By thinking through Exceptional Norms, we investigate how technologies, particularly those related to embodied computing, literally encode normative assumptions and expectations in their artefacts. We conduct critical analysis of existing work which we augment with the development of artifacts in a manner of research through design to account for the vast varieties of human bodies.
Project Homepage: https://exceptional-norms.at
Team: Katta Spiel
From September 2018 TU Wien has established an interdisciplinary Doctoral College (DC) on “Trust in Robots – Trusting Robots” to foster cutting-edge research in robotics and AI at the TU Wien. The main objective of the DC is to comprehensively analyse “trust” in the context of robot technology from various perspectives including but not limited to social sciences and economics, computer science and mathematics, electrical and mechanical engineering, and architecture.
Project Website: http://www.trustrobots.eu
Team: Astrid Weiss (supervisor and contact person for HCI group) , Geraldine Fitzpatrick (supervisor), Peter Purgathofer (supervisor), Glenda Hannibal (PhD Student), Isabel Schwaninger (PhD student)
SCHAUKASTEN - Sehförderung für Kleinkinder (1.12.2016 - 31.1.2018), financed by: Hauptverband der österreichischen Sozialversicherungsträger
SCHAUKASTEN seeks to conceptualize, co-design and implement novel interactive toys that motivate young children with visual impairments to keep up with their often dull but crucially important optical exerices.
Children with distinct visual impairment shall exercise their vision as soon as possible in order not to go blind. This exercise in vision constitutes an important building block for later leading an autonomous life.
Unfortunately, these exercise can often be little engaging and boring for the effected children and their parents or caregivers.
Therefore, SCHAUKASTEN seeks novel ways into motivating these children to do their exercises by supporting them with engaging and interactive exercise elements. During training, children shall be motivated by interactive toys to focus and endure as long as optimal. At the same time, parents and caregivers shall be relieved from challenges in motivating the children.
Digitalisation has transformed work, jobs, and working environments. Research has paid a lot of attention to topics such as "industry 4.0", gig economy and digital employment. However, it is often overlooked how digitalisation has also affected the (often female-dominated) occupations of the service sector. Which (hidden) technological labour do retail employees or mobile care workers perform on a daily basis?
This research question is addressed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers that brings together feminist perspectives from social, spatial and technological sciences. The aim is to place explicit focus on the rarely visible technologies and digital competencies that service workers already employ in their service provision. By bringing their often hidden efforts to the frontstage, we seek to contribute to political debates on revaluating these often underrated and underpaid occupations.
Together with secondary school students we investigate how concepts from the field of game-based learning can be used to develop learning methods and materials covering the topic informatics and society.
Project Homepage: http://www.piglab.org/sparklinggames
Team: Fares Kayali, Peter Purgathofer
Project Partners (Scientific): Gerit Götzenbrucker und Vera Schwarz (Universität Wien)
The AAL project - short for Active & Assisted Living - aims to develop age-approriate assistance systems for an active, independent and self-determined life.
WAALTeR is the research project of the “Wiener AAL Testing Region”, that is: the Vienna AAL Testing Region.
In this Vienna AAL testing region, we examine how technological assistance in the everyday lives of senior citizens support their activity and mobility, social interactions, safety and health - and how they can contribute to raising the quality of life for older adults in Vienna.
Project Homepage: http://www.waalter.wien/
RoboGen is a 3-years project, started in 2018 funded by the FGG (FemTech project).
The goal in RoboGen is to develop a prototype with a learning agent that, through feedback from users, makes gender-sensitive options accessible to all users and thus enables gender-sensitive human-robot interaction. The beneficiaries are senior citizens of 50+ and people with chronic diseases (mainly diabetes and hypertension).
Technologically, the focus of the project is on the upcoming, low-priced social robots in a price range around € 1,000, which are also affordable for “ordinary citizens”.
Project Website: https://astridweiss.net/services/robogen-2018-2021/
Team: Astrid Weiss (contact person for HCI group; external advisor)
RISIoT (Risks of the Internet of Things) is a market analysis and risk assessment to accelerate the adoption of the Internet of Things in Austrian enterprises.
Team: Peter Mayer, Geraldine Fitzpatrick Project Partners: IDC Central Europe GmbH, Austrian Institute of Technology - Digital Safety & Security Department, Oesterreichische Computer Gesellschaft
Based on project partners' products "iToilet" and "fearless", the feasibility of supporting cognitively impaired people while using the toilet will be explored.
Project Homepage: https://www.aat.tuwien.ac.at/wcbuddy
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer
The iToilet project addresses older persons who are living independently at home and the needs they have when using a toilet.
