challenges related to the specificity of the context addressed. We argue that a game-facilitated intervention helps with facing these challenges. The characteristics of a game developed to this goal and the results of user tests conducted in situ are presented.

Involving elderly users in design: techniques to collect preferences for Interactive Digital Television.

SeniorChannel is a European project that explores the potential of using an Interactive Digital Television (IDTV) to turn elderly people at home into an active audience. Techniques to involve elderly users in the requirement collection during the design phase should take into account the decrease in perception, cognition and motor abilities associated with aging. The paper describes the specific solutions adopted here to elicit users' contribution, as well as the contributed preferences in terms of IDTV content and interaction modalities.

Using an eye-tracker to assess the effectiveness of a three-dimensional riding simulator in increasing hazard perception.

A crucial factor contributing to the high rate of road accidents involving young people is inexperience, in particular the inability to promptly identify risky situations. The aim of this study is to test the effectiveness of a riding simulator in improving this skill in young inexperienced riders. We use the first fixation latency to measure the improvement in detecting the hazardous object.

Designing a serious game for young users: the case of happy farm.

The interactivity and attractiveness of video games are increasingly deployed for educational and training purposes in what are called "serious games." This paper describes Happy Farm, a serious game targeting young people and aimed at increasing their awareness of the risks connected to the consumption of psychoactive substances. The development of the game is driven by the premise that credibility and usability are pre-conditions for persuasion.

Interacting via SMS: practices of social closeness and reciprocation.

This paper deals with the sequential structure of communication via short message service (SMS) among adults and young adults, aged 25-35 and 50-65, respectively. A collection of 173 SMS exchanges for personal communication, spontaneously composed by participants, was gathered. Each exchange was photographed from the display of the participant's mobile phone and then analysed with the approach of conversation analysis.

Ergonomics of virtual environments for clinical use.

Usability is defined by the International Standards Organization as "the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which a certain user may achieve a specific objective in a particular environment" (ISO DIS 9241-11). This definition highlights the need for considering the specific destination of a certain technology and reflects the current trends in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In compliance with these remarks, the evaluation will be described here of a Virtual Environment (VE) for the treatment of male sexual dysfunctions; the common assumption will be avoided according to which a VE is a space separated from its "real" surroundings [6, 7] and the full environment where the Virtual session takes place will be addressed instead.