EAGER: Interaction Can Hurt - Exploring a Gesture-Based Design Paradigm for Chronic Pain Sufferers

痛苦是人类最常见的体验之一。当事情不正常时发出警告，并在需要采取行动时发出警报，这是至关重要的。但是，当疼痛持续超过3个月时，就被称为慢性疼痛，它会剥夺患者的工作效率、精神健康，甚至可能夺去他们的生命。随着人口的老龄化，罹患慢性疼痛的人数将会增加，这些慢性疼痛是由纤维肌痛和腕管综合症引起的，需要与电脑互动。与此同时，随着微软Kinect等新技术的普及，越来越多的主流应用开始使用基于空中手势的非接触式交互技术，以替代鼠标/键盘的操作模式。随着这一趋势加速并变得更加普遍，慢性疼痛相关疾病（CPD）患者将成为最受负面影响的人群之一。PI在这项探索性研究中的目标是通过开发CPD用户手势交互的设计范例和最佳实践来缓解这一问题。项目成果不仅会深刻地改变目标用户社区成员的日常生活，而且通过更广泛地推进基于手势的交互技术的最新技术，它们还将减少其他用户未来患上身体疾病的机会。为了达到这些目的，PI将建立他的“个人空间”方法来进行手势交互，这允许用户定义交互区域，以及在交互过程中休息他们的肘部。他将分别考虑手势指向（使用用户的身体来控制交互的位置和方向）和手势操作（用于在交互系统中保持、释放或选择项目的手势），寻找每个问题空间，以发现常见的非触摸手势交互的哪些改变对用户的疲劳、准确性和吞吐量有积极的影响。使用文献中自然和直观的手势操作，如抓取，捏和抓作为起点，实验将进行，以回答诸如各种喜欢的输入类型是什么，哪些肌肉群在使用过程中受到最大影响等问题。其他输入选项，包括是否使用静态或动态手势，是否支持手部切换，以及基于语音的输入也将被评估。研究结果将结合起来创建一个设计范例，以帮助塑造一个完整的基于手势的交互和CPD用户的最佳实践。

One of the most common human experiences is pain. It is essential to warn when something is not right, and to alert when action needs to be taken. But when pain persists for longer than 3 months it is called chronic and it can rob those who suffer from it of their productivity, their mental well-being, and potentially even their lives. As the general population ages the number of people suffering from chronic pain induced by conditions such as Fibromyalgia and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome who require computer interaction will increase. Meanwhile, fueled by the deployment of new commodity technologies such as the Microsoft Kinect, there is a growing reliance in a variety of mainstream applications on touchless mid-air gesture-based interaction as an alternative to the mouse/keyboard paradigm for non-expect users. As this trend accelerates and becomes more widespread, people with chronic pain-related diseases (CPD) will be among those most negatively affected. The PI's goal in this exploratory research is to alleviate this problem by developing a design paradigm and best practices for gestural interaction for users with CPD. Not only will project outcomes profoundly change everyday life for members of the target user community, but by more generally advancing the state-of-the art in gesture-based interaction techniques they will also lessen the chance of other users developing future physical ailments.To these ends, the PI will build upon his "personal space" approach to gestural interaction, which allows the user to define the area of interaction as well as to rest their elbow during the interaction. He will consider separately gestural pointing (the use of a user's body to control interaction location and direction), and gestural manipulation (gestures used to hold, release, or select items within an interaction system), seeking for each problem space to discover which alterations to common touchless gesture interaction have a positive impact on users' fatigue, accuracy, and throughput. Using natural and intuitive gestures from the literature for operations such as grab, pinch and grasp as a starting point, experiments will be conducted to answer questions such as what are the various favored types of input, and which muscle groups are most affected during use. Other input options, including whether to use static vs. dynamic gestures, support for hand switching, and speech based input will also be evaluated. The findings will be combined to create a design paradigm to help shape a complete gesture-based interaction and best practices for users with CPD.