User-centered Experiment Research Articles

Assessing proxemics impact on Human-Robot collaboration safety in construction: A virtual reality study with four-legged robots

Recent advancements in four-legged robots have prompted their integration into the construction industry, yet the safety implications of their deployment remain inadequately explored. As such comprehensive investigations are required to ensure the safety of robot deployment and the well-being of construction professionals who work with and alongside these robots. This study addresses this gap by conducting a user-centered experiment employing virtual reality to assess human behavior and safety impacts in varying interaction spaces with four-legged robots within a simulated construction environment. By employing objective and subjective measures, including physiological and attentional responses, emotional reactions, situational awareness, risk perceptions, and attitudes towards robots, this study analyzes the impact of proxemics on construction individuals at two distinct interaction spaces: proximal (1.5 – 4 ft) and distal (12 – 25 ft) from the four-legged robots. The study found that while participants’ physiological responses, emotional states, situational awareness, risk perceptions, and attitudes towards robots were not significantly influenced by four-legged robot interaction space, those in the distal group allocated significantly more attention to the robot, particularly in terms of fixation count, indicating a significant proxemics impact on attentional states. These findings shed light on the safety implications of human-robot collaboration on jobsites, contributing to the advancement of safe and efficient practices in construction settings.

Pre-Calibrated Visuo-Haptic Co-Location Improves Execution in Virtual Environments.

A common approach to visio-haptic human-machine interfaces adopts a simpler design by shifting grounded force feedback away from the virtual scene. The alternative design favors intuitiveness by displaying visual and grounded force feedback at the same location (i.e. visuo-haptic co-location) but requires a sensibly more complex implementation and a tedious kinematic conception. The benefits of one approach over the other had not been fully investigated. Notably, (i) while users seem to better operate under co-located condition, it's not always the case. (ii) In the case of a desktop interface, the cost of a complex implementation to achieve co-location is challenged. We aim here to resolve (i) by conducting a user-centered experiment in which participants performed two generic tasks in co-located and delocated configurations, and comparing their performances. Additionally, we intend to fill the gap (ii) by testing a design without continuous head tracking, i.e., with static co-location. Participants' performances are assessed in terms of execution time, accuracy and force variation, while their subjective experiences are collected via a survey. Findings indicate that co-located configurations lead to shorter execution times, more accurate motions, better management of forces and are largely preferred by users, even when the co-location is pre-calibrated statically.

Interpreting and tailoring affordance based design user-centered experiments

ABSTRACTThe identification, selection, and consideration of appropriate affordances during the preliminary design phase of a product play a critical role in the process of Affordance Based Design (ABD). A design tool named Affordance Based Interactive Genetic Algorithm (ABIGA) evolves products by having designers identify, and then users assess the affordance qualities of virtual prototypes. Affordances are defined to be perceived interactions, both positive and negative, primarily between the user and the artifact. In order to achieve a successful product evolution, guidelines are proposed to help designers in the setting up of experiments related to user-centered design and ABD specifically. It was found that the existence of conflicting affordances would result in a slower evolution when compared with one that did not have such conflicts. Meanwhile, it was observed that virtual presentation does influence the users’ judgments. From these observations, hypotheses and multiple experiments, these guidelines are discussed and critiqued to provide designers with insight into how to control user-centered experiments.

Applying an information-seeking dialogue model in an interactive information retrieval system

Purpose – People often engage in different information-seeking strategies (ISSs) within a single information-seeking episode. A critical concern for the design of information retrieval (IR) systems is how to provide support for these different behaviors in a manner which searchers can easily understand, navigate and use, as they move from one ISS to another. The purpose of this paper is to describe a dialogue structure that was implemented in an experimental IR system, in order to address this concern. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a user-centered experiment to evaluate the IR systems. Participants were asked to search for information on two different task types, with four different topics per task, in both the experimental system and a baseline system emulating state-of-the-art IR systems. The authors report here the results related explicitly to the use of the experimental system's dialogue structure. Findings – For one of the task types, most participants followed the search steps as predicted in the dialogue structures, and those who did so completed the task in fewer moves. For the other task type, predicted order of moves was often not followed, but participants again used fewer moves when following the predicted order. Results demonstrate that the dialogue structures the authors designed indeed support effective human information behavior patterns in a variety of ways, and that searchers can effectively use a system which changes to support different ISSs. Originality/value – This study shows that it is both possible and beneficial, to design an IR system which can support multiple ISSs, and that such a system can be understood and used successfully.

Cross Language Information Retrieval using Multilingual Ontology as Translation and Query Expansion Base (pp. 13-16)

Abstract —This paper reports an experiment to evaluate a Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) system that uses a multilingual ontology to improve query translation in the travel domain. The ontology-based approach significantly outperformed the Machine Readable Dictionary translation baseline using Mean Average Precision as a metric in a user-centered experiment. Index terms —Ontology, multilingual, cross language information retrieval. I. I NTRODUCTION HE growing requirement on the Internet for users to access information expressed in language other than their own has led to Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) becoming established as a major topic in IR. One approach to CLIR uses different translation approaches to translate queries to documents and indexes in other languages. As queries submitted to search engines suffer lack of context, translation approaches have great problems with resolving query ambiguity. In our approach, we built a multilingual ontology to be used as a translation base for CLIR. In this paper we evaluate our proposed query translation methodology and compare it with a base line system that uses a Machine Readable Dictionary (MRD) as translation base in a user-centered experiment. II. B