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The design of civic tech is often confronted with impediments, barriers, and a lack of resources. These and other causes may lead to the discontinuation and even abandonment of initiatives. Since seemingly failed projects are much more difficult to publish as articles, this workshop will provide academics and practitioners with a rare opportunity to exchange experiences and insights on discontinued civic tech initiatives. The goal of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of why some civic tech initiatives fail and ask whether discontinued initiatives may still somehow contribute to social change and the growth of digital civics. A variety of sub-questions around discontinued civic tech will be addressed in the workshop, including matters of participation, citizen science, public management, power structures and biases, and communication.

BACKGROUND Innovative technologies such as game consoles and smart toys used with games or playful approaches have proven to be successful and attractive in providing effective and motivating hand therapy for children with Cerebral Palsy (CP). Thus, there is an increased interest in designing and implementing interventions that can improve the well-being of these children. However, there needs to be more understanding of the playful elements of technology-supported hand therapy. OBJECTIVE This scoping review aims to identify the playful elements and the innovative technologies currently used in hand therapy for children with CP. METHODS We included studies that design or evaluate interventions for children with CP that use innovative technologies with game or play strategies. Data were extracted and analyzed on the type of technology, description of the system and playful elements according to the Lenses of Play, a play design toolkit. Thirty-one studies were included in the analysis. RESULTS The results show high use of consumer technologies in hand therapy for children with CP. While several studies used a combination of consumer technologies with therapeutic-specific technologies, only a few studies focused on the exclusive use of therapeutic-specific technologies. To analyze the playfulness of these interventions that make use of innovative technologies, we focused our review on three Lenses of Play: Open-ended Play, where it was found that the characteristics of Ludus, such as a structured form of play and defined goals and rules, were the most common ones, while strategies that relate to Paidia were less common. The most used Forms of Play were physical or active form and games with rules. Finally, the most popular Playful experiences were control, challenge, and competition. CONCLUSIONS The inventory and analysis of innovative technology and playful elements we provide here can be a starting point for new developments of fun and engaging tools to assist hand therapy for children with CP.

Despite the high prevalence of visual impairments in persons with severe or profound intellectual disability (ID), often a formal diagnosisis unavailable. Direct support workers and staff members have access to the information of the visual functioning through the personalfiles and build knowledge based on their own experiences. In order to provide individualized and high quality support in daily life, theaccuracy and availability of this information of the visual functioning is essential. This study investigates the knowledge of direct supportworkers and staff members on the visual functioning of their clients and the written information available in the personalfiles. It is investi-gated to what extent they do agree on their knowledge and how certain direct support workers and staff members are about their knowl-edge on the visual functioning. Additionally is investigated to what extent the information available in supportfiles is based on formalassessment. For 104 clients with severe or profound ID a direct support worker and a staff memberfilled in a questionnaire about theirvisual functioning. Next, the personalfiles were analyzed. Direct support workers and staff members respond significantly differently onthe questions on the impaired visual functions. Direct support workers rate the certainty level of their knowledge on their clients’visualfunctions higher than staff members. The personalfiles lack information on the visual functioning. If information is available, it is mostlybased on subjective impressions. The knowledge of direct support workers and staff members and the information available in the per-sonalfiles provide no comprehensive picture of the visual functioning of the persons with severe or profound ID. ispartof: Journal Of Policy And Practice In Intellectual Disabilities vol:16 issue:4 pages:287-295 status: published

