Human-Computer Interaction and Beyond: Advances Towards Smart and Interconnected Environments (Part I)

HCI is a discipline concerned with designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use. HCI focuses on the fact that “people should come first.” The healthcare industry has more rapid influence and development with HCI in recent days. Healthcare systems with improved HCI would benefit the industry in terms of quality of service and throughput. In the healthcare domain, the Interaction possibilities are spread in a broad spectrum, i.e., from tangible interfaces to wearable and implanted devices. The survey of the diverse device interactions in various healthcare systems from technological aspects is a significant area of research, useful to the medical fraternity and ordinary people. The presented survey will open up the doors for exploring novel approaches related to the rich User Experience in the healthcare domain for the benefit of society.

When creating digital products, it is essential to validate design decisions through user testing. Ensuring a digital product meets targeted user groups and personas' needs, all sorts of design decisions need to be carefully evaluated and adjusted, including informational architecture, navigation, selections, control patterns, feedback, colors, typography, iconography, and many more. Every testing session is unique and needs to be personalized according to the testing persona. When working with special needs persons, atypical development, or visual impairments, special care and preparation are required. These circumstances of user testing are even more challenging when the targeted audience is children with said disabilities. In preparation for testing, it is essential to understand the type of disability a child has and inform their legal guardian or medical caretaker. Considering all these things, conducting user testing can still prove challenging because of a child's unpredictable behavior. They might seem interested; they might lose focus or generally not be in the mood. With research skills, clear set goals, and preparation, a healthy dose of empathy and human understanding must gather valuable testing session’s insights. Insights that will help inform further design decisions.

Nowadays, assistive technologies facilitate visually impaired people a lot. However, they still face many challenges in their daily lives, such as the perception of rich visual information around their adjacent environment. Several assistive technology-based solutions have adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) which offers instant information of nearby visible things, objects, and persons to visually impaired people. Visually impaired people can also easily access online communication with emerging solutions using AI and perform numerous daily routine tasks. This paper presents a review of AI's role in visually impaired and solving their everyday life problem intelligently. A detailed analysis of assistive technologies and smartphonebased solutions for the visually impaired is presented, highlighting the need for technological enrichments and AI-based interventions for them. Furthermore, some challenges were addressed which faced by the visually impaired during the use of AIbased solutions. Additionally, the usefulness and limitations of the recent assistive solution are presented. Lastly, future research endeavors are introduced, which may help researchers and developers propose some innovative solutions.

This research paper presents a usability testing of the Twitter app with Indian Twitter users for identifying usability problems, especially for the new users or beginners. This usability test mainly focuses on a normal usage context and subject of observations, which significantly affects the user experience with the Twitter app. Various Twitter functionalities/features have been explored during usability testing, and ten frequently used tasks were selected. The selected users have been ten Indian college students in the age group of 21-23 years but are not using Twitter now or have not used Twitter before. It is directly affected by usability problems related to the app like Twitter. Therefore, several usability problems have been identified during usability testing. These problems include the ambiguous design of icons, faulty design of buttons, hidden options inside the menu, information overload, and inefficiency with functions. Few remedies are also proposed for dealing with identified usability problems with the Twitter app. It is believed that the design updates based on identified usability problems and remedies will improve the user experience of Indian Twitter users, boosting the popularity of the Twitter app among Indian youths.

Gamification introduces game elements and game thinking in non-game contexts. Many scholars argue that gamification can potentially be a viable online learning approach to promoting student engagement and learning outcomes in recent years. However, various obstacles impede their practical implementation. As a result, user experience (UX) and user participation may be affected, possibly resulting in high course drop-outs rates. Furthermore, it is unclear which game elements are effective and recognized as the current state-of-the-art gamified online learning research. This study provides a review identifying the game elements introduced in online learning and tested in previous studies from 2017-2020 through a systematic search strategy. By reviewing the literature, we identified the most effective game elements and determined their impact on the learners’ user experience. The results show that in 26 of the 34 selected studies, gamified online learning had a significant beneficial effect on user experience, engagement, and completion of courses. Moreover, points, leader boards, levels, badges, and progress bars are the most widely used game elements in the studies. This study’s findings may guide the design of more successful gamification interventions for online learning.

The human-computer interaction (HCI) is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and the study of major phenomena in the health care system. There is a growing demand for healthcare, and this necessitates the development of healthcare technology. Digital technologies are now playing a major role in delivering healthcare and individuals' health and well-being management experiences. The use of digital technology like digital x-ray and computer interface-based applications makes many tasks easy for doctors and humans. These computer interface system saves time with most accurate results as compared to humans. For health care systems, a computerdeveloped application is used to save time. It was also used to disseminate doctors' efficiency for critical tasks, which made it easy by computer interface such as diagnosis of a critical disease like rheumatoid arthritis. This research is based on computer applications and their doctors' usage to correct Rhemutoidarthrits in an early stage. This research aims to use the software and identify if it is currently being used to enhance or upgrade the level of diagnosis system for doctors using deep learning methods. The Research analysis of the software is performed by collecting digital x-ray image data. The results of the research share the network-wise details of software for the diagnosis of Rheumatoid arthritis.

Bangladesh significantly depends on seasonal and annual rainfall for agriculture. Yet, there are flash or regional floods and droughts affecting human-lives, properties, and crops that urge low-cost but accurate warning systems in meeting sustainable developments. The paper aims to predict rainfall in Bangladesh by incorporating the Artificial Neural Network with optimizations based on climatology. The study-site is focused on metropolitans: Dhaka (capital) and Chittagong (port) cities and compared with historical evolutions. The experiments include data mining and a statistical approach for trend analyses before modeling. The observation data, i.e., 24- hr accumulated rainfall (mm), is obtained from Bangladesh Meteorological Department (1989 to 2014) and Ogimet (1999 to 2018). September is a neutral and transitional month from monsoon to winter to evaluate drought scenarios. Additionally, in Matlab R2018b, Nonlinear Autoregressive with external input (NARX) is tested with several optimization techniques: Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), Bayesian Regularization (BR), and Scaled-Conjugate Gradient. ANN models show that Chittagong has more rainfall than Dhaka supporting climatological statistics. Specifically, forecasts for Dhaka are 25%, 21%, and 22%, and Chittagong 31%, 30%, and 8%, respectively, using LM, BR, and SCG. The iterations for Chittagong 12, 201, and 10 and Dhaka are 5, 12, and 47, respectively, by LM, BR, and SCG. The results suggest rainfall probabilities in September about 20 to 30% of annual events. The study, particularly for Chittagong in ANN, refers to computational resources and time that are significant to test sensitivities before building a meteorological disaster management tool.

Although architecture software companies incorporate high-level programming to process the complexity of data, only some End-User Programmers (EUP) manage to customize their GUI to design and integrate smart devices for future smart homes and smart cities. HCI is a source of inspiration to incorporate a large part of the design process into creative flows. In this context, we identify patterns to analyze, interpret, and optimize the work of EUP architects who seek to customize the GUI of their digital design tools. We obtained a set of 16 patterns that reconfigure the interaction of their processes. We programmed the integration of data science in architecture, machine learning, visual and textual programming, Cloud Computing with AWS, and Augmented Reality with Unity. The result is an ecosystem of three platforms that compensate for the shortcomings of computerized design in data-driven design processes, optimizing execution time in an emergency, with perspectives towards Smart and Interconnected Environments. Considering that the GUI is the most important product of HCI research, our analysis and interpretation of the results and their discussion highlight the need to explore personalized GUI solutions promoted by the designers to enrich them, capitalizing on their processes in codes for the reuse and co-design of new interactions.