Project Homepage: http://itoilet-project.eu
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer, Georg Ehrenfels
Social play is key for successful inclusion of children with disabilities and has significant impact on their wellbeing and development. Typical traits in autism, such as impaired social and communication skills and repetitive behaviours, make social play particularly challenging for children diagnosed on the spectrum, exposing them to a wide range of mental health risks. This project investigates how technology can help support social play activities in mixed, co-located groups of autistic and neuro-typical children, aged 6 to 8 years. We aim to develop smart play objects, which can intelligently react to social situations to scaffold interactive play experiences of autistic children and their typically developing peers. For such objects to be meaningful to different children, it is key to involve them actively in their design.
Project Homepage: http://socialplay.at
Team: Christopher Frauenberger, Laura Scheepmaker, Katta Spiel
With Breaking The Wall we explore how to use technology to involve the audience in music performances. We design and develop different interactive systems together with artists. These systems will be deployed in public concerts of the artists in spring 2017 in the Kuppelsaal of the Vienna University of Technology. During all concerts the spectators can participate in various ways in the live performances.
Project Homepage: http://www.piglab.org/breakingthewall
Team: Fares Kayali, Oliver Hödl, Peter Purgathofer, Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Project Partners (Scientific): Ruth Mateus-Berr, Ulrich Kühn, Thomas Wagensommerer (University of Applied Arts Vienna), Johannes Kretz, Hande Sağlam (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna), Simon Holland (The Open University, UK)
Project Partners (Artists): Susanne Kirchmayr (Electric Indigo), Chris Bruckmayr, Didi Bruckmayr (Fuckhead)
The Viz4PAIS (Visualization Techniques for Process-Aware Information Systems) project is an initiative from the Workflow Systems and Technology Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna and we are one of their partners. The goals of the project are (a) to develop and design user centered visualization approaches and (b) to create a community to unify and nurture the development of process visualization topics as a continuing research area.
The T4ME2 project addresses older people and the needs they have when using a toilet outside home in semi-public environments (e.g. toilets located in community centres, shopping malls, museums, theatres, hotels).
Project Homepage: http://www.toilet4me-project.eu/t4me2.html
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer
In Austria about 1.2% of the population or a total of ca. 130.000 persons are affected by dementia. The increase of life expectancy will lead to a growing number of people affected in the future. Maintaining mobility can at least help delay the advance of dementia symptoms. Lack of movement is considered to be one of the prevalent risk factors for dementia in the USA and Europe. Encouraging mobility of people with dementia poses risks like getting lost or falling. For this reason technological solutions mostly focus on monitoring and restricting or even inhibiting the mobility of persons with dementia. Often considered stakeholder groups in the design and implementation of technological solutions are care personnel and relatives, making persons with dementia only passive users in the functional chain. Whenever attempts were made to increase independent mobility of people, smartphones or smart watches were used, which are known to be difficult to handle for this user group.
The project Way-Key follows the approach of promoting mobility. For persons with light to medium grades of dementia independent mobility is feasible and a legitimate need in a self-determined lifestyle. Technology should be used to support people to the necessary extent, to guide them to their goal and back home safely, and to generally encourage mobility. Relatives or care personnel will be involved only when necessary. To avoid acceptance problems and facilitate everyday use, the developed tool will be connected to an item of daily use to make it likely to be carried along by users when leaving home. Privacy protection, human dignity, ethics by design, usability and non-discrimination are central themes in the project.
The Centre of Visual Analytics Science and Technology (CVAST) is one of the Laura Bassi Centres of Excellence. The goals of CVAST are twofold. The first goal is the integration of the outstanding capabilities of humans in terms of visual information exploration with the enormous processing power of computers to form a powerful knowledge discovery environment. The second goal is to scientifically assess the usability and utility of such discovery environments while bridging the gap between theory and practice for selected application scenarios. To achieve these goals we cooperate with several partners from industry.
Minecraft multiplayer servers allow millions of children from around the world to build, play and problem solve together in a shared virtual space. As conflicts between players are common, these online spaces offer unique opportunity to help children develop effective conflict resolution skills that would then transfer to real-world settings.
This project draws on 40 years of conflict resolution curricula in Prevention Science to develop in-game tools that embedded learning into the Minecraft gameplay. To explore this space, we collaborate with leading game researchers (Katie Salen, Mimi Ito) as well as SEL developers at Committee for Children (the developers of Second Step, used by more than 8 millions of children in USA).