Background Approximately 5%-10% of elementary school children show delayed development of fine motor skills. To address these problems, detection is required. Current assessment tools are time-consuming, require a trained supervisor, and are not motivating for children. Sensor-augmented toys and machine learning have been presented as possible solutions to address this problem. Objective This study examines whether sensor-augmented toys can be used to assess children’s fine motor skills. The objectives were to (1) predict the outcome of the fine motor skill part of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children Second Edition (fine MABC-2) and (2) study the influence of the classification model, game, type of data, and level of difficulty of the game on the prediction. Methods Children in elementary school (n=95, age 7.8 [SD 0.7] years) performed the fine MABC-2 and played 2 games with a sensor-augmented toy called “Futuro Cube.” The game “roadrunner” focused on speed while the game “maze” focused on precision. Each game had several levels of difficulty. While playing, both sensor and game data were collected. Four supervised machine learning classifiers were trained with these data to predict the fine MABC-2 outcome: k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), and support vector machine (SVM). First, we compared the performances of the games and classifiers. Subsequently, we compared the levels of difficulty and types of data for the classifier and game that performed best on accuracy and F1 score. For all statistical tests, we used α=.05. Results The highest achieved mean accuracy (0.76) was achieved with the DT classifier that was trained on both sensor and game data obtained from playing the easiest and the hardest level of the roadrunner game. Significant differences in performance were found in the accuracy scores between data obtained from the roadrunner and maze games (DT, P=.03; KNN, P=.01; LR, P=.02; SVM, P=.04). No significant differences in performance were found in the accuracy scores between the best performing classifier and the other 3 classifiers for both the roadrunner game (DT vs KNN, P=.42; DT vs LR, P=.35; DT vs SVM, P=.08) and the maze game (DT vs KNN, P=.15; DT vs LR, P=.62; DT vs SVM, P=.26). The accuracy of only the best performing level of difficulty (combination of the easiest and hardest level) achieved with the DT classifier trained with sensor and game data obtained from the roadrunner game was significantly better than the combination of the easiest and middle level (P=.046). Conclusions The results of our study show that sensor-augmented toys can efficiently predict the fine MABC-2 scores for children in elementary school. Selecting the game type (focusing on speed or precision) and data type (sensor or game data) is more important for determining the performance than selecting the machine learning classifier or level of difficulty.

The rapid developments in new communication technologies have facilitated the popularization of digital games, which has translated into an exponential growth of the game industry in recent decades. The ubiquitous presence of digital games has resulted in an expansion of the applications of these games from mere entertainment purposes to a great variety of serious purposes. In this edited volume, we narrow the scope of attention by focusing on what game theorist Ian Bogost has called 'persuasive games', that is, gaming practices that combine the dissemination of information with attempts to engage players in particular attitudes and behaviors. This volume offers a multifaceted reflection on persuasive gaming, that is, on the process of these particular games being played by players. The purpose is to better understand when and how digital games can be used for persuasion by further exploring persuasive games and some other kinds of persuasive playful interaction as well. The book critically integrates what has been accomplished in separate research traditions to offer a multidisciplinary approach to understanding persuasive gaming that is closely linked to developments in the industry by including the exploration of relevant case studies.

Persuasive games are designed for a variety of objectives, from marketing to healthcare and activism. Some of the more socially aware ones cast players as members of disenfranchised minorities, prompting them to see what they see. In parallel, designers have started to leverage system-immersion to enable players to temporarily feel like another person, to sense what they sense. From these converging perspectives, we hypothesize a stilluncharted space of opportunities at the crossroads of games, empathy, persuasion, and system-immersion. We explored this space by designing A Breathtaking Journey, a mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee’s journey. A qualitative study was conducted to tease out empathy-arousing characteristics, provide insights on empathic experiences, and contribute three design opportunities: visceral engagement, reflective moments, and affective appeals.

This chapter offers a multifaceted reflection on persuasive gaming divided into three pillars: persuasiveness, design, and validation. The first section on persuasiveness is a critical review of previous and current persuasive gaming theory and analysis. It argues that the contemporary gaming landscape needs to expand theoretically and presents a multidimensional persuasive approach as one way in which this can be done. The following section on the design of persuasive games looks at research on design principles, which are the defining characteristics of persuasive games. The final section on validation discusses existing studies on the effects of persuasive games and the case-based assessment of the impact of new games.

The pace and magnitude of recent advancements in digital technologies have set the scene for a complete transformation of our citizenship experience. In the past, HCI research has been concerned with aligning technological progress with top-down organizational models of government institutions or exploring the needs of individual bottom-up community initiatives. However, this approach has proved too rigid for systemic issues and HCI researchers have started to meet these wicked problems halfway, rather than from two opposing sides. This involves putting emphasis on how citizens and organizations can incorporate existing technologies and involve dialogue and co-creation in their process. In this paper we highlight several directions of HCI research that follow the trail towards civic empowerment. Based on these, we identify a set of strategies that might help researchers contribute to a more inclusive orientation of civic tech.

