Touchless interaction in surgery

 From the key insights, it is said that the touchless interaction in surgery should be designed to work within operating-theatre practices. When I first saw it, I came up with the future cinema, I think  there are kind of similar because they both rely on the system to do the work.

    However, this kind of advanced knowledge still remains many problems, firstly, such practices are not risk free. Especially, for the long procedures, since it needs to take plenty of time which can be delayed, in other way, it can increase both financial cost and clinical risk. Also, the process of using such technology is very complex, so the implementation and refinement are very necessary for th touches system to develop. Moreover, operating on the patients need really high technology which should do the work very correctively step by step, it is not allowed to make a little mistake during the process, so it requires a much precise set of image manipulation options rather than simple adjustment of various image parameters.Moreover, the technology also combines the use of voice in the system with the gestural modality to achieve control. In designing the system we had to address notable socio-technical concerns with broader significance for how to think about system development.The other point requires to pay attention to is about collaboration and control, as I mentioned before, the surgeon is very serious about the technology to utilize, so the collaboration for each patient and procedure should be super clear. Moreover, the system engagement and disengagement are also problem, in specific, sometimes gesturing may be not correct to connect with the screen. I think it is kind of messy for people to interact with such system, like the article said, the design itself should be not merely focused on the technology but also the clinical demands. The technology itself should not be just innovative in also needs to concern the usability and safety from my personal perspective, developer also should understand what’s the first importance for the clinicians, so that the system can be more useful in the medical aspects.

VoxBox: a Tangible Machine that Gathers Opinions from the Public at Events

 Basically the Voxbox is designed as a tangible system to gather people’s opinions in interactive way through roughly 4 steps like questions, completion, answers and results.

     As we all know traditionally we always use the surveys to research people’ reaction, but since it has the limitation of approaching people,so in this way the voxbox which is made of both physical input and output devices tried to solve this problem which can invite people to use it in positive way. 

     Regarding to the background, the voxbox which include the use of large screens, mobile phones and voting box elicit opinions with clear and easy-understandable affordances. Meanwhile the researchers also focus on attracting public attention to let people approach the Voxbox through designing the voxbox as interesting and playful as possible.

     The voxbox is intended to stand out as modular system, at first, grouping similar questions mainly is about the questionnaire with a logical flow of questions. And then, after arranging the questions, we should encourage completion and show progress, the voxbox is visible for people to check the completion, the progress is also shown by lighting panels one by one. The next step is to gather answers to closed and open questions, they try to use the phone handset to give the answers willingly. Finally, the voxbox which make difference from the traditional methods to gather people’s opinion is  that people can see the collected results.

     According to the design and implemention od voxbox, it is mentioned that the voxbox was inspired by the archaic computer game” the incredible machine.” In details the questions group was divided into 5 types such as demographics, mood, the crowd, the event and open questions, so I think the difficult part is to match the different questions with different physical mechanisms. Since the voxbox inside is kind of complicated, which need the implementation to test it can work well or not. Voxbox was controlled by open source Arduino technologies. Moreover, voxbox was designed to not only allow people to share data on their demographics and views, but to also give them the opportunity to learn more about the opinions held by others.As for the initial deployment, the voxbox is concerned to connect the relationship between the government, digital democracy and the public. And from the article we can know that Voxbox was really well-welcomed. it is written that most users answered the open questions through the phone, and answer the questions in positive way. To some extent, this kind of way to gather public opinion is very effective, which just let them approach it by themselves rather than invite them.

      Since when I see how popular the Voxbox is, I will say it is really a successful work to attract public attention which take effective function on the gathering public opinions, but I think nowadays people use internet more that the product itself, so I just guess even the voxbox seems effective to let people approach it, but the people can know or use it, it’s a big problem. 

      

The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

 This paper also kind of relates the communication of emotion, especially for the touch. So from this point, the Haptic Creature project  that mimics a small pet seek to develop a deeper understanding of touch interaction between human and robot which contains companionship.

      Overall, the Haptic Creature Project mainly focuses the goal about building up companionship between human and robot by investigating the use of affective touch. The approach is to leverage research in human-animal interaction by developing a robotic creature which interacts with the human through the modality of touch. And the Haptic Creature project is influenced by several parts like social interactive robotics, affect, touch and human-animal interaction as well. 

