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A digital spirometer is developed along with an application that introduces a certain level of gamification to the otherwise tedious practice of breathing exercises. The spirometer connects wirelessly with the application via Bluetooth. An illustration is displayed on the screen visualizing the patient's lung output. The immediate objective of this product is to engage the patient through gamification during their breathing exercises and consequently improve their lung strength. 

Today people depend on technology, but often do not take the necessary steps to prioritize privacy and security. Researchers have been actively studying usable security and privacy to enable better response and management. A breadth of research focuses on improving the usability of tools for experts and organizations. Studies that look at non-expert users tend to analyze the experience for a device, software, or demographic. There is a lack of understanding of the security and privacy among average users, regardless of the technology, age, gender, or demographic. To address this shortcoming, we surveyed 47 publications in the usable security and privacy space. The work presented here uses qualitative text analysis to find major themes in user-focused security research. We found that a user’s misunderstanding of technology is central to risky decision-making. Our study highlights trends in the research community and remaining work. This paper contributes to this discussion by generalizing key themes across user experience in usable security and privacy. 

Medication adherence is a major problem in the healthcare industry: it has a major impact on an individual’s health and is a major expense on the healthcare system. We note that much of human activity involves using our hands, often in conjunction with objects. Camera-based wearables for tracking human activities have sparked a lot of attention in the past few years. These technologies have the potential to track human behavior anytime, any place. This paper proposes a paradigm for medication adherence employing innovative wrist-worn camera technology. We discuss how the device was built, various experiments to demonstrate feasibility and how the device could be deployed to detect the micro-activities involved in pill taking so as to ensure medication adherence. 

Ụbụrụ is an executive function computerized rehabilitation application specifically designed for mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) individuals. Ụbụrụ utilizes serious games to train cognitive flexibility, planning, and organization. This paper explores the rationale and components behind the alpha stage of the application’s development, and its first design iteration. Currently, individuals with a history of mTBI have limited rehabilitation options as a result of lack of knowledge in terms of available services, access, time, or financial and insurance constraints. Due to the invisible nature of mTBIs, perception of injury severity is diminished, individuals are not properly equipped with how to proceed forward with rehabilitation, and awareness of injury can be inadvertently compromised. The intention behind the Ụbụrụ application is to be a computerized cognitive rehabilitation alternative and additive when limitations such as time, finances, or insurance exist. 

We conducted a 2x2 Wizard of Oz between-subject user study with sixteen healthy older adults. We investigated how to make social robots converse more naturally and reciprocally through unstructured conversation. We varied the level of interaction by changing the level of verbal and nonverbal communication the robot provided. Participants interacted with the robot for eight sessions engaging in an unstructured conversation. These conversations lasted thirty minutes to an hour. This paper will evaluate four questions from the post-interaction survey individuals completed after each session with the robot. The questions include: (i) I had fun talking to the robot; (ii) I felt I had a meaningful conversation; (iii) I was engaged the whole interaction; and (iv) I would consider the robot my friend. All participants reported they were engaged, had a meaningful conversation, and had fun during all eight sessions. Seven individuals felt the robot was their friend. 

Working memory plays an important role in human activities across academic, professional, and social settings. Working memory is defined as the memory extensively involved in goal-directed behaviors in which information must be retained and manipulated to ensure successful task execution. The aim of this research is to understand the effect of image captioning with image description on an individual’s working memory. A study was conducted with eight neutral images comprising situations relatable to daily life such that each image could have a positive or negative description associated with the outcome of the situation in the image. The study consisted of three rounds where the first and second round involved two parts and the third round consisted of one part. The image was captioned a total of five times across the entire study. The findings highlighted that only 25% of participants were able to recall the captions which they captioned for an image after a span of 9–15 days; when comparing the recall rate of the captions, 50% of participants were able to recall the image caption from the previous round in the present round; and out of the positive and negative description associated with the image, 65% of participants recalled the former description rather than the latter. 

Touch plays a vital role in maintaining human relationships through social and emotional communication. The proposed haptic display prototype generates stimuli in vibrotactile and thermal modalities toward simulating social touch cues between remote users. High-dimensional spatiotemporal vibrotactile-thermal (vibrothermal) patterns were evaluated with ten participants. The device can be wirelessly operated to enable remote communication. In the future, such patterns can be used to richly simulate social touch cues. A research study was conducted in two parts: first, the identification accuracy of vibrothermal patterns was explored; and second, the relatability of vibrothermal patterns to social touch experienced during social interactions was evaluated. Results revealed that while complex patterns were difficult to identify, simpler patterns, such as SINGLE TAP and HOLD, were highly identifiable and highly relatable to social touch cues. Directional patterns were less identifiable and less relatable to the social touch cues experienced during social interaction. 

The promises of smart cities continue to overwhelm many people eager to live in them. Simultaneously, many people are still concerned about the increasing privacy risks associated with the core of the promises. The core of smart cities’ promises lies in generating and using data to enable urban technologies that provide, to some degree, value-added services and opportunities for both cities and their citizens. The promises of smart cities highlight three interdependent dimensions, namely the information type, purpose, and value that provide the basis of studying and addressing privacy concerns to enable successful smart cities. This paper presents a 3D privacy framework based on three interdependent dimensions that build on existing citizens’ privacy models [1] and framework [2] to hypothesize when citizens are likely to accept smart city technologies with privacy concerns, when citizens are more likely to accept trading their privacy for the provided valued services under defined regulations, and when citizens are likely to protest and disregard smart cities technologies altogether. The 3D privacy framework highlights new ways of evaluating how technologies impact citizens’ privacy and encourages adopting new ways to lessen citizens’ privacy concerns by implementing technology-specific agile regulation based on the metrics of security. Some specific examples of smart city technologies are discussed to illustrate the practicality and usefulness of the proposed 3D privacy framework in the smart cities’ space.