Gesture Quality Research Articles

Recipient design in human–robot interaction: the emergent assessment of a robot’s competence

People meeting a robot for the first time do not know what it is capable of and therefore how to interact with it—what actions to produce, and how to produce them. Despite social robotics’ long-standing interest in the effects of robots’ appearance and conduct on users, and efforts to identify factors likely to improve human–robot interaction, little attention has been paid to how participants evaluate their robotic partner in the unfolding of actual interactions. This paper draws from qualitative analyses of video-recorded interactions between a robot and groups of participants, in the framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We analyse the particular ways in which participants shape their embodied actions, how they can reproduce a prior action that failed to obtain a response from the robot; and how they explore the robot’s embodied nature. We find a set of recurrent methods or practices, showing that robot-recipient design displays not only participants’ initial assumptions about the robot’s competences, but also more importantly perhaps their continuous assessment of the robot’s behaviour, and their attempts to adapt to it. Participants locally produce and constantly revise their understanding of the robot as a more or less competent co-participant, drawing from its past, current, and projected conduct and responsiveness. We discuss the implications of these findings for research in robotics and human–robot interactions, and the value of the approach to shed new light on old questions by paying attention to the quality of gesture and the sequential organisation of interaction.

Telestration in the Teaching of Basic Surgical Skills: A Randomized Trial

To evaluate how an affordable course using telestration with augmented reality can be compared to the traditional teaching of basic surgical skills. Prospective, randomized and blinded study. Faculty of Medicine of PortoUniversity. Twenty medical students without any experience in basic surgical skills were randomized into two different learning groups: telestration and traditional teaching (on-site mentoring) groups. Five different types of sutures were taught: the single interrupted, the cruciate mattress, the horizontal mattress, the vertical mattress and the simple continuous sutures. Data was obtained on the time taken to learn each of the techniques and to perform each exercise without any support from the faculty, tension of the suture, quality of the procedure using a modified Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills and participants' answers to a Likert questionnaire in terms of their learning experience, confidence, and self-evaluation. Trainees in the telestration group were globally faster when performing independently (1393.40 [SD 288.89] vs 1679.00 [SD 328.22] seconds, p = 0.04) particularly during the cruciate mattress suture (235.50 [SD 61.81] vs 290.00 [SD 68.77] seconds, p = 0.05) and the simple continuous suture (492.40 [SD 87.49] vs 630.30 [SD 132.34] seconds, p = 0.01).Time needed for students to learn the procedures was similar between the groups. There were also no statistically significant differences in terms of the quality of the surgical gesture, tension of the suture, self-evaluation or confidence. A basic surgical skills course using telestration through a head-mounted device with augmented reality capabilities can be a viable alternative to traditional teaching, considering time and quality of the gesture. Though costs can discourage from using this technology in basic procedures, the use of free software may turn it into an affordable option in the context of distant learning.

Influence of visual control on the quality of graphic gesture in children with handwriting disorders

Handwriting disorders (HD) are considered one of the major public health problems among school-aged children worldwide with significant interference on academic performances. The current study hypothesized that HD could be partly explained by a deficit in sensory feedback processing during handwriting. To explore this hypothesis, we have analyzed the effect of vision suppression on postural-gestural and on spatial/temporal/kinematic organization of drawing during an early pre-scriptural loop task with a digital pen, under two conditions: eyes open and eyes closed. Data collected from 35 children with HD were compared to data collected from typical children (typical group) from primary schools. The HD group showed significantly poorer postural control and an improvement on the spatial/temporal/kinematic organization of drawings when they closed their eyes compared to eyes opened. While in the typical group, postural-gestural organization became significantly more mature but there was no significant influence found on spatial/temporal/kinematic parameters of the loops. Thus, handwriting disorders could be explained by both proprioceptive/kinesthetic feedback disabilities and a disruptive effect of the visual control on the quality of the pre-scriptural drawings among these children who have kinesthetic memory and visuospatial disabilities. The ability of directing the strokes would remain dependent on sensory feedbacks, themselves insufficiently efficient, which would lead to difficulties in reaching a proactive control of handwriting. This current research is a liable contribution to enhance clinical practice, useful in clinical decision-making processes for handwriting disorders remediation.