TEAM (Technology Enabled Mental Health for Young People), is a 4-year Innovation Training Network (ITN), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions initiative. There has been considerable research and many commercial products for improving physical...
Exploring Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction: What makes people accept or reject companion robots?
SharedSpace is a 3-years project, started in 2018 funded by the FWF (Elise Richter programme). The working hypothesis of this project is that the interaction of lay people with a social companion robot (in this project the commercially available robot Anki Vector) changes over time and that its adoption and acceptance differ in terms of the socio-demographic qualities of the involved households.
The main goal is to gain detailed empirical evidence on the adoption and acceptance processes from a relatively small sample (eight households) over a longer period of time (eight months), therefore an ethnographic approach is chosen as methodology. Several household visits accompanied by specific field tools and techniques (semi-structured qualitative interviews, Day Reconstruction Method, drawing/tinkering activities, short questionnaires/rating scales) will be performed. A baseline of existing household routines will be established in a pre-visit before households receive an Anki Vector and are firstly regularly visited over a period of six months. After half a year, the absence of Anki Vector and its impact on the social household dynamics will be studied by giving it back for one month, after a one-month break.
Project Homepage: https://astridweiss.net/services/sharedspace-2018-2022/
Team: Astrid Weiss (Contact Person for HCI Group), Rafael Vrecar
With OutsideTheBox we will think laterally and outside of typical boxes and categorisations. We will design new technologies with autistic children which are not exclusively driven by functional limitations, but engage children in all their diversity and with all their differences.
Project Homepage: http://outsidethebox.at
Give&Take co-designs an innovative digital platform that enables senior citizens to reciprocally exchange services and resources, creating new opportunities for senior citizens to contribute to society as volunteers and caregivers in their local communities. The GiveTake project is funded under the EU’s AAL programme.
Project Homepage: givetake.eu
Within this project, a technological toolkit is being developed, which will allow young people, mediated by caregivers, to create customizable applications to support their own mental health and wellbeing, based on evidence-based interventions.
Caring Robots /Robotics Care is a 5-years project, started in 2022, funded by the FWF #Connecting Minds program.
It involves 4 key researchers from TU Wien and one from University of Salzburg. Our goal is to develop and implement novel and desirable roles of robotic technology that proof useful, safe, meaningful, and wanted.
We aim for a participatory, open and reflective design process that involves a broad range of stakeholders from the care sector, with the ultimate goal to create desirable technological futures of care rather than merely acceptable ones. The gained insights shall contribute to a novel ethically aligned design approach for robotic care technology.
Project Homepage: https://www.caringrobots.eu/?lang=en
Team: Astrid Weiss (contact person for HCI group), Anna Dobrosovestnova
XXLMontage für alle (Diversitätfördernde Individualisierung von Arbeitssystemen in der industriellen Baustellenmontage):
MAXimizeMe is a 2-years project, started in 2021 funded by Digifonds. Within MAXimizeMe we aim to achieve a better understanding of how aspects, such as age, gender, education or socioeconomic background impact the interaction with (autonomous) work systems in manufacturing or assembly.
The result of MAXimizeMe will be a collection of diversity-sensitive design guidelines that take into account relevant aspects for workforce allocation, work execution and resource provision in industrial site assembly in such a way that all employees can perform their work activities as long as possible, in a targeted manner and with optimized quality and efficiency.
Project Homepage: https://astridweiss.net/services/maximizeme-2021-2023/
Team: Astrid Weiss (Contact Person for HCI Group), Rafael Vrecar
The basis of assistive products such as "iToilet" with integrated nursing documentation could be expanded sensibly and innovatively by further methods of data analysis in the daily use of toilets.
Project Homepage: https://www.aat.tuwien.ac.at/mysafewc
Team: Peter Mayer, Paul Panek
The goal of this project is to improve visualizations for pairwise network comparisons via new cognition-driven design guidelines. This project will specifically concentrate on the visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs in node-link diagrams. Such comparison is needed, for example, in the analysis of phylogenetic trees in biology or in the assessment of contagion in financial networks. In these cases, the domain experts concentrate on finding commonalities and differences between the two networks being compared. This analysis is often undertaken in a visualized form. Visual exploration enables to identify where the differences are located and thereby to extract insights from these differences. Effective visual network comparison requires a well-designed visualization. Effective visualization uses guidelines, which are inter alia derived from research in cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction (HCI). Until now, HCI research has mainly focused on deriving guidelines for the visualization of single networks. There are still many open research questions concerning the comparison of two or more networks in node-link diagrams
Got-IT will deliver an online toolkit to assist the design of inclusive eHealth solutions targeting the promotion of healthy lifestyles among older adults with low eHealth literacy, promoting citizen empowerment and contributing to the fight against health disparities in Europe.
