HMI research: current and past projects

When we search online for information, we increasingly stumble upon ‘conversational social agents’ that try to help us with our information needs, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, or even embodied agents smiling at us from the screen and robots addressing us in the physical world. Children as well are exposed to these agents but we know very little about how children should preferably be addressed in such conversational transfer of information scenarios, nor how children, consciously or unconsciously, meet with the conversational type of interaction they get seamlessly pulled into.

PRoSPEro Social robots are increasingly playing a role in social care professions. While the technological challenges and progress are substantial, and these technologies will be used by, or alongside, a range of social professionals, there has been little thought of how this might impact on their everyday work, career development and professional identity.

In Council of Coaches, multiple virtual coaches form a personal council that supports the user in their health and well-being. Individual coaches have their own area of expertise, personality, and style of coaching. Join a council meeting! Give the council your thoughts, or listen and observe how the individual coaches exchange their views on your health behavior. Take what you’ve learned into your daily life, and if the need arises, contact any of the coaches anytime, anywhere.

The 4TU research centre Humans & Technology (H&T) brings together the social sciences, humanities, and technical sciences. Its goal is excellent research on innovative forms of human-technology interaction for smart social systems and spaces. The research program “Smart Social Systems and Spaces for Living Well” (S4) aims to combine knowledge available from different disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, and industrial design.

In the Smart Sports Exercises project, new forms of indoor sports training are researched. This is done in a “smart indoor sports space”: an interactive floor capable of displaying video and realtime graphics, equipped with unobtrusive pressure sensing capabilities. A specially developed training system will offer interactive exercises.

Emotional expression plays a crucial role in everyday functioning. It is a continuous process involving many features of behavioral, facial, vocal, and verbal modalities. Given this complexity, few psychological studies have addressed emotion recognition in an everyday context. Recent technological innovations in affective computing could result in a scientific breakthrough as they open up new possibilities for the ecological assessment of emotions. However, existing technologies still pose major challenges in the field of Big Data Analytics.

The Data2Game project investigates how, and to what extent, the efficacy of computerised training games can be enhanced by tailoring the training scenarios to the individual player. It is a joint project between the Universities of Twente and Tilburg, in collaboration with serious-game developers at Thales/HBA-Lab and with Veiligheidsregio Twente.

This project aims to investigate (1) how the emotional states of speakers influence the language they produce and (2) how the influence of emotion on language production can be modeled in computational tools for affective natural language generation. It is a joint project between the universities of Twente and Tilburg.

The POSTHCARD project aims at teaching adapted care strategies to formal and informal caregivers of Alzheimer patients in order to reduce their burden. To achieve this, the consortium will develop an application centered around a strongly personalized simulation in which caregivers will be able to test different caring strategies.

In the DE-ENIGMA project, we develop a novel robot-assisted intervention for autistic children through which they can learn the basics of learning to recognise emotional facial expressions. The humanoid robot (Robokind’s Zeno/Milo) is a tool for adults that models facial expressions and mediates the interaction between child and adult.

WEAFING will develop innovative garments with integrated textile actuators, sensors, and electronics for haptic stimulation. We will advance the technology and manufacturability of electroactive fabrics resulting in lightweight and flexible textile actuators. Integration of the actuators in wearables takes into account different textile morphologies, soft mechatronics, producibility, and human perception. The garments developed will have a high level of wearability as the actuator is the garment itself and the technology is silent.

Tabaksverslaving is een complexe, chronische ziekte. Succesvolle behandeling is mogelijk, maar lastig voor kwetsbare groepen, zoals patiënten met psychiatrische aandoeningen, laag geletterdheid en/of een verstandelijke beperking. Zij hebben baat bij ‘doen’, ipv praten.

The proposed research will provide insights into the extent to which “Social Touch Technology” can affect people’s trust and decisions. More specifically, the research focuses on Virtual Reality (VR) interactions, during which a virtual agent applies social touches to the arm of the user in order to convince him/her during a discussion.

Introduction: The increasing availability of large amounts of (personal) data (Big Data) and the performance boost of advanced Human Language Technologies (HLT) hold great potential for self-management and empowerment in health and wellbeing. The topic of the project is the combination of text mining of Dutch written and spoken client [More...]

SQUIRREL is an autonomous robot designed to interact in collaborative tasks with multiple children in unstructured domestic settings. The user interaction takes place in crowded environments in terms of objects, but also in terms of children that can be expected to act in rather unstructured and unforeseeable ways. The Squirrel robot engages socially to support collaborative tasks. It detects and responds to children's emotional states and it exhibits cooperative nonverbal behavior.

IUALL is part of the Dutch national COMMIT/ project. IUALL aims to improve intelligent interactive systems – endowing them with social intelligence – as well as the process of designing socially intelligent systems by establishing guidelines on ...

TERESA is a telepresence robot that allows elderly to visit social activities from a distance, if they cannot do so in person. With the consortium, we developed autonomous socially intelligent behaviors for the robot, allowing the visitor to focus on their friends.

AIRplay is a gaming environment to support physical (re-)conditioning and self-management of asthma among children in a fun manner. The challenge is to combine such biomedical sensing and smart coaching, innovative gaming strategies, and an interactive playground so that children become more adherent to their medication, feel ...

The EASEL project investigates how robots can help children with a learning task. The impact of the robot on how children learn is investigagted through long term in-class studies.

The R3D3 project aims at investigating situated natural language dialogue systems that combine limited natural language understanding with the understanding of the nonverbal behaviour of the users in a real-life context.

The ARIA-VALUSPA project has as the main objective to develop a socially and emotionally adaptive virtual human information interaction framework. This framework is supplied with example virtual humans as a start and can be used by other academics and industry for creating their own virtual humans.