BACKGROUND Approximately 5%-10% of elementary school children show delayed development of fine motor skills. To address these problems, detection is required. Current assessment tools are time-consuming, require a trained supervisor, and are not motivating for children. Sensor-augmented toys and machine learning have been presented as possible solutions to address this problem. OBJECTIVE This study examines whether sensor-augmented toys can be used to assess children’s fine motor skills. The objectives were to (1) predict the outcome of the fine motor skill part of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children Second Edition (fine MABC-2) and (2) study the influence of the classification model, game, type of data, and level of difficulty of the game on the prediction. METHODS Children in elementary school (n=95, age 7.8 [SD 0.7] years) performed the fine MABC-2 and played 2 games with a sensor-augmented toy called “Futuro Cube.” The game “roadrunner” focused on speed while the game “maze” focused on precision. Each game had several levels of difficulty. While playing, both sensor and game data were collected. Four supervised machine learning classifiers were trained with these data to predict the fine MABC-2 outcome: k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), and support vector machine (SVM). First, we compared the performances of the games and classifiers. Subsequently, we compared the levels of difficulty and types of data for the classifier and game that performed best on accuracy and F1 score. For all statistical tests, we used α=.05. RESULTS The highest achieved mean accuracy (0.76) was achieved with the DT classifier that was trained on both sensor and game data obtained from playing the easiest and the hardest level of the roadrunner game. Significant differences in performance were found in the accuracy scores between data obtained from the roadrunner and maze games (DT, P=.03; KNN, P=.01; LR, P=.02; SVM, P=.04). No significant differences in performance were found in the accuracy scores between the best performing classifier and the other 3 classifiers for both the roadrunner game (DT vs KNN, P=.42; DT vs LR, P=.35; DT vs SVM, P=.08) and the maze game (DT vs KNN, P=.15; DT vs LR, P=.62; DT vs SVM, P=.26). The accuracy of only the best performing level of difficulty (combination of the easiest and hardest level) achieved with the DT classifier trained with sensor and game data obtained from the roadrunner game was significantly better than the combination of the easiest and middle level (P=.046). CONCLUSIONS The results of our study show that sensor-augmented toys can efficiently predict the fine MABC-2 scores for children in elementary school. Selecting the game type (focusing on speed or precision) and data type (sensor or game data) is more important for determining the performance than selecting the machine learning classifier or level of difficulty.

HCI and design research has turned toward exploring methods, technologies, processes for societal impact, and do so by intervening in the real world and designing for, with and by people and existing citizen initiatives. A key issue faced is enabling efforts to continue beyond the project or grant timeline. For this reason, there is a growing need to create a forum where researchers and practitioners can share their approaches to shed light on opportunities and challenges of supporting lasting civic initiatives moving forward. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in how to make civic initiatives have lasting impact: either by supporting and sustaining such initiatives or by focusing on how their outcomes increase people's capacity to act on their ideas and wishes.

Socially aware persuasive games that use immersive technologies often appeal to empathy, prompting users to feel and understand the struggles of another. However, the often sought-after standing in another's shoes' experience, in which users virtually inhabit another in distress, may complicate other-oriented empathy. Following a Research through Design approach, we designed for other-oriented empathy - focusing on a partaker-perspective and diegetic reflection - which resulted in Permanent; a virtual reality game designed to foster empathy towards evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. We deployed Permanent 'in the wild' and carried out a qualitative study with 78 participants in the Netherlands and Japan to capture user experiences. Content Analysis of the data showed a predominance of other-oriented empathy across countries, and in our Thematic Analysis, we identified the themes of 'Spatial, Other, and Self -Awareness', 'Personal Accounts', 'Ambivalence', and 'Transdiegetic Items', resulting in design insights for fostering other-oriented empathy through virtual reality.

Citizens and communities play a significant role in shaping the cities they live in, providing a human touch to the development of smart cities. Designers and researchers aim to support this movement through developing (partly) digital technologies together with citizens and communities. However, while the body of examples on this topic is steadily growing, less effort has been made to aggregate existing research and map the underlying processes. In order to contribute to a better understanding of community technology initiatives, this article presents a qualitative systematic literature review on the design and deployment of (partly) digital technologies for civic communities. The article outlines five important topics in these community technology initiatives, based on a qualitative analysis of findings from 36 empirical studies. The five topics are: connectedness to the community context, establish(ed) networks and relationships, balanced roles and responsibilities, diverse and inclusive involvement, and collaborative development of community technologies. The article provides a starting point for future research and design of community technology initiatives and offers an introduction for researchers new to the field.

