Proyectos
Uso de interfaces no tradicionales para el reconocimiento de señas
Determinando la experiencia de usuario de dispositivos y aplicaciones de Inteligencia Ambiental en actividades cotidianas
Clasificación de vehículos y peatones en vídeos de tráfico vial
Edificios inteligentes y computación afectiva para mejorar la interacción humano robot
Publicaciones
Multiplatform Career Guidance System Using IBM Watson, Google Home and Telegram
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence
Developing a Proxy Service to Bring Naturality to Amazon's Personal Assistant "Alexa"
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Advances in Human Factors and Systems Interaction
Alexa vs. Siri vs. Cortana vs. Google Assistant: A Comparison of Speech-based Natural User Interfaces
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Advances in Human Factors and Systems Interaction
Automatic recognition of the American sign language fingerspelling alphabet to assist people living with speech or hearing impairments
Tipo de publicación: Journal Article
Publicado en: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing
Improving Deaf People Accessibility and Communication Through Automatic Sign Language Recognition Using Novel Technologies
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Advances in Design for Inclusion
Web Accessibility for People with Reduced Mobility: A Case Study Using Eye Tracking
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Advances in Design for Inclusion
Alternative and Augmentative Communication for People with Disabilities and Language Problems: An Eye Gaze Tracking Approach
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Advances in Design for Inclusion
A Gesture-Based Interaction Approach for Manipulating Augmented Objects Using Leap Motion
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Ambient Assisted Living. ICT-based Solutions in Real Life Situations
Sign Language Recognition Using Leap Motion
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. Sensing, Processing, and Using Environmental Information
Scheduling of events through notifications in mobile devices
Descripción:
It is very common to interact with notifications every day with our mobile devices. Notifications have advantages and disadvantages. They bring information for the user, but they are also interruptions. In this study, the authors provide a solution for scheduling events through notifications. They created an application using the Google Calendar platform and the Swift programming language to respond to events through notifications. Then, the participants evaluated the application through the usability scale of the system (SUS), and the results were positive. The authors received excellent comments and feedback from the participants in the evaluation.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: 2019 IV Jornadas Costarricenses de Investigación en Computación e Informática (JoCICI)
Standardized Questionnaires for User Experience Evaluation: A Systematic Literature Review
Descripción:
Standardized questionnaires are one of the methods used to evaluate User Experience (UX). Standardized questionnaires are composed of an invariable group of questions that users answer themselves after using a product or system. They are considered reliable and economical to apply. The standardized questionnaires most recognized for UX evaluation are AttrakDiff, UEQ, and meCUE. Although the structure, format, and content of each of the questionnaires are known in detail, there is no systematic literature review (SLR) that categorizes the uses of these questionnaires in primary studies. This SLR presents the eligibility protocol and the results obtained by reviewing 946 papers from four digital databases, of which 553 primary studies were analyzed in detail. Different characteristics of use were obtained, such as which questionnaire is used more extensively, in which geographical context, and the size of the sample used in each study, among others.
Tipo de publicación: Journal Article
Publicado en: 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence UCAmI 2019
Smart Meeting Room Management System Based on Real-Time Occupancy
Descripción:
This paper proposes the creation of a smart meeting room through the incorporation of a PIR sensor and an AWS IoT button that allows the booking system to reflect a more precise availability of meeting rooms according to the actual occupancy status. The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are controlled using a Wi-Fi module that allows them to connect to the REST web service and to integrate with the open source Meeting Room Booking System (MRBS). In order to evaluate the system a storyboard evaluation was conducted with 47 participants. All participants filled out the User Experience Questionnaires (UEQ), described the product using three words and expressed their opinion through open comments. Finally, 19 participants took part in a real-life simulation of the smart meeting room and evaluated the system using the UEQ questionnaire. Based on the positive acceptance reflected in the evaluations, results show that the proposed system is considered very attractive and useful by the participants.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: 2019 IV Jornadas Costarricenses de Investigación en Computación e Informática (JoCICI)
User Experience Comparison of Intelligent Personal Assistants: Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and Cortana
Descripción:
Natural user interfaces are becoming popular. One of the most common natural user interfaces nowadays are voice activated interfaces, particularly smart personal assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of these four smart personal assistants in two dimensions: the correctness of their answers and how natural the responses feel to users. Ninety-two participants conducted the evaluation. Results show that Alexa and Google Assistant are significantly better than Siri and Cortana. However, there is no statistically significant difference between Alexa and Google Assistant.
Tipo de publicación: Journal Article
Publicado en: 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence UCAmI 2019
Framework for Creating Audio Games for Intelligent Personal Assistants
Descripción:
Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) has experienced an important market growth, therefore, an increase in its development by having more people interested in devices that use this software. This opens possibilities for develop new games that people can be interested in. This article presents a framework proposal to create audio games using IPA enabled devices. In order to evaluate the framework, a prototype was designed and presented to 30 participants. The results obtained indicated that a 97.6% of the interviewees were attracted to the idea of playing a game using and IPA.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Advances in Human Factors in Wearable Technologies and Game Design
A Model Proposal for Augmented Reality Game Creation to Incentivize Physical Activity
Descripción:
Obesity and a sedentary lifestyle are relevant issues in today’s society. Even though different resources can be used to approach this problem, technology provides endless possibilities to fight against this problem. This article presents the results of a model to create augmented reality games where goals are achieved by doing physical activity (moving between different places). In order to evaluate the model, a prototype was built and presented to 50 participants. The results obtained indicated that an important percentage of the interviewees were attracted to the idea of playing a game to increase their physical activity.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 5: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2017)
UX Evaluation with Standardized Questionnaires in Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review
Descripción:
Standardized questionnaires are well-known, reliable, and inexpensive instruments to evaluate user experience (UX). Although the structure, content, and application procedure of the three most recognized questionnaires (AttrakDiff, UEQ, and meCUE) are known, there is no systematic literature review (SLR) that classifies how these questionnaires have been used in primary studies reported academically. This SLR seeks to answer five research questions (RQs), starting with identifying the uses of each questionnaire over the years and by geographic region (RQ1) and the median number of participants per study (how many participants is considered enough when evaluating UX?) (RQ2). This work also aims to establish whether these questionnaires are combined with other evaluation instruments and with which complementary instruments are they used more frequently (RQ3). In addition, this review intends to determine how the three questionnaires have been applied in the fields of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence (RQ4) and also in studies that incorporate nontraditional interfaces, such as haptic, gesture, or speech interfaces, to name a few (RQ5). Methods. A systematic literature review was conducted starting from 946 studies retrieved from four digital databases. The main inclusion criteria being the study describes a primary study reported academically, where the standardized questionnaire is used as a UX evaluation instrument in its original and complete form. In the first phase, 189 studies were discarded by screening the title, abstract, and keyword list. In the second phase, 757 studies were full-text reviewed, and 209 were discarded due to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. The 548 resulting studies were analyzed in detail. Results. AttrakDiff is the questionnaire that counts the most uses since 2006, when the first studies appeared. However, since 2017, UEQ has far surpassed AttrakDiff in uses per year. The contribution of meCUE is still minimal. Europe is the region with the most extended use, followed by Asia. Within Europe, Germany greatly exceeds the rest of countries (RQ1). The median number of participants per study is 20, considering the aggregated data from the three questionnaires. However, this median rises to 30 participants in journal studies while it stays in 20 in conference studies (RQ2). Almost 4 in 10 studies apply the questionnaire as the only evaluation instrument. The remaining studies used between one and five complementary instruments, among which the System Usability Scale (SUS) stands out (RQ3). About 1 in 4 studies analyzed belong to ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence fields, in which UEQ increases the percentage of uses when compared to its general percentage, particularly in topics such as IoT and wearable interfaces. However, AttrakDiff remains the predominant questionnaire for studies in smart cities and homes and in-vehicle information systems (RQ4). Around 1 in 3 studies include nontraditional interfaces, being virtual reality and gesture interfaces the most numerous. Percentages of UEQ and meCUE uses in these studies are higher than their respective global percentages, particularly in studies using virtual reality and eye tracking interfaces. AttrakDiff maintains its overall percentage in studies with tangible and gesture interfaces and exceeds it in studies with nontraditional visual interfaces, such as displays in windshields or motorcycle helmets (RQ5).
Tipo de publicación: Journal Article
Publicado en: Advances in Human-Computer Interaction
A Mobile Application for Improving the Delivery Process of Notifications
Descripción:
t present, there are systems in charge of classifying and sending notifications to smart devices at different times. However, there are not many studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of these systems in real world settings. We propose a method that classifies and prioritizes notifications by analyzing only the content of the notification and the sender of the message. We also developed a system implementing this method. User diaries were used to analyze the behavior of the system in real world situations, and the results showed that the implemented system significantly reduces interruptions to users. Additionally, the user experience of the system was evaluated through the standardized questionnaire UEQ (User Experience Questionnaire). The results obtained were positive in most of the scales of this instrument, above the average according to UEQ benchmarks. However, aspects such as stimulation and creativity can be improved in the future to motivate users to use the system.
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing
Emotions Classifier based on Facial Expressions
Descripción:
Emotion recognition is important in the context of smart buildings and IoT, because it allows the environment to have a better notion of the mood of the humans who are present. With a view to developing such projects, in this article we analyze the performance of an emotion classifier that uses a convolutional neural network. Specifically, we focus on analyzing the impact of the epochs and batch size hyperparameters. To do this, we propose an experimental design with the following hypothesis: "The number of epochs that the model trains and the size of the batch given by iteration in each epoch influence the accuracy of an emotion classifier built from networks. convolutional neurons using the VGG16 architecture".
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: 2021 IEEE V Jornadas Costarricenses de Investigación en Computación e Informática (JoCICI)
Asynchronous Detection of Slowloris Attacks Via Random Forests
Descripción:
An asynchronous classifier of network flows was developed to detect Slowloris attacks. This classifier was implemented using random forests and its effectiveness was measured by the area under the ROC curve. These random forests were trained from a public dataset. We sought to minimize the number of necessary features that are required to analyze the flows satisfactorily. Finally, it was shown that the chosen features can be used individually to obtain reliable detections in the classifier, with two of the three individual features having an area under the curve greater than 0.95.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: 2021 IEEE V Jornadas Costarricenses de Investigación en Computación e Informática (JoCICI)
Recognizing daily-life activities using sensor-collected data in a kitchen
Descripción:
This paper focuses on the recognition and classification of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) that are carried out in a kitchen. To do this, a Recurrent Neural Network architecture of the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) type is implemented as a classifier. The ARAS dataset is used for training and evaluation. A classifier is obtained with an average value in the F1 metric of 95.33% for the chosen data set.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: 2021 IEEE V Jornadas Costarricenses de Investigación en Computación e Informática (JoCICI)
User Experience in Communication and Collaboration Platforms: A Comparative Study Including Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom
Descripción:
Due to the measures imposed to prevent the spread of the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic, how education and work communications are carried have changed. An increase in video conferencing and meeting applications is noticeable. In this research paper, we describe the results of a user experience evaluation of three widely used platforms: Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. Through the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) application, it was determined that Discord is better in aspects not related to tasks and provides an above-average UX. On the other hand, zoom excels when it comes to tasks, but in conjunction with Microsoft Teams, it delivers below-average UX.
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems
Conversational Design Patterns for a UX Evaluation Instrument Implemented by Voice
Descripción:
In recent years there has been an increase of voice interfaces, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence and the expansion of commercial devices that use them, such as smart assistants present on phones or smart speakers. One field that could take advantage of the potential of voice interaction is in the self-administered surveys data collection, such as standardized UX evaluation questionnaires. This work proposes a set of conversational design patterns for standardized UX evaluation questionnaires that use semantic difference scales as a means of collecting quantitative information on user experience, as is the case of AttrakDiff and UEQ (User Experience Questionnaire). The presented design patterns seek to establish a natural conversation created in accordance with the user, the conservation of context between subsequent questions, the minimization of statements and with statement repair mechanisms not completely understood by the user or voice agent, as eliciting explanation of a concept or repetition.
Tipo de publicación: Book Chapter
Publicado en: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems
User - Smart Building Interactions: An Analysis of Privacy and Productivity Human Factors
Descripción:
Smart buildings are increasingly becoming more common and changing the way we interact with our home, workplace, and cities. Consequently, it is important to study how human factors play a role in smart building-based environments. This research focuses on the privacy and productivity of human factors, and presents the results of two complementary evaluations: a survey in which people’s privacy concerns were analyzed and an assessment that quantifies if smart building functionalities impacts people’s productivity.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2022)
Smart Home Interface Design: An Information Architecture Approach
Descripción:
The usage of IoT devices is rapidly growing. Many users may want to add them to their homes to automate certain tasks, help themselves with information, or monitor their environment continuously. Quick IoT development is taking place on privacy, protocols, and other areas. However, the user interface area is being left out of the efforts. Mobile applications and websites are focused on technical requirements only. Research is not focused on the interaction of the user with the application, so standards and/or tendencies may not be utilized. This investigation aims to implement a smart house application interface focused on the user instead of the technical requirements. To start, the card sorting technique is used to group IoT devices into meaningful groups for users. Then, an interface prototype of a smart house application is created with the feedback obtained from the card sorting activity. Finally, the prototype is evaluated by using a standardized questionnaire.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence
Understanding Students' Perspectives About Human-Building Interactions in the Context of Smart Buildings
Descripción:
Smart buildings provide a variety of sensor-based services to support and enhance the quality of human activities. Advanced technologies such as robotics are increasingly added to smart buildings’ ecosystems, creating a need to incorporate affective computing techniques to augment the quality of human-building, and human-robot interactions. To better understand user’s needs and expectations about human-building interactions, we conducted a pilot study using a mixed methods approach combining short surveys and controlled laboratory activities. We recruited 66 participants and collected several data elements characterizing their perceptions and expectations about smart building services. This paper presents preliminary evidence showing acceptance of specific human-building interaction methods based on ambient-sensors information such as in-context voice, behavior, and emotion, recognition. We also identified a need for educational activities to promote the understanding of smart building concepts and their impact in modern society. These results can be leveraged to assist the design of future services that include human-building and human-robot interactions.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence
Translation and Validation of the AttrakDiff User Experience Questionnaire to Spanish
Descripción:
The AttrakDiff questionnaire is a widely used instrument for measuring User Experience. However, a Spanish version of the questionnaire has yet to be validated. This represents a significant limitation, given the importance of the Spanish-speaking community. This study aims to translate and validate AttrakDiff to Spanish. Several techniques for translation were used, and the results were joined in a translation proposal. The translated version was evaluated in two scenarios. First, an evaluation with 200 + participants to assess the translation proposal. Second, an evaluation of three systems to perform a factorial analysis and determine the correlations between questions of the same dimension. The results of this study will contribute to the advancement of UX research and practice in the Spanish-speaking context and provide a valuable tool for practitioners and researchers who work with Spanish-speaking users.
Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper
Publicado en: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2023)