 |
|
| Future Interaction Technology Lab · Department of Computer Science · Swansea University · Wales | |
FIT Lab research areasThe FIT Lab focuses on leading work that fall in line with our view of Grand Challenges and making the future safer and more enjoyable. Our research, funded by the EPSRC, Royal Society, Microsoft and others, aims at improving the quality of interactive devices - from web sites to medical devices, and from digital libraries to mobile computing in South Africa. Briding the Rural Divide Photo by Sam Beebe/Ecotrust Access to digital services is unevenly distributed across the UK and the urban-rural divide is particularly pronounced. A great deal of effort is being invested in providing universal access, but the development of services that meet rural demand is also needed to engage rural communities in Digital Britain and enhance their stake in the Digital Economy. This project seeks to bridge the rural divide through the development of novel mapping services that augment a broad range of activities underpinning the rural economy; activities such as walking, cycling, canoeing, bird-watching, and other everyday activities that sustain the rural economy. Specifically, the project seeks to develop community-based maps that enhance our engagement with the countryside and novel data services that enable individuals to input and/or access digital content in the field. By developing these services in the wild through direct user participation, the research will provide a blueprint for broader roll-out and provision of services that meet rural need. Contact: Prof Matt Jones CHI+MED CHI+MED (Computer-Human Interaction for Medical Devices) is a major new research project to improve the usability and safety of interactive medical devices, such as infusion devices, glucometers and vital signs monitors - devices that have a user interface and are designed to be used by people without extensive technical training. Incorrect user programming or readings can, and unfortunately does, result in incorrect treatment, even patient death. Contact: Prof Harold Thimbleby  CHARMCHARM, funded by the EPSRC Digital Economies programme, employs digital technologies as a means of providing individuals with feedback about their own and others' sustainability behaviours. Thus, the three-year project examines the potential for telling people what other people do - the so-called 'social norm' approach - to change individual practices and behaviours in socially-desirable ways.
Contact: Dr Parisa Eslambolchilar
Exploratory Search Interfaces There are many situations where search interfaces like Google do not provide the best support for searchers, like when doctors need to find the most up-to-date research on a topic. Similarly, patent officers need to complete a comprehensive search to make sure no prior art exists for a new application. Everyday users have to make sense of information and make difficult decisions, like planning a holiday or buying a new car. This project focuses on how we can evaluate search interfaces, and has so far produced a tool called Sii (the Search Interface Inspector). Sii can inspect search interfaces, and even prototype designs, for how well they will support different types of search tactics. Uniquely, Sii also evaluates how useful the design is for different types of searchers, whether they know exactly what they want, or are hoping to stumble across a good bargain. Contact: Dr Max L. Wilson Taking on the Teenagers - Using Adolescent Energy to Reduce Energy Use Taking on the Teenagers - Using Adolescent Energy to Reduce Energy Use is a three-year project that aims to investigate the use of digital technology to change the domestic energy-use behaviour of teenagers. The underlying research hypothesis is that "teenagers can, if instructed and informed about their energy use in an appropriate way, be instrumental in changing not only their own behaviours but also in changing the behaviours of those around them". Research questions that arise from this hypothesis are "How can teenagers be best informed and instructed?" "How are appropriate technologies for teenagers designed?" and "How can behaviour change be measured and evaluated?" These questions will be answered during the research work. Contact: Prof Matt Jones Point of Care NanoTechnology The project involves in vivo and in vitro disease model (Stroke) work at University of London, and work intended to enable our device to perform a therapeutic function. In this way we propose to lay the foundations for a POC system for Patient Self Assessment and Patient Self Management in anticoagulant applications, in addition to a new technological basis for thromboembolic disease screening. The project also includes anticoagulated Stroke patient volunteers at Morriston NHS Hospital. We have a highly multidisciplinary Team with internationally leading expertise in rheometry and haemorheology; nanotechnology, nanomaterials and nanofabrication; nanomedicine and drug delivery; and human-device interaction aspects of medical instrument design. Contact: Prof Harold Thimbleby Social Media Analysis There is a lot we can learn from social media. Twitter is an open free forum of communication and even conversation. For the first time, we now have