Social sustainability is becoming an increasingly important topic in design practice, calling for more contextual perspectives on the process of design for social sustainability. This paper presents a retrospective case study analyzing the design process of a serious game which aimed to empower teenagers to organize events to strengthen community bonds. The community context in which the collaborative project took place underwent significant contextual changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis using the Ecologies of Contestation framework shows the influence of multiple contextual levels (Socio-cultural, Power, Constructed, and Values-based) on the design process. Moreover, the paper discusses multiple contextual factors which influenced the design process and presents four suggestions for designers to anticipate and benefit from dynamics in these contextual elements. The suggestions regard (1) integrating the temporal dimension in the collaborative design processes, (2) carefully considering (value) alignment between actors, (3) leveraging values in the collaborative design process, and (4) acknowledging and responding to the multilayered nature of communities throughout the design process. As such, this paper explores the relationships between the community context and the collaborative design process to contribute to more resilient design practices. Social sustainability is becoming an increasingly important topic in design practice, calling for more contextual perspectives on the process of design for social sustainability. This paper presents a retrospective case study analyzing the design process of a serious game which aimed to empower teenagers to organize events to strengthen community bonds. The community context in which the collaborative project took place underwent significant contextual changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis using the Ecologies of Contestation framework shows the influence of multiple contextual levels (Socio-cultural, Power, Constructed, and Values-based) on the design process. Moreover, the paper discusses multiple contextual factors which influenced the design process and presents four suggestions for designers to anticipate and benefit from dynamics in these contextual elements. The suggestions regard (1) integrating the temporal dimension in the collaborative design processes, (2) carefully considering (value) alignment between actors, (3) leveraging values in the collaborative design process, and (4) acknowledging and responding to the multilayered nature of communities throughout the design process. As such, this paper explores the relationships between the community context and the collaborative design process to contribute to more resilient design practices.

We argue that the distinguishing features of Participatory Design are not the participatory activities as such but the mechanisms used, the effects produced and the way in which these are sustained. We use program theory to illuminate how participatory design works and how it may be understood as more than a collection of methods or a matter of configuring user participation. Program theory operates by formulating the causal relations between the planned inputs, the process and the effects in terms of output, outcome and impact. While participatory design might appear similar to co-design or user-centered design on the level of design activities, PD differs in terms of the mechanisms employed and how effects and their sustainment are conceived. Looking at participatory design through the lens of program theory highlights how particular mechanisms work towards not only the designed product but also towards generating gains and lasting effects for participants. We argue that the distinguishing features of Participatory Design are not the participatory activities as such but the mechanisms used, the effects produced and the way in which these are sustained. We use program theory to illuminate how participatory design works and how it may be understood as more than a collection of methods or a matter of configuring user participation. Program theory operates by formulating the causal relations between the planned inputs, the process and the effects in terms of output, outcome and impact. While participatory design might appear similar to co-design or user-centered design on the level of design activities, PD differs in terms of the mechanisms employed and how effects and their sustainment are conceived. Looking at participatory design through the lens of program theory highlights how particular mechanisms work towards not only the designed product but also towards generating gains and lasting effects for participants.

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.

Designing for open-ended play poses specific new challenges to designers. Designing for closed games includes defining rules and goals to balanced the game properly. A design for open-ended play has no predefined rules and goals. The design needs to provide users with more freedom to continually change goals and rules of play, which distinguishes the field from designs of closed games. Gaining knowledge on the design process of creating this freedom is essential. For this purpose, an integrated model for open-ended play is proposed. This model is based on a combination of two existing models: Hunicke’s Mechanics Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) model and Grünvogel’s formal models for game design. Both of the above mentioned existing models are generalized to make them applicable for analyzing open-ended play. In the proposed combined model we distinguish between the perspectives of the design, and the perspective of play. It addresses how to handle changing rules and goals, instead of the assumptions that rules and goals do not change. Furthermore, the model was used to improve our understanding on progression and emergence, two key concepts that are commonly used in game design. The integrated model for open-ended play (IMO) was used in a preliminary case study with a digital play application, an interactive environment for open-ended play named the GlowSteps, to evaluate the model and to underline our insights on emergence and progression.

Toolkits enable individuals to create and design their own technologies. With more toolkits being commercially available, movements such as the Maker Movements has led to a hype around Do-It-Yourself and Making practices. This development aligns with the recent HCI research agenda, which is calling for user empowerment. Yet, the Maker Movement has been criticised for lacking diversity and practicality in the broader world. The question remains how toolkits can afford and sustain wider participation of different communities in technology design. This workshop aims to identify ways in which toolkits can empower people. By bringing together researchers, designers, and practitioners with an interest in DIY/making toolkits for people from diverse backgrounds, for different purposes, and in a variety of project contexts, we see a particular potential in discussing how HCI research could contribute and unpack toolkits as tools for empowerment and thinking about the role of making in broader practice.

