Integrating eye tracking in virtual reality for stroke rehabilitation

This thesis reports on research done for the integration of eye tracking technology into virtual reality environments, with the goal of using it in rehabilitation of patients who suffered from stroke. For the last few years, eye tracking has been a focus on medical research, used as an assistive tool  to help people with disabilities interact with new technologies  and as an assessment tool  to track the eye gaze during computer interactions. However, tracking more complex gaze behaviors and relating them to motor deficits in people with disabilities is an area that has not been fully explored, therefore it became the focal point of this research. During the research, two exploratory studies were performed in which eye tracking technology was integrated in the context of a newly created virtual reality task to assess the impact of stroke. Using an eye tracking device and a custom virtual task, the system developed is able to monitor the eye gaze pattern changes over time in patients with stroke, as well as allowing their eye gaze to function as an input for the task. Based on neuroscientific hypotheses of upper limb motor control, the studies aimed at verifying the differences in gaze patterns during the observation and execution of the virtual goal-oriented task in stroke patients (N=10), and also to assess normal gaze behavior in healthy participants (N=20). Results were found consistent and supported the hypotheses formulated, showing that eye gaze could be used as a valid assessment tool on these patients. However, the findings of this first exploratory approach are limited in order to fully understand the effect of stroke on eye gaze behavior. Therefore, a novel model-driven paradigm is proposed to further understand the relation between the neuronal mechanisms underlying goal-oriented actions and eye gaze behavior.

Object modeling for user-centered development and user interface design: the wisdom approach

João Bernardo de Sena Esteves Falcão e Cunha

A multimodal tablet-based interface for designing and reviewing 3D engineering models

The ability to view and interact with 3D models has been happening for a long time. However, vision-based 3D modeling has only seen limited success in applications, as it faces many technical challenges. Hand-held mobile devices have changed the way we interact with virtual reality environments. Their high mobility and technical features, such as inertial sensors, cameras and fast processors, are especially attractive for advancing the state of the art in virtual reality systems. Also, their ubiquity and fast Internet connection open a path to distributed and collaborative development. However, such path has not been fully explored in many domains. VR systems for real world engineering contexts are still difficult to use, especially when geographically dispersed engineering teams need to collaboratively visualize and review 3D CAD models. Another challenge is the ability to rendering these environments at the required interactive rates and with high fidelity. In this document it is presented a virtual reality system mobile for visualization, navigation and reviewing large scale 3D CAD models, held under the CEDAR (Collaborative Engineering Design and Review) project. It’s focused on interaction using different navigation modes. The system uses the mobile device's inertial sensors and camera to allow users to navigate through large scale models. IT professionals, architects, civil engineers and oil industry experts were involved in a qualitative assessment of the CEDAR system, in the form of direct user interaction with the prototypes and audio-recorded interviews about the prototypes. The lessons learned are valuable and are presented on this document. Subsequently it was prepared a quantitative study on the different navigation modes to analyze the best mode to use it in a given situation.

Goals Software Construction Process

Generalized hyper competitiveness in the world markets has determined the need to offer better products to potential and actual clients in order to mark an advantagefrom other competitors. To ensure the production of an adequate product, enterprises need to work on the efficiency and efficacy of their business processes (BPs) by means of the construction of Interactive Information Systems (IISs, including Interactive Multimedia Documents) so that they are processed more fluidly and correctly.The construction of the correct IIS is a major task that can only be successful if the needs from every intervenient are taken into account. Their requirements must bedefined with precision, extensively analyzed and consequently the system must be accurately designed in order to minimize implementation problems so that the IIS isproduced on schedule and with the fewer mistakes as possible. The main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of Goals, a software (engineering) construction process which aims at defining the tasks to be carried out in order to develop software. This process defines the stakeholders, the artifacts, and the techniques that should be applied to achieve correctness of the IIS. Complementarily, this process suggests two methodologies to be applied in the initial phases of the lifecycle of the Software Engineering process: Process Use Cases for the phase of requirements, and; MultiGoals for the phases of analysis and design. Process Use Cases is a UML-based (Unified Modeling Language), goal-driven and use case oriented methodology for the definition of functional requirements. It uses an information oriented strategy in order to identify BPs while constructing the enterprise’s information structure, and finalizes with the identification of use cases within the design of these BPs. This approach provides a useful tool for both activities of Business Process Management and Software Engineering. MultiGoals is a UML-based, use case-driven and architectural centric methodology for the analysis and design of IISs with support for Multimedia. It proposes the analysis of user tasks as the basis of the design of the: (i) user interface; (ii) the system behaviour that is modeled by means of patterns which can combine Multimedia and standard information, and; (iii) the database and media contents. This thesis makes the theoretic presentation of these approaches accompanied with examples from a real project which provide the necessary support for the understanding of the used techniques.