Medical heuristics and action-research: professionalism versus science

BackgroundProfessional knowledge aims at improving practice. It reduces uncertainty in decision-making, improves effectiveness in action and relevance in evaluation, stimulates reflexivity, and subjects practice to ethical standards. Heuristics is an approach to problem-solving, learning, and discovery employing a practical methodology that, although not optimal, is sufficient for achieving immediate goals. This article identifies the desirable, heuristic particularities of research in professional, medical practice; and it identifies what distinguishes this research from scientific research.Main textWe examine the limits of biomedical and sociological research to produce professional knowledge. Then, we derive the heuristic characteristics of professional research from a meta-analysis of two action-research projects aimed at securing access to essential generic drugs in Senegal and improving physicians’ self-assessment and healthcare coordination in Belgium.To study healthcare, biomedical sciences ignore how clinical decisions are implemented. Decisions are built into an articulated knowledge system, such as (clinical) epidemiology, where those studied are standardisable - while taking care of patients is an idiosyncratic, value-based, person-to-person process that largely eludes probabilistic methodologies. Social sciences also reach their limits here because descriptive, interpretative methods cannot help with gesture and speech quality, while the management of the patient’s suffering and risks makes each of them unique. Research into medical professionalism is normative as it is intended to formulate recommendations. Scientific data and descriptions are useful to the practitioner randomly, only from the similarities in the environment of the authors and their readers. Such recommendations can be conceived of as strategies, i.e., multi-resource and multi-stage action models to improve clinical and public health practice. Action learning and action-research are needed to design and implement these strategies, because their complexity implies trial and error. To validate a strategy, repeated experiences are needed. Its reproducibility assumes the description of the context. To participate in medical action-research, the investigator needs professional proficiency - a frequent difficulty in academic settings.ConclusionSome criteria to assess the relevance of publicly funded clinical and public health research can be derived from the difference between scientific and professional knowledge, i.e. the knowledge gained with real-life experience in the field.

An investigation into the relationship between Quality of pantomime gestures and visuospatial skills

While children with developmental language disorder or Williams syndrome appear to use hand gestures to compensate for specific cognitive and communicative difficulties, they have different cognitive strength-weakness profiles. Their semantic and visuospatial skills potentially affect gesture quality such as iconicity. The present study focuses on untangling the unique contribution of these skills in the quality of gestures. An explicit gesture elicitation task was presented to 25 participants with developmental language disorder between 7 and 10 years of age, 25 age-matched peers with typical development, and 14 participants with Williams Syndrome (8−23 years). They gestured pictures of objects without using speech (pantomime). The iconicity, semantic richness, and representation technique of the pantomimes were coded. Participants’ semantic association and visuospatial skills were formally assessed. Iconicity was slightly lower in individuals with Williams syndrome, which seems related to their visuospatial deficit. While semantic saliency was similar across participant groups, small differences in representation technique were found. Partial correlations showed that visuospatial skills and semantic skills were instrumental in producing clear pantomimes. These findings indicate that clinicians aiming to enhance individuals’ natural iconic gestures should consider achieved iconicity, particularly in individuals with low visuospatial skills.

