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BACKGROUND: Improving arm-hand skill performance is a major therapeutic target in stroke rehabilitation. Arm-hand rehabilitation may be enriched in content and variation by using technology-assisted training. Especially for people with a severely affected arm, technology-assisted training offers more challenging training possibilities. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to explore the feasibility of ReHab-TOAT, a “Remote Handling Based Task-Oriented Arm Training” approach featuring enriched haptic feedback aimed at improving daily activities and participation. METHODS: Five subacute or chronic stroke patients suffering moderate to severe arm-hand impairments and five rehabilitation therapists participated. All participants received 2 ReHab-TOAT sessions. Outcome measure was a bespoke feasibility questionnaire on user experiences and satisfaction regarding ‘motivation’, ‘individualization of training’, ‘potential training effects’, and ‘implementation in rehabilitation’ of patients and therapists. RESULTS: Both patients and therapists experienced ReHab-TOAT as being feasible. They found ReHab-TOAT very motivating and challenging. All patients perceived an added value of ReHab-TOAT and would continue the training. Small improvements regarding exercise variability were suggested. CONCLUSION: ReHab-TOAT seems to be a feasible and very promising training approach for arm-hand rehabilitation of stroke patients with a moderately or severely affected arm. Further research is necessary to investigate potential training effects of ReHab-TOAT.

Background Although disease-specific exercise guidelines for cardiovascular disease (CVD) are widely available, it remains uncertain whether these different exercise guidelines are integrated properly for patients with different CVDs. The aim of this study was to assess the inter-clinician variance in exercise prescription for patients with various CVDs and to compare these prescriptions with recommendations from the EXercise Prescription in Everyday practice and Rehabilitative Training (EXPERT) tool, a digital decision support system for integrated state-of-the-art exercise prescription in CVD. Design The study was a prospective observational survey. Methods Fifty-three CV rehabilitation clinicians from nine European countries were asked to prescribe exercise intensity (based on percentage of peak heart rate (HRpeak)), frequency, session duration, programme duration and exercise type (endurance or strength training) for the same five patients. Exercise prescriptions were compared between clinicians, and relationships with clinician characteristics were studied. In addition, these exercise prescriptions were compared with recommendations from the EXPERT tool. Results A large inter-clinician variance was found for prescribed exercise intensity (median (interquartile range (IQR)): 83 (13) % of HRpeak), frequency (median (IQR): 4 (2) days/week), session duration (median (IQR): 45 (18) min/session), programme duration (median (IQR): 12 (18) weeks), total exercise volume (median (IQR): 1215 (1961) peak-effort training hours) and prescription of strength training exercises (prescribed in 78% of all cases). Moreover, clinicians’ exercise prescriptions were significantly different from those of the EXPERT tool ( p Conclusions This study reveals significant inter-clinician variance in exercise prescription for patients with different CVDs and disagreement with an integrated state-of-the-art system for exercise prescription, justifying the need for standardization efforts regarding integrated exercise prescription in CV rehabilitation.

Whereas exercise training is key in the management of patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk (obesity, diabetes, dyslipidaemia, hypertension), clinicians experience difficulties in how to optimally prescribe exercise in patients with different CVD risk factors. Therefore, a consensus statement for state-of-the-art exercise prescription in patients with combinations of CVD risk factors as integrated into a digital training and decision support system (the EXercise Prescription in Everyday practice & Rehabilitative Training (EXPERT) tool) needed to be established. EXPERT working group members systematically reviewed the literature for meta-analyses, systematic reviews and/or clinical studies addressing exercise prescriptions in specific CVD risk factors and formulated exercise recommendations (exercise training intensity, frequency, volume and type, session and programme duration) and exercise safety precautions, for obesity, arterial hypertension, type 1 and 2 diabetes, and dyslipidaemia. The impact of physical fitness, CVD risk altering medications and adverse events during exercise testing was further taken into account to fine-tune this exercise prescription. An algorithm, supported by the interactive EXPERT tool, was developed by Hasselt University based on these data. Specific exercise recommendations were formulated with the aim to decrease adipose tissue mass, improve glycaemic control and blood lipid profile, and lower blood pressure. The impact of medications to improve CVD risk, adverse events during exercise testing and physical fitness was also taken into account. Simulations were made of how the EXPERT tool provides exercise prescriptions according to the variables provided. In this paper, state-of-the-art exercise prescription to patients with combinations of CVD risk factors is formulated, and it is shown how the EXPERT tool may assist clinicians. This contributes to an appropriately tailored exercise regimen for every CVD risk patient. ispartof: SPORTS MEDICINE vol:48 issue:8 pages:1781-1797 ispartof: location:New Zealand status: published

Part 7: Design Rationale and Camera-Control; International audience; In the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process.

Attending music festivals is a popular pastime. However, there will unfortunately always be a share of fans who, for a wide variety of reasons, are unable to visit a festival of their choice in person. This article reports on the expectations users have about being able to immersively experience music festivals from the comfort of their living room. Out of these expectations, we distill an approach for remote festival engagement that is centered around the concept of blending respectively professional and user-generated content. We then crystallize our approach into a Smart TV application called WanderCouch and let prospective users evaluate it in a simulated live setting. The resulting findings suggest that the proposed solution, among other things, exhibits the potential to improve on the experience provided by traditional (TV) coverages of music festivals, to have a positive impact on both immersion and level of engagement with concerts, and to transfer a veracious impression of the festival's general theme and on-site atmosphere. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement nr 610370, ICoSOLE ("Immersive Coverage of Spatially Outspread Live Events", http://www.icosole.eu). The authors would like to thank their consortium partners VRT, BBC, Technicolor, Joanneum Research, bitmovin and TaW for their help gathering the Dranouter footage. We explicitly thank prof. Philippe Bekaert for his efforts in rendering out the professional Dranouter recordings. Finally, we express our sincere gratitude to the organizers of the Dranouter music festival, as well as to Triggerfinger, Intergalactic Lovers and Bart Peeters, the three bands that are featured in our prototype.

