User Impressions Research Articles

Piton: Investigating the Controllability of a Wearable Telexistence Robot.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted collaborative activities, travel, and physical contact, increasing the demand for real-time interactions with remote environments. However, the existing remote communication solutions provide limited interactions and do not convey a high sense of presence within a remote environment. Therefore, we propose a snake-shaped wearable telexistence robot, called Piton, that can be remotely used for a variety of collaborative applications. To the best of our knowledge, Piton is the first snake-shaped wearable telexistence robot. We explain the implementation of Piton, its control architecture, and discuss how Piton can be deployed in a variety of contexts. We implemented three control methods to control Piton: HM-using a head-mounted display (HMD), HH-using an HMD and hand-held tracker, and FM-using an HMD and a foot-mounted tracker. We conducted a user study to investigate the applicability of the proposed control methods for telexistence, focusing on body ownership (Alpha IVBO), mental and physical load (NASA-TLX), motion sickness (VRSQ), and a questionnaire to measure user impressions. The results show that both the HM and HH provide relevantly high levels of body ownership, had high perceived accuracy, and were highly favored, whereas the FM control method yielded the lowest body ownership effect and was least favored. We discuss the results and highlight the advantages and shortcomings of the control methods with respect to various potential application contexts. Based on our design and evaluation of Piton, we extracted a number of insights and future research directions to deepen our investigation and realization of wearable telexistence robots.

Exploring Opportunities to Improve Physical Activity in Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury Using Context-Aware Messaging

Spinal cord injury (SCI) affects the mobility of 250,000 people per year worldwide. Physical activity (PA) in individuals with SCI is positively associated with improved mental and physical health outcomes. Mobile technologies have been developed to motivate individuals with SCI to increase PA using activity tracking and real-time feedback. We conducted semi-structured interviews and participatory design sessions with 15 manual wheelchair users with SCI and eight of their family members/friends to investigate user impressions of future technologies that might use computer-mediated, sensor-triggered communication to motivate PA. We assessed barriers to PA and how context-aware communication could help overcome them. Participants with SCI expressed that PA tracking and communication technologies must be tailored to their specific needs. Further analysis revealed that context-aware messaging could help participants with SCI connect with others to initiate timely conversations about overcoming PA barriers, and to provide encouragement to meet their PA goals. We discuss opportunities to empower individuals with SCI with regards to PA using tailored, context-aware communication.

Study of the characteristics of ear animations used to convey information and emotion in remote communication without web camera

The use of remote communication has grown globally due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In some remote communication, meeting participants use audio only with their web cameras turned off, resulting in a lack of exchange of nonverbal information. In this study, we defined an “ear animation” as an avatar composed of a simple face-like body with no facial features and ear-like parts coming out from this body which can be animated. The purpose of this study was to design the ear animation and evaluate user impressions of it as nonverbal information. While setting conveying information and conveying emotion as dependent variables, the independent variables we set in this study were three different conditions: when ear animations were presented with no sound, when ear animations were presented simultaneously with simple voice, when only voice was played, and three different kinds of content: “agreement”, “skepticism”, and “disagreement” conveyed from ear animations. Using Two-way ANOVA (repeated) with these variables, we conducted comparative analysis. The results showed that ear animations presented simultaneously with voice had the potential to be a new way of conveying nonverbal information by combining relevant ear animation movement forms.

Lexical Acquisition during Dialogues through Implicit Confirmation

We have been addressing the problem of acquiring attributes of unknown terms through dialogues and previously proposed an approach using the implicit confirmation process. It is crucial for dialogue systems to ask questions that do not diminish the user’s willingness to talk. In this paper, we conducted a user study to investigate user impression for several question types, including explicit and implicit, to acquire lexical knowledge. We clarified the order among the types and found that repeating the same question type annoys the user and degrades user impression even when the content of the questions is correct. We also propose a method for determining whether an estimated attribute is correct, which is included in an implicit question. The method exploits multiple-user responses to implicit questions about the attribute of the same unknown term. Experimental results revealed that the proposed method exhibited a higher precision rate for determining the correctly estimated attributes than when only single-user responses were considered.