EFFECT OF 8-WEEK MULTILATERAL TRAINING ON PHYSICAL AND TECHNICAL PERFORMANCE IN YOUNG KARATEKA

Karate training, a Japanese martial art, is considered enough to increase physical-motor and technical performance. Instructors seem to prefer only technical Karate training to other physical-motor training methods. Therefore, the purpose of the present investigation was to assess the effects of 8 weeks of multilateral training on the physical-motor performance and technical gesture quality in young karateka. Participants (8-10 years) were recruited from a karate school and pair-matched based on gender and then randomly assigned to either an experimental group (EG, n = 14) or a control group (CG, n = 14). The EG was trained three times per week on non-consecutive days replacing a part of karate training with a multilateral training (i.e. flexibility, balance, strength and coordination, 45 min.) without increasing the total training time (90 min.). At baseline and after 8-weeks all participants were tested on the sit and reach, stork balance stand, standing long jump, and Harre test, and the technical gesture quality through the prefixed decision-making criteria. After intervention, the EG group showed significantly improvement than CG in the sit and reach test (2.0 vs. 1.1 cm, p < 0.001, ES = 0.73) and standing long jump test (8.3 vs. -4.0 cm, p < 0.01, ES = 0.88). Furthermore, the subjective evaluation scores of the technical gesture were significantly enhanced ( p < 0.001, ES = 0.6 - 2.0) for EG in terms of technique, power, expressiveness and rhythm, whereas for CG the scores remained unchanged. Results suggested that incorporating a physical-motor training with a multilateral approach to karate technical sessions was more effective than technical training alone to improve physical-motor and technical performance in children. Article visualizations:

Effects of Varying Noise Levels and Lighting Levels on Multimodal Speech and Visual Gesture Interaction with Aerobots

This paper investigated the effects of varying noise levels and varying lighting levels on speech and gesture control command interfaces for aerobots. The aim was to determine the practical suitability of the multimodal combination of speech and visual gesture in human aerobotic interaction, by investigating the limits and feasibility of use of the individual components. In order to determine this, a custom multimodal speech and visual gesture interface was developed using CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) sphinx and OpenCV (Open source Computer Vision) libraries, respectively. An experiment study was designed to measure the individual effects of each of the two main components of speech and gesture, and 37 participants were recruited to participate in the experiment. The ambient noise level was varied from 55 dB to 85 dB. The ambient lighting level was varied from 10 Lux to 1400 Lux, under different lighting colour temperature mixtures of yellow (3500 K) and white (5500 K), and different background for capturing the finger gestures. The results of the experiment, which consisted of around 3108 speech utterance and 999 gesture quality observations, were presented and discussed. It was observed that speech recognition accuracy/success rate falls as noise levels rise, with 75 dB noise level being the aerobot’s practical application limit, as the speech control interaction becomes very unreliable due to poor recognition beyond this. It was concluded that multi-word speech commands were considered more reliable and effective than single-word speech commands. In addition, some speech command words (e.g., land) were more noise resistant than others (e.g., hover) at higher noise levels, due to their articulation. From the results of the gesture-lighting experiment, the effects of both lighting conditions and the environment background on the quality of gesture recognition, was almost insignificant, less than 0.5%. The implication of this is that other factors such as the gesture capture system design and technology (camera and computer hardware), type of gesture being captured (upper body, whole body, hand, fingers, or facial gestures), and the image processing technique (gesture classification algorithms), are more important in developing a successful gesture recognition system. Some further works were suggested based on the conclusions drawn from this findings which included using alternative ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) speech models and developing more robust gesture recognition algorithm.

Quality study of user activity using mobile device. Tap, double tap, flick gestures.

The article presents the results of research on the quality of gestures performed by users using a mobile device. As a mobile device, the Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone was used. The results of the research concern the basic gestures of tap, double tap and flick, and include the execution time and the precision of the gesture. The results take into account the division of users into age groups and groups using and not using a smartphone every day. A comparison of the designated characteristics between groups is presented. Research on other gestures will be presented in the next paper.