access to almost unlimited amounts of digital data that we can learn from. For example, what is beautiful? What do people consider too be good architecture? What is good food? There are many challenges in this space, including visualisation, text analysis, exploration, and sensemaking. To begin, we have focused on something more pragmatic: analysing information seeking. We are building a classification of searching scenarios as they are described over social media. Contact: Dr Max L. Wilson Community-generated media for the next billion This project aims to contribute significant insights into how social-media sharing systems should be designed and deployed to benefit many billions of people beyond the mainstream "developed" world. Our target communities live in both "developing" countries and those that are marginalised in places such as the UK. We will do so by exploring a series of novel information ecologies for media sharing in a highly populated, but remote, rural development context. Working with Transcape, our main project partner, we will build on a current wireless network to establish digital media libraries connecting multiple locations across 5 villages in the Wild Coast of South Africa. We will use this infrastructure to examine the interplay of mobile phones, pico-projectors, situated displays, word-of-mouth storytelling and paper-based artefacts to create and exchange multimedia content for education, health, agriculture, local social welfare and community decision-making. We will ground our innovations in local social systems, undertake participative design activities and iteratively test novel solutions and ecologies. Contact: Prof Matt Jones Formal Tools for HCI Design There is a long tradition in formal HCI of using mathematics to describe the user interface, along with other aspects of 'the system', such as the user. Building on this tradition, we have already shown how a mathematical model of a interface can be used to identify inconsistencies in the design, which are liable to catch users out. Our research will develop and generalise similar techniques, to describe common notions of good interface design, such as simplicity and consistency, in useful mathematical models. Our research will embed the theory in analysis and evaluation tools, so it can be applied to real device designs. This will make the theory base available both to designers and to researchers. A libary of device designs will be built, which will both help demonstrate the tool and its underlying theory and their benefits, as well as allow researchers to experiment with and validate the theories on a variety of devices and scenarios. The library will also support other approaches; it is intended to be of far wider scope and benefit than this project alone. Contact: Prof Harold Thimbleby Multimodal Negotiated Interaction Our proposal is to investigate an alternative means of allowing users to interact with content and services in their environment such that the actions they make, movements, gestures, etc., and feedback they receive are continuous, with the user and system negotiating their interactions in a fluid, dynamic way. We believe the appropriate comparison would be dancing, rather than the current command & control metaphor. When someone dances with a partner there is a soft ebb and flow of control; sometimes one person leads, sometimes the other, this changing fluidly as they dance. We are proposing a similar interaction between a user and computer, where sometimes the user leads and at other times the computer according to the context of the interaction. This contrasts with most current approaches where one agent, be it the human or the computer, pre-empts the other and where most interaction is driven by events and proceeds to varying degrees in rigid, over specified ways
Contact: Prof Matt Jones  UCLIC+FIT Platform GrantInteractive systems in health raise many problems of interest to interaction researchers. Clinical appliances such as syringe pumps have apparently simple interfaces that nonetheless have contributed to medical errors, while the proliferation of online material leads to many patients attempting to self-diagnose or understand a chronic condition. The design of effective interactions with healthcare systems requires a multidisciplinary approach; conversely, we can test and extend HCI approaches by working in this demanding setting. For example, the design of medical appliances raises challenges of developing formal modelling techniques that can be used to analyse complex, often messy, systems. Similarly studies of patient's internet searches, and the rich interactions they have with and around information, challenge our understanding of interactive information seeking. This Platform grant brings together two research groups with complementary skills and approaches, and a track record of effective collaboration. It will provide base-line support for developing a research agenda in "healthy interactive systems", by which we mean systems that are dependable, usable and appropriate to their contexts of use, and that empower their users, augmenting people's understanding and capabilities. Contact: Prof Harold Thimbleby Some older projects
| |
 | |
|
Future Interaction Technology Lab
| |