Economic evaluation of digital marketing management at the enterprise

The meaning of the “digital marketing management” concept that takes into account the role of customer impressions and emotional response as prerequisites for activating targeted actions is clarified. It is proved in the paper that one of the most important criteria of digital marketing management effectiveness is the formation of user impressions. The issues of digital marketing management evaluation are generalized. It was found that modern methods of economic evaluation do not take into account the emotional component of content perception. It is proposed to introduce qualitative evaluation of impressions along with quantitative methods of digital marketing management. Digital marketing formats are systematized according to the ability to track customer feedback after interacting with a particular format. It was found that the most popular formats of digital marketing in 2021 were those that take feedback into account. In particular, companies spend their budgets for SMM – 75 %, banner advertising – 71 %, and for sharing they mostly choose social networks: Facebook – 88 %, Instagram – 78 %, Google – 75 % and YouTube – 71 %. Methodical recommendations to substantiate the economic evaluation of digital marketing management are proposed. Based on the concept of impression economy, the method of assessing the impressions of users by reviewing their reactions on social networks is analyzed. SWOT analysis of user impressions is made, and it is proposed to choose digital content, which is more emotional. The proposed methodological recommendations reflect the results of the effectiveness of digital marketing management both in quantitative (assessment of absolute and relative indicators) and qualitative forms (assessment of impressions)

P047 SUTURE-TOOL: A SUTURING DEICE FOR SWIFT AND STANDARDIZED ABDOMINAL APONEUROSIS CLOSURE

Abstract Aim Introduction Surgeons can reduce incisional hernia formation by adhering to standardized techniques for incisional wound closure. This is often neglected by the time a long operation is to be ended and can lead to the risk of developing an incisional hernia or a wound rupture. To address this issue, a suturing machine (Suture-TOOL) was developed for swift and standardized abdominal closure. The aim was to compare the user safety, speed, and suturing quality between Suture-TOOL and manual Needle-Driver suturing. Material and Methods Fifteen surgeons who were specialists in surgery, urology, and gynaecology as well as surgical trainees were invited. The Suture-TOOL was presented to the surgeons who read the instructions for use before starting the test. Each surgeon closed nine 15-cm-long incisions in a human body model; six with Suture-TOOL and three with the Needle-Driver technique. Gloves were examined for puncture damage. Endpoints were suture-length/wound-length (SL/WL)-ratio, closure time, number of stitches, learning curve, and glove puncture rate. A VAS-evaluation concerning different Suture-TOOL user impressions was completed. Results SL/WL-ratio ≥4 was 98% for Suture-TOOL versus 69% for Needle-Driver (p < 0,001). Suture time was shorter for Suture-TOOL (p = 0,013). The median SL/WL-ratio was similar between the groups. The learning curve plateaued after three closures using Suture-TOOL. Two glove punctures were detected—all in the Needle-Driver group. Suture-TOOL received high VAS scores for all measured functionalities. Conclusions Suture-TOOL is a promising device for clinical use. It is safe, easy, and fast resulting in a high-quality suture lines with a short learning curve and a high functionality ranking.

Remote auditory testing: Test-retest and user impressions

The Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) application was developed to measure basic auditory processing abilities and has been shown to effectively measure these abilities in research and audiologic clinical settings. Here, the effect of testing environment and participant perception on testing location were evaluated comparing the performance of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired participants in their homes versus a clinical setting. Subjective data on participant impressions of testing environments was included to assess feasibility of testing outside a clinical setting, as patient comfort completing tests in environments without clinical supervision may play a role in their overall performance. An important component of implementing PART tests to the clinical test battery is preventing additional test time to an already lengthy audiologic clinical appointment. Though testing time in clinics is limited, the implementation of administering auditory tests from the PART test battery in the waiting room or at the patients’ home could provide critical additional information on their auditory processing ability while adding minimal time to appointments. Use of PART may enable access to a broader collection of testing that an audiologist can use to improve patients’ outcomes and address patients’ hearing concerns beyond a pure-tone hearing test without increasing current clinical test time.

Deep learning for emotion driven user experiences

Deep knowledge about user characteristics and behaviors opens new and promising landscapes to the User Experience. Thanks to emerging machine learning techniques, a new form of communication channel among users and applications may be exploited for customizing and finely tuning the dynamic behavior of applications to the peculiarities of their users. This work investigates the empathic improvement of the User Experiences and exploits inferences on user expressions for activating gaming and entertainment events, that are adopted in a cinematic way to create dynamic application behaviors. The presented approach is applied to a third/first-person horror adventure and a classic table game. As already verified in a preliminary phase of the research, user impressions, collected as subjective evaluation in a controlled experiment, are positive and encourage further steps, like the evaluation of other inferences on users.