Pictogram-based mobile first medical aid communicator

Recent progress in communications technology has been very rapid. High-speed mobile Internet access and mobile devices have enabled the development of robust technologies such as machine translation, automated speech recognition, voice synthesis, and even speech-to-speech translation. Communication applications that support sign language recognition are also being introduced and upgraded. Nonetheless, people with speech, hearing, or mental impairment still require special communication assistance, especially for medical purposes; this makes their health and life dependent on other people. Automatic solutions for speech recognition or voice synthesis from the text are poor fits for communication in the medical domain because they are dependent on error-prone statistical models. Additionally, in emergency cases, rapid information exchange is essential. Systems dependent on manual text input are insufficient. Recently introduced systems for automatic sign language recognition are dependent on statistical models and image and gesture quality. Such systems remain in early development and are based mostly on minimal hand gestures unsuitable for medical purposes. Furthermore, Internet-dependent solutions cannot be used in most countries requiring humanitarian aid. We propose a high-speed, intuitive, Internet-free, voice-free, and text-free tool suited for emergency medical communication. Our solution is a pictogram-based communication application that provides easy communication means for individuals who are speech- or hearing-impaired, have mental health issues impairing communication, or non-natives who do not speak the local language. It provides support and clarification in communication with such people using intuitive icons and interactive symbols easy to find on a mobile device. Such pictogram-based communication can be quite effective and, ultimately, make some people’s lives happier, easier, and safer. We have developed a conceptual prototype of a patient-physician communicator on a smartwatch that can be used for local as well as remote communication.

A Cross-Lingual Mobile Medical Communication System Prototype for Foreigners and Subjects with Speech, Hearing, and Mental Disabilities Based on Pictograms

People with speech, hearing, or mental impairment require special communication assistance, especially for medical purposes. Automatic solutions for speech recognition and voice synthesis from text are poor fits for communication in the medical domain because they are dependent on error-prone statistical models. Systems dependent on manual text input are insufficient. Recently introduced systems for automatic sign language recognition are dependent on statistical models as well as on image and gesture quality. Such systems remain in early development and are based mostly on minimal hand gestures unsuitable for medical purposes. Furthermore, solutions that rely on the Internet cannot be used after disasters that require humanitarian aid. We propose a high-speed, intuitive, Internet-free, voice-free, and text-free tool suited for emergency medical communication. Our solution is a pictogram-based application that provides easy communication for individuals who have speech or hearing impairment or mental health issues that impair communication, as well as foreigners who do not speak the local language. It provides support and clarification in communication by using intuitive icons and interactive symbols that are easy to use on a mobile device. Such pictogram-based communication can be quite effective and ultimately make people's lives happier, easier, and safer.

Requirements analysis and preliminary design of a robotic assistant for reconstructive microsurgery.

Microanastomosis is a microsurgical gesture that involves suturing two very small blood vessels together. This gesture is used in many operations such as avulsed member auto-grafting, pediatric surgery, reconstructive surgery - including breast reconstruction by free flap. When vessels have diameters smaller than one millimeter, hand tremors make movements difficult to control. This paper introduces our preliminary steps towards robotic assistance for helping surgeons to perform microanastomosis in optimal conditions, in order to increase gesture quality and reliability even on smaller diameters. A general needs assessment and an experimental motion analysis were performed to define the requirements of the robot. Geometric parameters of the kinematic structure were then optimized to fulfill specific objectives. A prototype of the robot is currently being designed and built in order to providing a sufficient increase in accuracy without prolonging the duration of the procedure.

Enhancing gesture quality in young singers

ABSTRACTStudies have shown positive results for the use of gesture as a successful technique in aiding children's singing. The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of movement training for children with regard to enhancing gesture quality. Thirty-six fifth-grade students participated in the empirical investigation. They were randomly assigned into control and experimental groups: (1) control group – children who sang with gesture but without movement training and (2) experimental group – children who sang with gesture and received Dalcrozian movement training. The gestures were designed for developing singing voice, whereas the movement activities were designed for developing effective gestures for singing. The instructional unit, consisting of two 40-minute sessions per week for 24 sessions, focused on gesture use in singing. Each individual child was tested a Chinese art song. Three experts were asked to judge the children's individual gesture and singing performances by using a nine-point scale. Results showed that the children who received movement training gained a significantly higher score on gesture quality. It was concluded that the combination of gesture and movement training could be a powerful teaching strategy in children's singing.