Background Exercise rehabilitation is highly recommended by current guidelines on prevention of cardiovascular disease, but its implementation is still poor. Many clinicians experience difficulties in prescribing exercise in the presence of different concomitant cardiovascular diseases and risk factors within the same patient. It was aimed to develop a digital training and decision support system for exercise prescription in cardiovascular disease patients in clinical practice: the European Association of Preventive Cardiology Exercise Prescription in Everyday Practice and Rehabilitative Training (EXPERT) tool. Methods EXPERT working group members were requested to define (a) diagnostic criteria for specific cardiovascular diseases, cardiovascular disease risk factors, and other chronic non-cardiovascular conditions, (b) primary goals of exercise intervention, (c) disease-specific prescription of exercise training (intensity, frequency, volume, type, session and programme duration), and (d) exercise training safety advices. The impact of exercise tolerance, common cardiovascular medications and adverse events during exercise testing were further taken into account for optimized exercise prescription. Results Exercise training recommendations and safety advices were formulated for 10 cardiovascular diseases, five cardiovascular disease risk factors (type 1 and 2 diabetes, obesity, hypertension, hypercholesterolaemia), and three common chronic non-cardiovascular conditions (lung and renal failure and sarcopaenia), but also accounted for baseline exercise tolerance, common cardiovascular medications and occurrence of adverse events during exercise testing. An algorithm, supported by an interactive tool, was constructed based on these data. This training and decision support system automatically provides an exercise prescription according to the variables provided. Conclusion This digital training and decision support system may contribute in overcoming barriers in exercise implementation in common cardiovascular diseases. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The realisation of the proof of concept of the EXPERT tool was supported by a UHasselt Industrial Research Fund (IOF) proof of concept (PoC) project.

International audience; We present Gestu-Wan, an intelligible gesture guidance system designed to support mid-air gesture-based interaction for walk-up-and-use displays. Although gesture-based interfaces have become more prevalent, there is currently very little uniformity with regard to gesture sets and the way gestures can be executed. This leads to confusion, bad user experiences and users who rather avoid than engage in interaction using mid-air gesturing. Our approach improves the visibility of gesture-based interfaces and facilitates execution of mid-air gestures without prior training. We compare Gestu-Wan with a static gesture guide, which shows that it can help users with both performing complex gestures as well as understanding how the gesture recognizer works.

This paper describes how optimized streaming strategies, based on MPEG-DASH, can be employed to power a new generation of interactive applications based on immersive video. The latter encompasses ultra-high-resolution, omnidirectional and panoramic video. The goal is to deliver experiences that are made up of multiple videos of short duration, which can be joined at run-time in an order defined through user interactions. Applications of the technology are widespread, ranging from virtual walkthroughs to interactive storytelling, the former of which will be featured in detail. The main technological challenges tackled in this paper are to deliver these experiences in a seamless fashion, at the highest quality level allowed by network conditions and on a wide range of platforms, including the Web. Besides these, the paper focuses on the two-tier software architecture of the proposed framework, as well as a short evaluation to substantiate the validity of the proposed solutions.

The goal of multimodal user interfaces is to assist users in completing tasks quicker or with fewer errors, by reducing their cognitive workload. Visual, auditory and tactile feedback modalities are commonly used as a means to provide users with information through different sensory channels. Understanding how visual, auditory and tactile feedback modalities complement each other is still an open research area for understanding how computers can help users to complete everyday tasks more efficiently. In this paper, we evaluate user performance on a target acquisition task that simulates a real life scenario: locating a book in a bookcase. We performed a comprehensive comparison among the seven possible combinations of three feedback channels (visual, auditory and tactile). Twenty-four volunteers participated in our experiment. Our results show that using the combination of the three feedback modalities improves user performance on this evidently visual task. However, using the visual modality alone does not increase user performance as much as the other feedback channels. By means of a post-experiment questionnaire, subjects reported that they perceived tactile modality as the most helpful feedback channel.

The widespread usage of mobile devices together with their computational capabilities enables the implementation of novel interaction techniques to improve user performance in traditional mobile applications. Navigation assistance is an important area in the mobile domain, and probably Google Maps is the most popular example. This type of applications is highly demanding for user’s attention, especially in the visual channel. Tactile and auditory feedback have been studied as alternatives to visual feedback for navigation assistance to reduce this dependency. However, there is still room for improvement and more research is needed to understand, for example, how the three feedback modalities complement each other, especially with the appearance of new technology such as smart watches and new displays such as Google Glass. The goal of our work is to study how the users perceives multimodal feedback when their route is augmented with directional cues. Our results show that tactile guidance cues produced the worst user performance, both objectively and subjectively. Participants reported that vibration patterns were hard to decode. However, tactile feedback was an unobtrusive technique to inform participants when to look to the mobile screen or listen to the spoken directions. The results show that combining feedback modalities produces good user performance.