V. K. Günther, P. Schäfer, B. J. Holzner, and G. W. Kemmler, “Long-term improvements in cognitive performance through computer-assisted cognitive training: a pilot study in a residential home for older people,” Aging & Mental Health, vol. 7, pp. 200–2006, May 2003. [PDF]

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This paper describes the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the effect of a computer-assisted cognitive training software on aging-associated memory deficits, information processing speed, learning, etc. The authors conducted a longitudinal study with 19 residents of a home for older people. Cognitive tests were administered prior to the program, immediately after, and after a period of five months to assess the effectiveness of the cognitive training.  

Participants were asked to participate in 14 weeks of cognitive training program consisting of 45 minutes each week. The psychometric test battery was administered three times and consisted of two tests: the California Verbal Learning Test (Delis et al, 1987) and the Nurnberger-Aging-Inventory (NAI, Oswald and Fleishman, 1986). The study used “Cognition I”, developed by Marker (1992), which includes tasks that are designed to increase attention, verbal performance, and general knowledge.

When comparing performance pre-training and immediately post training, significant improvements were observed in the majority of cognitive functions. Verbal and visual, secondary and long-term memory, information processing speed, learning, and interference tendency improved significantly.

Gaze and Gestures in Telepresence: multimodality, embodiment, and roles of collaboration

Mauro Cherubini, Rodrigo de Oliveira, Nuria Oliver, Christian Ferran

(Submitted on 18 Jan 2010)

This paper proposes a controlled experiment to further investigate the usefulness of gaze awareness and gesture recognition in the support of collaborative work at a distance. We propose to redesign experiments conducted several years ago with more recent technology that would: a) enable to better study of the integration of communication modalities, b) allow users to freely move while collaborating at a distance and c) avoid asymmetries of communication between collaborators.

[PDF]

Position paper, International Workshop New Frontiers in Telepresence 2010, part of CSCW2010, Savannah, GA, USA, 7th of February, 2010. [conf. URL]

SQUARE has been defined as the PayPal for the real world. It allows user to accept micro payments almost everywhere there is a GSM connection:

Square uses a small card scanner which hooks up to a mobile by plugging straight into the audio-in jack. It lets you make physical credit card transaction payments, instantly. Think PayPal but for the physical world. At the moment it works on both the iPhone and Android handsets. […more]

I believe this is an interesting application because it might allow to extend further the concept of virtual economy allowing users to create virtual currencies as forms of payment. Of course, enhancing the range of companies that have access to credit card payments has also social implications for the management of the credit as some people might might be lend to spend more than what they can afford.

Mark Twain (1924) probably had politicians in mind when he reiterated Disraeli’s famous remark (”There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”). Scientists, we hope, would never use data in such a selective manner to suit their own ends. But, alas, the analysis of data is often the source of some exasperation even in an academic context. On hearing comments like ‘the result of this experiment was inconclusive, so we had to use statistics’, we are frequently left wondering as to what strange tricks have been played on the data.

When I was a child I really enjoyed playing with this interactive books. I recently bumped into this web site that analyzes the interaction design of those artifacts and explains eloquently how they works.

As a child of the 80s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were a fixture of my rainy afternoons. My elementary school library kept a low, fairly unmaintained-looking shelf of them hidden in one of its back corners. Whether this non-marquee placement was an attempt by the librarians to deemphasize the books in favor of ‘serious’ (children’s) literature or was simply my good luck I still haven’t worked out. But it meant there was a place that I could retreat to and dive into unfamiliar worlds without distraction.

A lot of what I read in those days served a similar purpose. A narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.

Mafalda, la hija pródiga del dibujante argentino Quino, volvió de su exilio para defender a las mujeres de Silvio Berlusconi, primer ministro de Italia. La niña bonaerense repite lo que le replicaron ayer: “No soy una mujer a su disposición”. El diario italiano La Repubblica publica el cartón de Quino en toda su extensión.

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Franklin, V. L., Waller, A., Pagliari, C., and Greene, S. A. A randomized controlled trial of Sweet Talk, a text-messaging system to support young people with diabetes. Diabetic Medicine 23, 12 (2006), 1332–1338. [PDF]

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This paper describes Sweet Talk a system that is used to enhance self-efficacy and facilitate uptake of intensive insuline theraphy and improve glycaemic control in patients. The system was tested with 126 patients. Sweet Talk was associated with improvement in diabetes selef.efficacy and self-reported adherence. Participants felt that Sweet Talk improved their self-management.

Consolvo, S., Everitt, K., Smith, I., and Landay, J. A. Design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity. In Proceedings of CHI’06 (Montréal, Canada, April 22-27 2006), pp. 457–466. [PDF]

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This paper presents the results of a field study involving the use of Huston, a protype mobile application for encouraging activity by sharing step cound with friends.

The authors build three versions of Huston for the pilot study: a baseline, personal, and sharing. During the first three weeks all three groups used the baseline version of Huston which was used to gather the data needed to establish the individual daily step goals. Then they provided one group with the personal version of Huston and two other groups with a sharing version of the application. The personal version provided a daily goal, indication of progress, and recognition for meeting the goal. The sharing version had an additional feature which allowed the users to share the physical-activity related information with members of their group.

They found that the sharing groups were significantly more likely to meet their goal than participants in the personal group.

Maitland, J., Sherwood, S., Barkhuus, L., Anderson, I., Hall, M., Brown, B., Chalmers, M., and Muller, H. Increasing the awareness of daily activity levels with pervasive computing. In Pervasive Health Conference and Workshops (Innsbruck, Austria, Nov 29 – Dec 1 2006), pp. 1–9. [PDF]

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The author of this work aimed at designing a system for motivating physical activity that could be adopted without extra equipment. The argument was that specialized technology for sending physical states of the user are indeed useful but can reduce the widespread adoption of a particular technology. They designed Shakra, an application for mobile phones that was able to detect the fluctuactions in the GSM network and use this information to infer the activity level of the user. This information was then used to inform a group of peers to stimulate competition and support self-awareness of activity levels. The authors critic the transteoretical model because it tries to explain motivation using only intrinsic factors, while communicty influence might just be as important as self-motivation.

They tested the Shakra prototype with three groups of users and they found that the participants were more active when they could see each other’s activity level then during the control periods.

Toscos, T., Faber, A., Connelly, K., and Upoma, A. M. Encouraging physical activity in teens: Can technology help reduce barriers to physical activity in adolescent girls? In Proceedings of Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth’08) (Tampere, Finland, Jan 30 – Feb 1 2008), pp. 218–221. [PDF]

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This article reports the finding from a three week field trial of technology designed to encourage physical activity in teenage girls by leveraging the power of personal relationships. The author provided 10 subjects with a mobile phone application and a pedometer which work together to provide a group support sytem that promotes walking towards a self-established daily step goal. Entered step counts are shared within the group with text messages.

The authors found that automated messages from the sytem were perceived negatively from the participants. More importantly, they found that competition between friends can be a fun way to create motivation for excercise but if competition is taken too far it may contribute to bad feelings and or bad behavior. Finally, they found that the intimacy of a small group of friends was consistently reported by participants as a benefit. The challenge of persuasive technology is to allow for good peer pressure while minimizing opportunities for bad peer pressure.