The use of sophisticated words with children with specific language impairment during shared book reading

In the context of the use of sophisticated (i.e., low-frequency) words with children with specific language impairment (SLI), the present study investigates the relationship between maternal interactive support for meaning and both conversational responsiveness and lexical development of children with SLI. Fifteen Italian-speaking children with SLI (age range: 3;4–5;6) and two groups of typically developing children – 15 chronological age (CA)-matched (3;8–5;8) and 15 language age (LA)-matched (1;10–3;5) – were videotaped during shared book reading with their mothers. Maternal utterances which included or were related to a sophisticated word were coded on the basis of informativeness and scaffolding provided; child utterances were coded for complexity. In addition, child's lexical development was assessed three months later. Mothers of children with SLI produced a higher percentage of directly informative utterances with gestural scaffolding than did mothers of CA-matched children, and only in the SLI group this kind of utterances were significantly followed by child's extended utterances. Child's lexical development (production) was related to direct maternal informativeness in both the SLI- and CA-matched groups, and to gestural scaffolding only in the SLI group. On the whole, these findings suggest that mothers of children with SLI attune their language to their children's linguistic limitations and that the gestural quality of the interactive scaffolding is related to these children's conversational participation and their level of lexical progress.Learning outcomes: The reader will recognize the importance of maternal support for the meaning of low-frequency words in promoting the child's conversational responsiveness and lexical development, particularly with children with SLI. These children seem to benefit when provided with direct information accompanied by gestural scaffolding. These findings, if replicated with a larger group of participants, could help clinicians develop improved strategies for teaching parents.

The time of gesture in cinema and its ethics

This essay explores the ethical and gesture in film, developing from Giorgio Agamben’s two ideas of gesture – of the movement that gesture constitutes, transforming the photographic into the cinematic; and what is pointed to as the feeling, or ethical stance that the gesture instantiates. In representation – whether literary or audio-visual, live or recorded, the time and timeliness of gesture as both the action of a moment, and the movement it constitutes, demands a reading, a recognition, that spurs understanding but also opens a gap in meaning. Gesture involves movement, an action in time, but it also appears as a moment of action, and not as a continuing movement, thus the moment of the gesture becomes stilled in its time of action as a communication. A gesture is a kind of event, crystallising meaning at a moment, while opening up to something next. Time here is therefore the time of the action itself, seconds or minutes, the stilling of that natural time in the moment of recognition by the observer or spectator of the action and its (potential) meaning, and the opening of implication of a time-to-be, a becoming inaugurated but not caused by the gesture. Agamben’s gesture is anti-realist, in his philosophy of ethics as the gestural as undertaking and supporting and hence of responsibility. It is the enigmatic, undecidable quality of gesture in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica that will be the focus of this essay. Gesture here is an action that carries the burden of responsibility in which the subject neither makes something nor enacts something.

‘Being time’: an exploration of personal experiences of time and implications for art psychotherapy practice

This heuristic, art-based study looks at how experiences of time might affect the practice of art psychotherapy. The author's art-making related to various ways of experiencing time which have particular relevance to art psychotherapy practice: presence, marking time, being in time, containing time and making time. The research yielded three main insights. Firstly, thinking about time as intimately linked to space seems to be a valuable perspective on therapeutic work, in terms of: considering therapeutic presence as a spatial ‘ground’ for the temporal marking of moments; imagining and attuning to the shape and gestural quality of a moment; and creating ‘containers’ in which to hold client and therapist in the ‘now’. Secondly, an existing theoretical framework of different organisational experiences of time provided a valuable perspective on how using different art materials affected how time was experienced, and suggests that further research applying this framework to art-making within art psychotherapy could be productive. Finally, this study can be seen as evidence for the value of heuristic, art-based research in informing art psychotherapy practice, and suggests that a therapist's personal sense of temporal agency, of ‘being time’, enhances the capacity to work with experiences of time within therapy.

Mourning Deaths, Lamenting Lives: Grief and Transformation in Inner Maniot Laments

Abstract The funeral laments (moiroloya) of Inner Mani, a region in southern Peloponnese, are the focus of this article, in particular the gestural and transformative aspects of their liminal character. A specific case of a wake (klama) is discussed and analyzed in order to provide insight into the particular process of lamenting. Some general characteristics of lamenting in the region are reviewed and some of the basic assumptions of anthropologists concerning the role of emotional expression in death rituals are considered. Lastly, by focusing on an excerpt from a lament that was sung in the wake session under question, the article points to the gestural, mimetic and transformative qualities of the emotional performance of lamenting, suggesting thus an alternative reading of the expression of grief within the course of death ritual.

