The emergence of Intelligent Classrooms and in particular classrooms that are equipped with appropriate infrastructure for identifying the students’ attention levels, has raised the need for appropriate educator-friendly tools that facilitate monitoring and management of these educational environments. This paper presents two such systems: LECTORviewer and NotifEye. LECTORviewer is deployed on the educator’s personal workstation and offers an overview of the students’ attention levels. Additionally, through its intuitive user interface, educators can provide their input regarding ambiguous behaviors or scheduled interventions that aim to reengage distracted, tired or unmotivated students to the educational process. NotifEye is a smart watch application for educators that aims to communicate, in a mobile fashion, important events occurring during a lesson (e.g., 60% of students are tired). This work presents the functionality of these tools and the usability findings of a heuristic evaluation experiment conducted with UX experts for LECTORviewer.

The Internet of Things is based on ecosystems of networked devices, referred to as smart objects, effectively enabling the blending of physical things with digital artifacts in an unprecedented way. In principle, endless automations may be introduced in the context of daily life exploring the numerous opportunities offered by the deployment and utilization of such smart objects. However, in practice the demands for such automations are highly personalized and fluid effectively minimizing the chances for building commercially successful general‐purpose applications. In this context our vision is to empower end‐users with the appropriate tools enabling to easily and quickly craft, test and modify the automations they need. In this chapter we initially discuss a few possible future scenarios for automations relying on smart objects. Then, we elaborate on the visual tools we currently develop, followed by a brief case study using the tools. Finally, the potential of publishing such automations in typical digital markets is considered.

The proliferation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) devices and services and their integration in smart environments creates the need for a simple yet effective way of controlling and communicating with them. Towards that direction, the application of the Trigger -- Action model has attracted a lot of research with many systems and applications having been developed following that approach. This work introduces ParlAmI, a multimodal conversational interface aiming to give its users the ability to determine the behavior of AmI environments, by creating rules using natural language as well as a GUI. The paper describes ParlAmI, its requirements and functionality, and presents the findings of a user-based evaluation which was conducted.

In the present Internet of Things (IoT) era, smart city components (e.g. Smart buildings, Smart infrastructures, etc.) are increasingly embracing cutting edge technologies to support complex scenarios that include decision-making, prediction and intelligent actuation. In this context, there is an increased need for information visualization, so as to propagate information to end users in a smart, sustainable, and resilient way. Currently, despite the growth of the IoT sector, many IoT operators only provide static visualizations. However, interactive data visualizations are required to achieve deeper and faster insights, beyond what is available in existing infrastructure, towards supporting decision-making by city authorities; while offering real time information to citizens. This paper builds on top of ongoing research work carried out at the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory of ICS-FORTH in the domain of visualizing and interacting with information in Ambient Intelligence environments, in order to propose the design of an interactive Smart City Visualization framework. In this context, advanced user interaction techniques can be employed, including gesture-based interaction with high resolution large screen displays in alternative contexts of use and immersive VR experiences. To this end, several gesture-based interaction techniques have been validated to propose a sufficiently rich set of gestures that are adaptable to user and context requirements and are ergonomic, intuitive, and easy to perform and remember, while remaining metaphorically appropriate for the addressed functionality. Additionally, Big Data visualization is accomplished by employing 3D solutions. The proposed design supports experiencing and interacting with information through VR technologies and large displays, offering improved data visualization capacity and enhanced data dimensionality, thus overcoming issues related to data complexity and heterogeneity.

Play is a voluntary activity in which individuals involve for pleasure. It is very important for children because through playing they learn to explore, develop and master physical and social skills. Play development is part of the child’s growth and maturation process since birth. As such, it is widely used in the context of Occupational Therapy (OT). Occupational therapists use activity analysis to shape play activities for therapeutic use and promote an environment where the child can approach various activities while playing. This paper builds on knowledge stemming from the processes and theories used in OT and activity analysis to present the design, implementation and deployment of a new version of the popular farm game as deployed within an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) simulation space. Within this space, an augmented interactive table and a three-dimensional avatar are employed to extend the purpose and objectives of the game, thus also expanding its applicability to the age group of preschool children from 3 to 6 years old. More importantly, through the environment, the game monitors and follows the progress of each young player, adapts accordingly and provides important information regarding the abilities and skills of the child and their development over time. The developed game was evaluated through a small scale study with children of the aforementioned age groups, their parents, and child care professionals. The outcomes of the evaluation were positive for all target groups and provided significant evidence regarding its potential to offer novel play experience to children, but also act as a valuable tool to child care professionals.

This paper describes an educational game that aims to familiarize cognitive impaired children with household objects, the overall home environment and the daily activities that take place in it. In addition to touch-based interaction, the game supports physical manipulation through printed cards on a tabletop setup, using a webcam to detect and track the cards placed on the game board.

This paper presents a user experience study of interaction with printed maps for providing digitally augmented tourism information. The Interactive Maps system has been implemented based on an interactive printed matter framework which provides all the necessary components for developing smart applications that offer printed matter interaction, and has been deployed and evaluated in the context of the publicly available Tourism InfoPoint of the Municipality of Heraklion. The results of the evaluation highlight that interacting with digitally augmented paper is quite easy and natural, while the overall user experience is positive.

This paper presents LECTOR, a system that helps educators in understanding when students have stopped paying attention to the educational process and assists them in reengaging the students to the current learning activity. LECTOR aims to take advantage of the ambient facilities that “smart classrooms” have to offer by (i) enabling educators to employ their preferred attention monitoring strategies (including any well-established activity recognition techniques) in order to identify inattentive behaviors and (ii) recommending interventions for motivating distracted students when deemed necessary. Furthermore, LECTOR offers an educator friendly design studio that enables teachers to create or modify the rules that trigger “inattention alarms”, as well as tailor the intervention mechanism to the needs of their course by modifying the respective rules. This paper presents the rationale behind the design of LECTOR and outlines its key features and facilities.

It is almost inevitable that during a course, students will get distracted either by internal or external stimuli. Introducing engaging activities into the main lecture and changing pedagogies within a class period has remarkable effects on students' concentration levels. This paper presents LECTORstudio, an authoring tool that enables educators to build the logic that guides the decision-making mechanisms of LECTOR, a framework capable of identifying inattentive behaviors and intervening to re-engage students to the educational process. LECTORstudio offers three simple and intuitive wizards that aim to guide educators through the sophisticated processes of (i) defining rules that signify inattention and (ii) describing the intervention strategies that should be applied under various educational circumstances. This work presents the functionality of the tool and the usability findings of a heuristic evaluation experiment conducted with UX experts.

Although activities of daily living are often difficult for individuals with cognitive impairments, their autonomy and independence can be fostered through interactive technologies. The use of traditional computer interfaces has however proved to be difficult for these users, bringing to the surface the need for novel interaction methods. This paper proposes Let’s Cook, an innovative Augmented Reality game, designed to teach children with cognitive impairments how to prepare simple meals, following a playful approach. Let’s Cook supports multimodal interaction techniques utilizing tangible objects on a table-top surface, as well as multimedia output. Additionally, it can be personalized to accommodate the diverse needs of children with cognitive impairments by employing individual user profiling. The system is currently installed in the kitchen of the Rehabilitation Centre for Children with Disabilities in Heraklion, Crete where it was evaluated by the students.