Smart tangible toys, designed for hand manipulation, can transform fine motor skills assessment into enjoyable activities which are engaging for children to play (partially) unsupervised. Such toys can support school teachers and parents for early detection of deficiencies in motor skills development of children, as well as objectively monitor the progress of skills development over time. To make a game enjoyable for children with different skills level, these smart toys could offer an adaptive game play. In this paper we describe the design and deployment of a digital board game, equipped with sensors, which we use to explore the potential of using smart toys for fine motor skills assessment in children.

For this study we investigated if and how the merging of VR with radio drama can provide general insights into storytelling for VR. In order to present the student project The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet as a case study, we discuss environmental storytelling, and storytelling in relation to VR and radioplay. We conclude that the traditional lean back medium that is radio drama may benefit from the lean in quality of VR and we discuss a number of strong concepts that can be explored in order to gain further knowledge about storytelling for VR.

Progetto Ustica is an experiment in "civically-engaged game design" and addresses the Ustica Massacre ("Strage di Ustica"), where 81 people lost their lives as an air-to-air missile hit a civilian aircraft in 1980. Progetto Ustica has been developed as part of an Action Research effort with the objective of preserving and transmitting the historical memory of the event. With this post-mortem essay, we reflect on the game design challenges that Progetto Ustica faced, we introduce different conceptualizations of "memory" emerging from our design practice, and we synthesize some lessons learned (implications for design) towards other "civically-engaged games" for socio-cultural heritage.

Games are designed with different objectives in mind. Some primarily for entertainment, others also to educate, motivate or persuade its players. Games with the latter objective, that of persuasion, are designed not only to be entertaining, but also with the intent to shape how players think and feel about issues in reality. However, despite the growing interest in persuasive games, we still lack the design insights and strategies that support their production, particularly for those using immersive technologies. To address this gap, we organize a hands-on workshop and bring together academic and industry experts to explore persuasive game design. Through making we generate knowledge in the form of insights and examplar work, and subsequently formulate best-practises and design strategies for future design and research.

When creating content for virtual reality, filmmakers find that they need to re-evaluate the tools they have traditionally used to tell their stories, and explore the new possibilities that this particular medium has to offer. To determine how storytelling- and filmmaking tools function in VR, the concept of presence is currently being re-evaluated for its possibilities to be used as a measurement of the relative effectiveness of these tools. The research project Project Orpheus is presented as a case study into trans-medial storytelling, exploring how the impact of a traditional television show may be reinforced by an immersive VR experience. The movie was subsequently used to conduct a small qualitative study into the use of 3D sound to guide the viewers attention in VR.

This paper describes experiments with a game device that was used for early detection of delays in motor skill development in primary school children. Children play a game by bi-manual manipulation of the device which continuously collects ac- celerometer data and game state data. Features of the data are used to discriminate between normal children and children with delays. This study focused on the feature selection. Three features were compared: mean squared jerk (time domain); power spectral entropy (fourier domain) and cosine similarity measure (quality of game play). The discriminatory power of the features was tested in an experiment where 28 children played games of different levels of difficulty. The results show that jerk and cosine similarity have reasonable discriminatory power to detect fine-grained motor skill development delays especially when taking the game level into account. Duration of a game level needs to be at least 30 seconds in order to achieve good classification results.

Intelligent environments and smart applications require creating engaging interactions with their users, which on one side requires sensing and understanding human behavior, and on the other side carefully engineered application interfaces to keep these interactions sustained and useful over longer periods. Playful interactions and serious games incorporate elements of play for this purpose. As a fundamental human activity, play engages people at every age. This thematic issue explores how novel technologies can fuel fun and entertainment in ambient intelligence applications, and the societal implications and possibilities thereof.

This article describes how to design for ambient playful interactions in public spaces, using interactive technology. Ten explorative design cases are presented, all interactive installations with the goal to elicit playful active behavior from teenagers. Following this, we derive three design values, based on literature, user research and the insights from the design cases. These design values describe our best practices for eliciting intrinsically motivating playful interactions: eliciting and seducing passers-by to become players, designing for emergent play to create personalized and changing play, and resonating with users' values, emotions and activities. In addition, insights gained from the cases and evaluations are discussed, and recommendations for implementing playful interactions in public spaces are given.