Conversational gestures in autism spectrum disorders: Asynchrony but not decreased frequency

Conversational or "co-speech" gestures play an important role in communication, facilitating turntaking, providing visuospatial information, clarifying subtleties of emphasis, and other pragmatic cues. Consistent with other pragmatic language deficits, individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are said to produce fewer conversational gestures, as specified in many diagnostic measures. Surprisingly, while research shows fewer deictic gestures in young children with ASD, there is a little empirical evidence addressing other forms of gesture. The discrepancy between clinical and empirical observations may reflect impairments unrelated to frequency, such as gesture quality or integration with speech. Adolescents with high-functioning ASD (n = 15), matched on age, gender, and IQ to 15 typically developing (TD) adolescents, completed a narrative task to assess the spontaneous production of speech and gesture. Naïve observers rated the stories for communicative quality. Overall, the ASD group's stories were rated as less clear and engaging. Although utterance and gesture rates were comparable, the ASD group's gestures were less closely synchronized with the co-occurring speech, relative to control participants. This gesture-speech synchrony specifically impacted communicative quality across participants. Furthermore, while story ratings were associated with gesture count in TD adolescents, no such relationship was observed in adolescents with ASD, suggesting that gestures do not amplify communication in this population. Quality ratings were, however, correlated with ASD symptom severity scores, such that participants with fewer ASD symptoms were rated as telling higher quality stories. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of communication and neuropsychological functioning in ASD.

Uso do gesto no transtorno autista: estudo de caso único

OBJETIVO: analisar a quantidade e qualidade dos gestos produzidos por uma criança com Transtorno Autista. PROCEDIMENTOS: trata-se de estudo de caso. Foram utilizados critérios para análise quanto à forma, função e tipo de gestos. RESULTADOS: após seis meses de intervenção terapêutica fonoaudiológica foi observado o aumento de gestos com funcionalidade em relação ao período inicial e após um ano, ausência de movimentos aleatórios. CONCLUSÃO: verificou-se aumento na qualidade gestual do caso em questão.

Gesture Interfaces and a Software Toolkit for Performance with Electronics

Electronic technology affects and can contribute to all aspects of music making. In particular, it reveals that instrument building, composing, and performing, while remaining different activities, share a common concern for physical form. At first sight, the user of a technological work station environment is faced with the absence of concrete objects-there are synthesizer patches instead of instrument bodies, programs instead of musical scores, and movement without contact or effort replacing instrumental gestures. It is precisely this physical absence that is naturally compensated for in music by reintroducing a concern for body, gesture, and space. The electronic music performer can deal with gesture and position detectors that lack inherent acoustical properties and the long tradition of instrumental practice. Holding a violin, for example, will not only condition the performer's gestures (one is supposed to act as a violinist when holding a violin), but the violin by itself on a table will still sound like a violin, whatever its stimulus. With the electronic instrument, sound and musical discourse are unified and internalized in the performer's body; the body itself becomes instrument, sound, and music. We are now far removed from the concept of the instrumentalist as triggering actor, which is so deeply anchored in people's minds that it is still the basis for most so-called performance electronics applications (Francois, Chabot, and Silber 1987). Now the performance itself is composed; with electronic instruments it is no longer possible to write an instrument name such as flute on a score part and assume a performance practice characteristic of the instrument. Composition now becomes a performance; it is the fruit of interactions and experiments with performers, programmers, machines, and software environments. Creation becomes experiencing. Conversely, performance becomes a compositional act because of the structuring quality of gesture and space. A gesture is itself a structure, while space has a natural topology (Greimas 1968). Physical form and its instrumentation offer a means not only of elaborating forms and materials but also of constant interrogation and creation. Electronic instruments challenge music making because they are elaborating through an intermediary-the explicit transliteration of gesture into sound. In my opinion, this is the main problem that we must address today in the philosophy of performance.