Intelligent Interaction Publications

User Experience (UX) is considered a subjective and universal concept which contributes to the success of any Information and Communications Technology (ICT) framework. However, in both Information Systems and Cultural Technology research, little attention has been paid to the evaluation of UX with technologies in cultural heritage environments. Since Cultural User Experience (CUX) is an important factor, a formal classification of how to design for and evaluate CUX is necessary. This paper attempts to analyze and evaluate the aspects of CUX methodologies that are currently available and to specify future designing improvements for UX evaluation methods.

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With the emergence of the Internet of Things, new services in healthcare will be available and existing systems will be integrated in the IoT framework, providing automated medical supervision and efficient medical treatment. Context awareness plays a critical role in realizing the vision of the IoT, providing rich contextual information that can help the system act more efficiently. Since context in healthcare has its unique characteristics, it is necessary to define an appropriate context aware framework for healthcare IoT applications. We identify this context as perceived in healthcare applications and describe the context aware procedures. We also present an architecture that connects the sensors that measure biometric data with the sensory networks of the environment and the various IoT middleware that reside in the geographical area. Finally, we discuss the challenges for the realization of this vision.

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The emergence of the Internet of Things involves new services in healthcare while existing systems will have to interact with the IoT framework in order to integrate in the established ecosystem and use its infrastructure and services. It will be important to design appropriate interfaces for those systems that will take into consideration the unique characteristics of healthcare. We propose an interface design that allows users to efficiently interact with smart objects of a healthcare platform. The notion of a wearable cloud is introduced which connects all sensors of a Body Area Network into a unified interface, managed by a single device, while context aware computing methods personalize the system behavior and natural interaction methods are integrated.

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This topic discusses an IoT case from the near future and analyzes a proposed architecture that addresses the issue of perception of the smart environment. In the forthcoming world full of smart devices which are adapted to facilitate human’s daily life, user interfaces have to ensure a simple and straightforward interaction between users and the smart environment. Personalization through context awareness, enhancement of natural interaction through augmented reality methods and markerless tracking techniques of smart objects are some of the requirements we believe to be indispensable for the interaction with IoT platforms. The proposed architecture is based on these characteristics and has to be tested in order to evaluate its effectiveness but we are confident that it would eventually help Lane to capitalize the full potential of the Internet of Things services.

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Communication between users and physical objects and sensors through the web within the Internet of Things framework, requires by definition the capability to perceive the sensors and the underlying information and services. Visualization of the Things in IoT is thus a requirement for natural interaction between users and IoT instances in the upcoming but steadily established computing paradigm. The immense quantity of sensors and variety of usable information introduces the need to intelligently filter and adapt the respective information sources and layers. Current work proposes an architecture that supports intelligent interaction between users and the IoT addressing the intelligent perception requirement described earlier. On the one hand, sensory visualization is tackled via Augmented Reality layers of sensors and information and on the other hand context and location awareness enhance the system by providing usable in the respective senses information.

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Conservation is an integral process of collections management aiming to preserve cultural heritage objects in the best possible condition. Object conservation procedures require detailed and accurate documentation in textual or visual records which provide valuable information for the future researcher, curator or conservator. Furthermore, conservation requires the awareness of cultural, historical and scientific information from sources both internal and external which in turn influence the ways in which conservators must approach their work. This integration of different information forms the body of knowledge, relevant to thoughtful decisions on treatment and care of cultural heritage objects. Taking into consideration the diversity of conservation information and associated information sources, the integration cannot be regarded as a trivial task. Therefore, knowledge organization, especially in a concepts level, is necessary. To this end this work presents a domain ontology known as the Conservation Reasoning (CORE) ontology aiming to address the specific requirements of the conservation sector.

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Many projects have already analyzed the current limitations and challenges on the integration of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud in mobile augmented reality (MAR) applications for cultural heritage, and underline the future directions and capabilities. The majority of the above works relies on the detected geo-location of the user or his device by various sensors (GPS – global positioning system, accelerometer, camera, etc.) or geo-based linked data, while others use marker-based techniques to link various locations with labels and descriptions of specific geodata. But when it comes to indoor environments (museums, libraries) where tracking the accurate user’s position and orientation is challenging due to the lack of GPS valid sensor data, complex and costly technological systems need to be implemented for identifying user’s OoI (Object of Interest). This paper describes a concept which is based on image identification and matching between frames from the user’s camera and stored images from the Europeana platform, that can link the LOD cloud from cultural institutes around Europe and mobile augmented reality applications in cultural heritage without the need of the accurate user’s location, and discusses the challenges and future directions of this approach.

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