Persuasive games exist for a wide variety of objectives, from marketing, to healthcare and activism. Some of the more socially-aware ones cast players as members of disenfranchised minorities, such as migrants, prompting them to 'see what they see'. In parallel, a growing number of designers has recently started to leverage immersive technologies to enable the public to temporarily inhabit another person, to 'sense what they sense'. From these two converging perspectives, we hypothesize a still-uncharted space of opportunities at the crossroads of games, empathy, persuasion, and immersion. Following a Research through Design approach, we explored this space by designing A Breathtaking Journey, an embodied and multisensory mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee's journey. A qualitative study was conducted with a grounded theory/open coding methodology to tease out empathy-arousing characteristics, and to chart this novel game design space. As we elaborate on our analysis, we provide insights on empathic mixed-reality experiences, and conclude with offering three design opportunities: visceral engagement, reflective moments and affective appeals, to spur future research and design.

As smart solutions for healthcare (eHealth) are becoming increasingly widespread, apps and other digital devices may effectively complement various forms of psychotherapy. We point at children and adolescents in psychological therapy as a yet-underserved public for similar solutions. Moreover, a shared design sensibility between interaction designers, game designers, and therapists is still lacking. The Games 4 Therapy initiative was launched to address this problem space through practical design explorations. We illustrate its design research agenda, we call for more attention to children and adolescents as important recipients of digitally-mediated psychological therapies, and we offer actionable concepts and game design tactics for interaction designers and psychotherapists. Finally, we discuss our findings by "thinking through" a selection of conceptual design explorations, pointing at the characteristics and tactics we identified in our sketches.

During the workshop on Ambient Gaming (AmGam’11) at the International Conference on Ambient Intelligence in Amsterdam, 16-18 November 2011, 17 participants from 8 different countries discussed emerging research topics around Ambient Gaming. With ambient games and play we denote playful activities that are seamlessly integrated within our daily lives in such a way that the boundaries between other activities and play disappear or blur. Ambient games blend the virtual and real world and are interacted with through multiple ubiquitous devices. Ambient games and play have a strong motivational character and may offer more natural and improved interaction. However, we are also faced with many challenges, not only technological, but societal and ethical as well.

The security concerns due to the September 11 and later terroristic attacks, fostered the development of more advanced techniques for biometric identification. This had a positive impact to research and deployment of these technologies, founding a basis for security-related applications. At the same time, the privacy concerns for the misuse of personal information have hindered the application of the same technologies wherever their introduction could not be enforced. The risk is for the scientific development to be blocked by contradictory needs, which, in turn, often derive from misconceptions or misunderstanding of the real potential of biometric technologies. Within this context, ambient intelligence allows to consider the relation between biometrics and privacy under a different perspective. In fact, as most of times we are able to maintain social relations without the need to know each other’s identity (consider for example the case of a customer relating with an attendant at a department store), in the same way biometric technologies can facilitate the man–machine interaction (to better provide useful services) without the need to determine the user’s full identity. Also in the case of security applications, most often may be sufficient to retrieve ancillary information about a subject rather than determining his/her identity. This paper analyzes the potential of biometric technologies within the general scope of ambient intelligence, trying to identify some key technological issues which may respond to privacy concerns. Some example applications are considered where by exploiting the information contained in biometric data, such as the facial expression or other, non visual, measurements, it is possible to better relate the user with the environment and provide a substantial input to drive the services provided, without compromising his privacy.

We present the first database of communicative interactions reproduced through point-light displays (Communicative Interaction Database). The database contains 20 communicative interactions performed by male and by female couples. For each action, we provide movie files from four different viewpoints, as well as text files with the 3-D spatial coordinates of the point lights, allowing researchers to construct customized versions. By including various types of actions performed with different social motives, the database contains a diverse sample of nonconventional communicative gestures. Normative data collected to assess the recognizability of the stimuli suggest that, for most action stimuli, information in point-light displays is sufficient for clear recognition of the action as communicative, as well as for identification of the specific communicative gesture performed by the actor. The full set of stimuli may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/ content/supplemental and from http://ppw.kuleuven.be/labexppsy/lepSite/resources/CID.rar.