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.

Exploiting Mobile Gamification to Foster Physical Activity: A Remotely-Managed Field Study.

Physical inactivity is a plague for public health, especially in Western Countries. Among the countermeasures, mobile applications promoting physical activity seem particularly promising, thanks to the spread and adoption of mobile devices. However, the dropout rates of users are high, thereby calling for strategies to increase retention rates.

Co-Design in Electrical Medical Beds with Caregivers.

Among the plethora of instruments present in healthcare environments, the hospital bed is undoubtedly one of the most important for patients and caregivers. However, their design usually follows a top-down approach without considering end-users opinions and desires. Exploiting Human-centered design (HCD) permits these users to have a substantial role in the final product outcome.

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.

Neurophysiological and behavioural effects of conventional and high definition tDCS.

High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) seems to overcome a drawback of traditional bipolar tDCS: the wide-spread diffusion of the electric field. Nevertheless, most of the differences that characterise the two techniques are based on mathematical simulations and not on real, behavioural and neurophysiological, data. The study aims to compare a widespread tDCS montage (i.

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.

Integrating neurophysiologic relevance feedback in intent modeling for information retrieval.

The use of implicit relevance feedback from neurophysiology could deliver effortless information retrieval. However, both computing neurophysiologic responses and retrieving documents are characterized by uncertainty because of noisy signals and incomplete or inconsistent representations of the data. We present the first-of-its-kind, fully integrated information retrieval system that makes use of online implicit relevance feedback generated from brain activity as measured through electroencephalography (EEG), and eye movements.

False Identity Detection Using Complex Sentences.

The use of faked identities is a current issue for both physical and online security. In this paper, we test the differences between subjects who report their true identity and the ones who give fake identity responding to control, simple, and complex questions. Asking complex questions is a new procedure for increasing liars' cognitive load, which is presented in this paper for the first time.

Covert lie detection using keyboard dynamics.

Identifying the true identity of a subject in the absence of external verification criteria (documents, DNA, fingerprints, etc.) is an unresolved issue. Here, we report an experiment on the verification of fake identities, identified by means of their specific keystroke dynamics as analysed in their written response using a computer keyboard.

The detection of faked identity using unexpected questions and mouse dynamics.

The detection of faked identities is a major problem in security. Current memory-detection techniques cannot be used as they require prior knowledge of the respondent's true identity. Here, we report a novel technique for detecting faked identities based on the use of unexpected questions that may be used to check the respondent identity without any prior autobiographical information.

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.

Rehabilitation Tool: A Pilot Study On A New Neuropsychological Interactive Training System.

Over the past 20 years, research has led to the development of new technologies to improve the quality of life of brain-damaged user. Introduction of new neuropsychological rehabilitation tools based both on the new knowledge on brain plasticity and on the latest developments in computer sciences is both necessary and scientifically challenging for health professionals, particularly neuropsychologists. Here we present a pilot study in which the use of a new Apple

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.

Test-retest consistency of Virtual Week: A task to investigate prospective memory.

The present study reports test-retest consistency of Virtual Week, a well-known measure of prospective memory (PM) performance. PM is the memory associated with carrying out actions at a specific moment in the future. Patients with neurological disorders as well as healthy older adults often report PM dysfunctions that affect their everyday living.

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.

Covert visuospatial attention orienting in a brain-computer interface for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients.

Background: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow people to control devices by translating brain signals into commands. BCIs represent a concrete solution with regard to communication and motor control disabilities of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Most of the BCIs rely on visual interfaces in which patients must move their eyes to achieve efficient BCI control.

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.

How tool use and arm position affect peripersonal space representation.

Experiment 1 investigated whether tool use can expand the peripersonal space into the very far extrapersonal space. Healthy participants performed line bisection in peripersonal and extrapersonal space using wooden sticks up to a maximum of 240 cm. Participants misbisected to the left of the true midpoint, both for lines presented in peripersonal and for those presented in extrapersonal space, confirming a peripersonal space expansion up to a distance of 240 cm.

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.

An exploratory fNIRS study with immersive virtual reality: a new method for technical implementation.

For over two decades Virtual Reality (VR) has been used as a useful tool in several fields, from medical and psychological treatments, to industrial and military applications. Only in recent years researchers have begun to study the neural correlates that subtend VR experiences. Even if the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is the most common and used technique, it suffers several limitations and problems.