      For instance, by the author’s order, I want to mention something about the socially interactive robotics and affect display. As the author mentioned the affect display with the vision and audition play an important role on the social interaction,the use of facial expressions is commonly used to convey emotion.

    Secondarily, regarding to affective touch and human-animal interaction, since the research focuses on the influence of affective touch on companionship, there are some reasons such as gender, familiarity, social status and culture which attribute the affective touch. The other one is differentiation,and the differentiation mainly have two parts, one is the concentration on the modality, another is the level of zoomorphism.

     Therefore, roughly if we intend to explain to people how the haptic creature is, in the article it said that the haptic creature is a robotic device tat mimics a small lap animal such as a pet cat or dog, in this way which really makes a model of the affective interaction between human and animal. First of all, the creature interacts with the world primarily through the modality of touch and regulates its emotional state based on this interaction.

        Nevertheless, the design consideration covers three major ones for the Haptic Creature, there are the interaction centers, providing an organic interaction whereby the sensing and in the level of zoomorphism. And then, the development phases are being conducted in three parts which are Wizard of Oz prototype, automated prototype and final creature.from those three, I would like to talk a little more about the automated prototype, this prototype is being used for rapid implementation and testing of software, hardware, and interaction techniques. Also, the haptic creature also contains the high-level architecture with  low-level sensing, gesture recognizer, emoter, physical renderer, and low-level actuation.By those components the haptic creature can response to the human appropriately. Personally, I think the emoter has a huge function of architecture. also, those different components take affect with each other.

     Since the author did the user studies which is important from my personal view, too. Through the preliminary investigation,interaction decomposition and companionship, the author try to get knowledge of the use of affective touch in socially interactive robotics.

    Above all, the haptic creature focus on the affect of the touch interaction. In fact, I think the tough is very important for users to interact with the products which relates with people’s emotion and feelings, so besides developing the quality, such affective touch can offer beneficial function.

“Moon Phrases”: A Social Media Faciliated Tool for Emotional Reflection and Wellness

   After I read the article which talks about the “moon phrase”, I was kind of getting interest of this. Actually before, I also curious about the people’s posts in the social media, sometime I found people don’t want to share the emotions and words with you face to face, but they will choose write it down in the social media like twitter, Facebook or Instagram. 

    Roughly, the moon phrases is a tool like “behavioral fingerprint” to track the emotion and linguistic expression on the social media which can record and reflect individuals’ own behavior over time.

    Firstly, why it’s necessary to invent the “moon phrases”, I think the significant reason is that emotion is closely related with our health and body which easily can impact some aspects of our lives. in this way the moon phrases can offer people awareness and acceptance of their feelings, so they might adjust their situation in time which can help individuals to work or enjoy social life efficiently. Additionally, in order to avoid getting disorder, for people  the moon phrases record the historical posting over time to facilitate emotional wellness.

   Second, social network and environment take an important function on individual’s emotional wellness. Therefore, the expression of language can affect human intentions, moods and disorders effectively. Since people use there language in the social media, to sone extent, the social media can provide a signal for people to figure out the emotional behaviors. The tool for emotional wellness seems very valuable for  people to in corporate mood together data, which also can encourage people’s health self-reflection.

    Third, regarding to the design process, the author intended to produce low-fidelity prototypes and gather reactions and comments based on the six media users’ experience. The patterns and levels of activity can define the interactions. In details, the moon phrases can offer a good way to observe how individual’s emotion change with the usage of various style categories like interrelated patterns of cognitive processes, physiological arousal, and behavioral reactions. Also, the moon phrases pay attention to the privacy and ethical considerations.

      Moreover, the moon phrases have the part of limitations and future directions. 

     In general, I think the moon phrases are very valuable for people to utilize, nowadays the emotion really became an important reason  to influence people’s life and work, even for the healthy. So through the moon phrases people can easily get reflection and awareness of their trend of moods, personally, not only it develops the significance of the social media, but also it provides good benefits for people to improve their life quality.