The creation of the toolkit will be performed in continuous collaboration with the end-users of the eHealth solutions (underprivileged older adults) and the end-users of the toolkit (eHealth developers). A strategy targeting sustainable engagement of end-users of the toolkit will aim at community building beyond the end of the project.
Got-IT is an AAL project, funded by the Active and Assisted Living Programme (AAL). It is also financed by the following funding agencies from the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria.
Project Homepage: https://www.got-it-toolkit.eu/
Team: Katharina Werner, Isabel Schwaninger, Geraldine Fitzpatrick
In this project, we are trying to uncover the problems developers are facing in the development of sensor-based monitoring systems to support older people living alone. For this we use qualitative methods to investigate what happens during the development. We are particularly interested in the development processes, how different stakeholder-needs are determined, and other factors that might contribute to outcomes that are less successful than expected.
The VALCRI project is funded by the EC to undertake R&D with a view to developing an integrated software support system for police forces across partner countries. This software system, known as VALCRI, will be used by police analysts to investigate crimes and crime-related behaviour, complementing and enhancing current police capabilities. The consortium includes partners and activities aimed at designing the technology from cognitive, legal, ethical and privacy perspectives so that the rights of the individual to security and liberty will be respected while ensuring the good of society.
The utilization of a plane toilet represents difficulties for many mobility reduced persons. Often they aren’t able at all, especially within short distance or medium-haul flights. Depending on mobility restrictions various requirements for toilet executions exist which cannot be complied because of technical possibilities of the plane or because of economical conditions of airlines.
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer
Project Partners: netwiss OG, FH JOANNEUM Graz, TU - Institut für Verkehrswissenschaften, Rodlauer Consulting GmbH, FACC AG, Verein Raltec
ILUM combines urban mobility with ICT. Pillars for local orientation are augmented as an interactive guide-system for pedestrians in Vienna. Our goal is the elaboration of interaction application scenarios and actual digital prototypes.
LARAH (Location-aware Assistant Robots At Home) aimed at providing older persons with an assistive robot, to provide support and safety in their own homes. This project developed a visual indoor localization solution for mobile assistive robots. The advanced localization technology proposed in LARAH will improve the assessment of the own position of the robot, and support tasks such as, finding and bringing objects, opening doors, and in finding persons in case of an emergency (e.g. fall).
Team: Marjo Rauhala, Paul Panek, Katharina Werner, Peter Mayer, Chris Frauenberger
Project Partners: AIT, Blue Danube Robotics
The CoSi4U (Human Factors in Using Collaboration Systems in Companies) project is a cooperation project with FRINK Advanced Services GmbH. FRINK Advanced Services GmbH developed a tool for analysing collaboration data in companies. The goal of the project is to support the company in finding a user-friendly design in order to help analysts to handle this data and to make relationships between them visible.
A principal challenge for existing social-emotional learning (SEL) programs is to provide reinforcement of the learnt competencies in everyday contexts and beyond the in-school lessons. SEL4Home project starts to bridge this gap by exploring how novel technologies can extend the programming into the homes of learners.
We collaborate with SEL developers and researchers at Committee for Children---the developers of Second Step, used by more than 8 millions of children in USA; as well as the VIBE group at Microsoft Research.
Comprehensive safety solution for people with Aphasia.
Project Homepage: https://aph-alarm-project.com/index.php/en/
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer
The Toilet4me project addressed older people and the needs they have when using a toilet outside home in semi-public environments (e.g. toilets located in community centres, shopping malls, museums, theatres, hotels).
Project Homepage: http://toilet4me-project.eu/
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer
Urban Food Spots – Development of the basics for gender and diversity sensitive cooling stations for foodsharing in urban areas (2015 – 2017), financed by: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft (FFG)
70.000 tons of originally packed or opened food of households, industry or trade, are disposed of into Viennese residual waste, while at the same time 22,7 % of the inhabitants are at risk of poverty. To take counteractive measures, this project develops the base for an area-wide, low-threshold offer to share food on a local level, including all relevant gender and diversity aspects in the development of cooling stations. The so called UrbanFoodSp ots consist of a cooling station and an information system. The UrbanFoodSpots assemble the needs of the various groups of users and will be developed to be realised in different places and organisational forms.
Less routine monitoring tasks for nurses and gaining more time for compassion and personal care taking for people with dementia.
Project Homepage: http://www.diana-project.eu/
Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer