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MULTIMODAL INTERFACES IN HOME APPLIANCES

     
Home appliances have changed a lot in the last decades: they have become increasingly smart, and the way in which we control them exploits new and often multiple interaction modalities, including touch and touch-less input, proximity interaction and speech interfaces
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Living spaces have never been so smart.

This evolution calls for a renovation of the approach employed in the investigation of the interaction between the appliance and the user.The project in collaboration with Electrolux aims at finding innovative methods for identifying usage issues of multimodal interfaces for home appliances and to investigate the experience of use with them.Depending on the maturity of the prototype, the experiments involve physical mock-ups or virtual simulation of the prototypes.Additionally, in the context of multimodal interfaces, it is of paramount importance for designers and developers to understand current practices of use in order to design effective interfaces.At HIT Research Centre we investigate users' practices in their natural setting, adapting the research methods from ethnography.Therefore, the method is based on the observation of the end user and on the subsequent analysis of their impressions concerning the use of specific interactive tools.Besides self-reported measures, in this project, we mainly collect and analyze objective data regarding users' behaviour, comprising computer-supported video-analysis, eye-tracking data analysis and automatic classification of emotions through facial expressions.The way the people react when they use innovative home appliances, can tell if a technology will be welcomed or highlight the need for improvements.By refining the methods to investigate user's satisfaction it is possible to configure an appropriate advance of technologies in harmony with human behaviours.

We research solutions, you enjoy life.
     
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Funding body: Electrolux
HIT Principal Investigators: Prof. Luciano Gamberini, PhD Valeria Orso