Geração automática de interfaces com o utilizador: uma abordagem baseada em MDA para a plataforma PHP

Os modelos e as técnicas de modelação são, hoje em dia, fundamentais na engenharia de software, devido à complexidade e sofisticação dos sistemas de informação actuais.A linguagem Unified Modeling Language (UML) [OMG, 2005a] [OMG, 2005b] tornou-se uma norma para modelação, na engenharia de software e em outras áreas e domínios, mas é reconhecida a sua falta de suporte para a modelação da interactividade e da interface com o utilizador [Nunes and Falcão e Cunha, 2000].Neste trabalho, é explorada a ligação entre as áreas de engenharia de software e de interacção humano-computador, tendo, para isso, sido escolhido o processo de desenvolvimento Wisdom [Nunes and Falcão e Cunha, 2000] [Nunes, 2001]. O método Wisdom é conduzido por casos de utilização essenciais e pelo princípio da prototipificação evolutiva, focando-se no desenho das interfaces com o utilizador através da estrutura da apresentação, com a notação Protótipos Abstractos Canónicos (PAC) [Constantine and Lockwood, 1999] [Constantine, 2003], e do comportamento da interacção com a notação ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) [Paternò, 1999] [Mori, Paternò, et al., 2004] em UML.É proposto, também, neste trabalho um novo passo no processo Wisdom, sendo definido um modelo específico, construído segundo os requisitos da recomendação Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [Soley and OMG, 2000] [OMG, 2003] elaborada pela organização Object Managent Group (OMG). Este modelo específico será o intermediário entre o modelo de desenho e a implementação da interface final com o utilizador. Esta proposta alinha o método Wisdom com a recomendação MDA, tornando possível que sejam gerados, de forma automática, protótipos funcionais de interfaces com o utilizador a partir dos modelos conceptuais de análise e desenho.Foi utilizada a ferramenta de modelação e de metamodelação MetaSketch [Nóbrega, Nunes, et al., 2006] para a definição e manipulação dos modelos e elementos propostos. Foram criadas as aplicações Model2Model e Model2Code para suportar as transformações entre modelos e a geração de código a partir destes. Para a plataforma de implementação foi escolhida a framework Hydra, desenvolvida na linguagem PHP [PHP, 2006], que foi adaptada com alguns conceitos de modo a suportar a abordagem defendida neste trabalho.

Meta, tracer - MOF with traceability

The following document proposes a traceability solution for model-driven development. There as been already previous work done in this area, but so far there has not been yet any standardized way for exchanging traceability information, thus the goal of this project developed and documented here is not to automatize the traceability process but to provide an approach to achieve traceability that follows OMG standards, making traceability information exchangeable between tools that follow the same standards. As such, we propose a traceability meta-model as an extension of MetaObject Facility (MOF)1. Using MetaSketch2 modeling language workbench, we present a modeling language for traceability information. This traceability information then can be used for tool cooperation. Using Meta.Tracer (our tool developed for this thesis), we enable the users to establish traceability relationships between different traceability elements and offer a visualization for the traceability information. We then demonstrate the benefits of using a traceability tool on a software development life cycle using a case study. We finalize by commenting on the work developed.

Modelação de interfaces gráficas no âmbito do ProjectIT

Orientador: Alberto Manuel Rodrigues da Silva

A virtual agent to sustaining children's engagement in language learning

In this thesis we aimed to explore the potential of gamification - defined as “the use of game elements in non-game contexts” [30] - in increasing children's (aged 5 to 6) engagement with the task. This is mainly due to the fact that our world is living a technological era, and videogames are an example of this engagement by being able to maintain children’s (and adults) engagement for hours straight. For the purpose of limiting complexity, we only addressed the feedback element by introducing it with an anthropomorphic virtual agent (human-like aspect), because research shows that virtual agents (VA’s) can influence behavioural change [17], or even induce emotions on humans both through the use of feedback provided and their facial expressions, which can interpreted in the same way as of humans’ [2]. By pairing the VA with the gamification concept, we wanted to 1) create a VA that is likely to be well-received by children (appearance and behaviour), and 2) have the immediate feedback that games have, so we can give children an assessment of their actions in real-time, as opposed to waiting for feedback from someone (traditional teaching), and with this give students more chances to succeed [32, 43]. Our final system consisted on a virtual environment, where children formed words that corresponded to a given image. In order to measure the impact that the VA had on engagement, the system was developed in two versions: one version of the system was limited to provide a simple feedback environment, where the VA provided feedback, by responding with simple phrases (i.e. “correct” or “incorrect”); for the second version, the VA had a more complex approach where it tried to encourage children to complete the word – a motivational feedback - even when they weren’t succeeding. Lastly we conducted a field study with two groups of children, where one group tested the version with the simple feedback, and the other group tested the ‘motivational’ version of the system. We used a quantitative approach to analyze the collected data that measured the engagement, based on the number of tasks (words) completed and time spent with system. The results of the evaluation showed that the use of motivational feedback may carry a positive effect on engaging children.