Jun HU :: HU, Jun

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) degrades sleep quality and is associated with serious health conditions. Instead of the gold-standard polysomnography requiring complex equipment and expertise, a non-obtrusive device such as ballistocardiography (BCG) is more suitable for home-based continuous monitoring of OSAS, which has shown promising results in previous studies. However, often due to the limited storage and computing resource, also preferred by venders, the high computational cost in many existing BCG-based methods would practically limit the deployment for home monitoring.

… Cross-validated on 32 subjects, the proposed approach achieved an accuracy of 71.9% for four-class severity classification and 87.5% for binary classification (AHI less than 15 or not)… These findings highlight the potential of our proposed BCG-based approach as an effective and accessible alternative for continuous OSAS monitoring.

Qianhui Wei, Jun Hu & Min Li

Mediated social touch (MST) is a popular way to communicate emotion and connect people in mobile communication. This article applies MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli in two online communication modes—asynchronous and synchronous communication (texting and video calling) to enhance social presence for mobile communication. We first designed the application that included the visual design of MST gestures, the vibrotactile stimuli design for MST gestures, and the interface design for texting and video calling. Then, we conducted a user study to explore if the MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli could increase social presence in texting and video calling compared to MST gestures without vibrotactile stimuli. We also explored if the communication modes affected the social presence significantly when applying MST signals. The quantitative data analysis shows that adding vibrotactile stimuli to MST gestures helps to increase social presence in the aspects of co-presence, perceived behavior interdependence, perceived affective understanding, and perceived emotional interdependence. Adding vibrotactile stimuli to MST gestures causes no significant differences in attentional allocation and perceived message understanding. There is no significant difference between texting and video calling when applying MST signals in mobile communication. The qualitative data analysis shows that participants think MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli are interesting, and they are willing to use them in mobile communication, but the application design should be iterated based on their feedback.

• Help-seekers adjust their diction to be more empathic and tactful when they perceive co-workers as stressed.
• Help-seekers experience less negative emotional shifts when rejected by stressed rather than relaxed co-workers, suggesting empathy towards stressed individuals.
• Social messaging applications could boost workplace empathy by enabling stress status sharing, albeit with caution for relaxed status displays.
• For privacy and reduced stigmatization, using subtle haptic vibrations could be considered for signaling users’ negative or sensitive emotional states.

Best Robot Design Process Award @ IEEE RO-MAN 2023 Robot Design Competition, for the design Petting Pen for Stress Awareness and Management in Children. We are very proud of our PhD candidates Jing Li and Pinhao Wang!