User Response to Extended Reality Sponsorship Activations on Social Media: Exploring Impressions of GoPro’s Use of 360° Video in Marketing

This research explores user impressions of 360° video as a platform for sponsorship activation, seeking to examine consumers’ responses to 360° virtual environments as a form of extended reality (XR) marketing as well as the structural and experiential antecedents to XR’s potential as a vehicle for brand marketing and sponsorship activation. GoPro was selected as a case study for analysis; 25 brand posts on GoPro’s YouTube channel were identified featuring 360° video integration as sponsorship communications, for which all video metadata and user comments were collected using programming software R to access YouTube’s standard application programming interface (API). Coding of the user commentary data subsequently revealed four primary themes, indicative of users’ impressions of 360° video technology. Notably, the study’s findings suggest that effective 360° integrations—alongside positive user experiences and access to the technology—pose tangible benefits to consumers’ attitudes and experiences, and present sponsors with a viable media through which to activate partnerships.

PEGON-GLIPH GAME PENGENALAN DAN PEMBELAJARAN ARAB PEGON BERBASIS ANDROID

This study aims to design an Android-based game as a medium for the introduction and learning of Arabic pegon and to evaluate user performance of the Arabic pegon educational game using the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). The research stages consisted of stages, 1) research data; 2) design; 3) implementation; 4) examiners; 5) report creation. Then the design of this product is in the form of a Pegon-gliph game which is run on the Android system by having four main features, namely material features, training features, game features, and motivation features. And UEQ benchmark test results get good scores in the novelty category, while in other categories such as attractiveness, visibility, efficiency, dependability, and stimulation, the results are very good. So that the results of the performance of the Pegon-gliph educational game users show a positive user impression.

Soliciting Human-in-the-Loop User Feedback for Interactive Machine Learning Reduces User Trust and Impressions of Model Accuracy

Mixed-initiative systems allow users to interactively provide feedback to potentially improve system performance. Human feedback can correct model errors and update model parameters to dynamically adapt to changing data. Additionally, many users desire the ability to have a greater level of control and fix perceived flaws in systems they rely on. However, how the ability to provide feedback to autonomous systems influences user trust is a largely unexplored area of research. Our research investigates how the act of providing feedback can affect user understanding of an intelligent system and its accuracy. We present a controlled experiment using a simulated object detection system with image data to study the effects of interactive feedback collection on user impressions. The results show that providing human-in-the-loop feedback lowered both participants’ trust in the system and their perception of system accuracy, regardless of whether the system accuracy improved in response to their feedback. These results highlight the importance of considering the effects of allowing end-user feedback on user trust when designing intelligent systems.

Short-Term Effects of a Passive Spinal Exoskeleton on Functional Performance, Discomfort and User Satisfaction in Patients with Low Back Pain.

Purpose Low back pain (LBP) remains a major worldwide healthcare issue. Recently, spinal exoskeletons were proposed as a potentially useful solution for LBP prevention and vocational reintegration for people who perform heavy load lifting, repetitive movements or work in prolonged static postures. The purpose of this study was to investigate how patients with LBP respond to the novel passive SPEXOR exoskeleton regarding functional performance, discomfort and general user impression. Methods Fourteen patients, with low to moderate LBP (2-7 on a 0-10 scale), performed 12 functional tasks with and without the exoskeleton. In addition to objective performance measures, participants subjectively assessed the level of local low back discomfort, task difficulty and general discomfort on a 0-10 visual analogue scales. Results The SPEXOR exoskeleton had favourable effects on performance and local discomfort during prolonged static forward bending. Minor reductions in performance were observed for sit-stand and ladder climbing tasks. The discomfort associated with the exoskeleton was generally low to moderate (median < 4), except for the 6-min walk test (median = 4.5), which is likely due to the weight of the device and obstruction of upper limb movement. The general impressions were mostly positive, with good adjustability, low interference with the movement and moderate support reported by the participants. Conclusion The SPEXOR exoskeleton is potentially useful for LBP prevention or management, however, further improvements are needed to provide higher levels support during heavy load lifting.

Stochastic Aspects of Marketing Health Care Services Strategies in the RS/BiH

Market globalization, transition processes and significant technical and technological advances are affecting both production and service business systems, such as health care business systems refer to the loss of a long-standing monopoly position by transforming the market into a structure of free competition. In addition, technical and technological support to the diagnostics sector as well as other segments of health care is also experiencing expansion and development, whereby the RS and BiH markets follow the global trends of development of the said segment. It is justified to assume that the level of quality of services, measured and expressed by the users' perception of the performance of the services, significantly increases, thus the customer's expectations regarding the quality of service in the field of health care are also rising. Quality of service within health care includes the clinical picture of the service user and refers to the the objective valorization of psychosomatic indicators, which refers to the value of characteristic parameters before and after access to the health care system, primarily as an objective metric of selected parameters, and secondly relates exclusively to the subjective perception of healthcare users personally or through stakeholders. Market positioning correspondends to the size, intensity, diversity, stochasticity and variability of factors that creating customer expectations, which have to be identified, quantified and covered by an adequate decision model. The degree of involvement of business systems in customer perception, as well as permanent improvement and / or maintaining a satisfactory level of service quality, is a key factor in the process of formulating an adequate marketing strategy as a platform for business success. User expectations, frequency and transparency of expressing user impressions in the context of the level of (dis)satisfaction with health care services as well as strengthening competitive positions in the market of providers, promote managerial focus from employees to users, and thus the need to examine and evaluate customer expectations and impression. Selecting the factors predominantly determining the level of user (dis)satisfaction with the health care service requires an adequate approach to the quantification of subjective factors, their classification in relation to the degree of influence on the research problem.examine and evaluate customer expectations and impression. Model correction of selected factors in terms of measure and direction of contribution to the level of customer expectations enables rational involvement in the marketing strategies system consisting of aligned observed tendencies, but also timely alignment with the system environment in which the selected system accomplishes its business mission. Creating desired business results and realistic approach to the consequences of strategic decisions is achieved through the selection of factors consistent with realistic circumstances and thus theoretical verification of the decision making factors.

A low latency sequential model and its user-focused evaluation for automatic punctuation of ASR closed captions

In Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), inserting the punctuation marks into the word chain hypothesis has long been given low priority, as efforts were concentrated on minimizing word error rates. Punctuation, however, also has a high impact on the transcription quality perceived by the users. Prosody, textual context and their combination have since been used successfully for automatic punctuation of ASR outputs. The recently proposed RNN based solutions show encouraging performance. We believe that current bottlenecks of punctuation technology are on one hand the complex punctuation models, which, having high latency, are not suitable for use-cases with real-time requirements; and on the other hand, punctuation efforts have not been validated against human perception and user impression. The ambition of this paper is to propose a lightweight, yet powerful RNN punctuation model for on-line (real-time including low latency) environment, and also to assess user opinion, in general and also for target users living with hearing loss or impairment. The proposed on-line RNN punctuation model is evaluated against a Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) baseline, for Hungarian and for English, whereas subjective assessment tests are carried out on real broadcast data subtitled with ASR (closed captioning). As it can be expected, the RNN outperforms the MaxEnt baseline system, but of course not the off-line systems: limiting the future context to minimize latency results only in a slighter performance drop, but ASR errors obviously influence punctuation performance considerably. A genre analysis is also carried out w.r.t. the punctuation performance showing that both recognition and punctuation of more spontaneous speech styles is challenging. Overall, the subjective tests confirmed that users perceive a significant quality improvement when punctuation is added, even in presence of word errors and even if punctuation is automatic and hence itself may contain further errors. For users living with hearing loss or deafness, an even higher, clear preference for the punctuated captions could be confirmed.

Cues for Increasing Social Presence for Mobile Health App Adoption

As mobile health apps become increasingly influential in daily life, they present an important opportunity for health communication for disease prevention. User impressions of app designs are influential for adoption. Using cues to increase feelings of being with others (social presence) is one way to encourage favorable impressions and health app adoption. To examine the impact of social context cues (conversation cues vs. community cues vs. no cue control) on two forms of social presence (emergent and transcendent social presence), we conducted an online experiment (n = 587) with US adults. We also examined the indirect effects of conversation and community cues through social presence on app trust, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and intentions to use the app. We found that conversational cues elicited intended feelings for new, emergent interactions and that community cues increased perceptions of ongoing or established social formations for transcendent interactions. These cues also had positive indirect effects for increased trust, perceived usefulness, and intentions to use the health apps and should be considered when developing mHealth to improve uptake and delivery of health promotion online.

A Multi-Feature Diffusion Model: Rumor Blocking in Social Networks

Online social networks provide a convenient platform for the spread of rumors, which could lead to serious aftermaths such as economic losses and public panic. The classical rumor blocking problem aims to launch a set of nodes as a positive cascade to compete with misinformation in order to limit the spread of rumors. However, most of the related researches were based on one-dimensional diffusion model. In reality, there are more than one feature associated with an object. The user's impression on this object is determined not just by one feature but by his/her overall evaluation on all of these features. Thus, the influence spread of this object can be decomposed into the spread of multiple features. Based on that, we propose a Multi-Feature diffusion model (MF-model) in this paper, and a novel problem, Multi-Feature Rumor Blocking (MFRB), is formulated on a multi-layer network structure according to this model. To solve MFRB, we design a creative sampling method, called Multi-Sampling, which can be applied to a multi-layer network structure. Inspired by martingale analysis, the Revised-IMM algorithm is proposed, and returns a satisfactory approximate solution to MFRB. Finally, we evaluate our proposed algorithm by conducting experiments on real datasets, and show the effectiveness and accuracy of the Revised-IMM algorithm and significantly outperforms other baseline algorithms.

The Privacy Policy Landscape After the GDPR

Abstract The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most demanding and comprehensive privacy regulations of all time. A year after it went into effect, we study its impact on the landscape of privacy policies online. We conduct the first longitudinal, in-depth, and at-scale assessment of privacy policies before and after the GDPR. We gauge the complete consumption cycle of these policies, from the first user impressions until the compliance assessment. We create a diverse corpus of two sets of 6,278 unique English-language privacy policies from inside and outside the EU, covering their pre-GDPR and the post-GDPR versions. The results of our tests and analyses suggest that the GDPR has been a catalyst for a major overhaul of the privacy policies inside and outside the EU. This overhaul of the policies, manifesting in extensive textual changes, especially for the EU-based websites, comes at mixed benefits to the users. While the privacy policies have become considerably longer, our user study with 470 participants on Amazon MTurk indicates a significant improvement in the visual representation of privacy policies from the users’ perspective for the EU websites. We further develop a new workflow for the automated assessment of requirements in privacy policies. Using this workflow, we show that privacy policies cover more data practices and are more consistent with seven compliance requirements post the GDPR. We also assess how transparent the organizations are with their privacy practices by performing specificity analysis. In this analysis, we find evidence for positive changes triggered by the GDPR, with the specificity level improving on average. Still, we find the landscape of privacy policies to be in a transitional phase; many policies still do not meet several key GDPR requirements or their improved coverage comes with reduced specificity.

Evaluating marketer generated content popularity on brand fan pages – A multilevel modelling approach

Facebook fan page of brands acts as a potential brand promotion platform, and it is critical for marketers to understand the subtleties of the users’ interaction. The study examines the effect of marketer generated content—content type and media type—and the associated user sentiments on user interaction using sentiment mining technique and multi-level modelling. For this study, approximately 3000 marketer content and 26 million user impressions taken from the Facebook brand pages of the top 25 mobile phone brands of India were analyzed. The analysis reveals that the comments expressing user sentiments positively and recursively influence the likes and shares related to the marketers’ content. Entertainment, remuneration, and information based content garnered maximum likes, comments, and shares, respectively. The influence of media type on user interaction had a varied effect. The findings will facilitate the marketers of mobile phones in formulating an effective Facebook content strategy.

Are Truthful Bidders Paying too Much? Efficiency and Revenue in Display Ad Auctions

Display ad auctions have become the predominant means to allocate user impressions on a website to advertisers. These auctions are conducted in milliseconds online, whenever a user visits a website. The impressions are typically priced via a simple second-price rule. For single-item auctions, this Vickrey payment rule is known to be incentive-compatible. However, it is unclear whether bidders should still bid truthful in an online auction where impressions (or items) arrive dynamically over time and their valuations are not separable, as is the case with campaign targets or budgets. The allocation process might not maximize welfare and the payments can differ substantially from those paid in an offline auction with a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) payment rule or also competitive equilibrium prices. We study the properties of the offline problem and model it as a mathematical program. In numerical experiments, we find that the welfare achieved in the online auction process with truthful bidders is high compared to the theoretical worst-case efficiency, but that the bidders pay significantly more on average compared to what they would need to pay in a corresponding offline auction in thin markets with up to four bidders. However, incentives for bid shading in these second-price auctions decrease quickly with additional competition and bidders risk losing.

The influence of visual complexity on initial user impressions: testing the persuasive model of web design

ABSTRACTShortly after fixating on webpages, users form initial impressions. These initial impressions influence how much users will use and return to websites. Researchers have understudied how objective design features (e.g. visual complexity) influence subjective perceptions of website content and the favorability of initial user impressions. In the present study, the influence of two dimensions of visual complexity – feature complexity and design complexity – were tested within the boundaries of the persuasive model of web design. More specifically, the study examined how visual complexity influences perceptions of visual informativeness, cues for engagement, favourable initial impressions, and behavioural intentions in a sample of young adults (N = 277). Results suggest relationships for both dimensions of visual complexity on all outcome variables using ANOVA and OLS regression procedures and that perceptions of visual informativeness and cues for engagement mediate the relationship between visual complexity and favourable initial impressions and behavioural intentions. The study offers support for the utility of the persuasive model of web design for linking objective design features with subjective design perceptions to better understand favourable initial user impressions.