This book describes the physics of phase change memory devices, starting from basic operation to reliability issues. The book gives a comprehensive overlook of PCM with particular attention to the electrical transport and the phase transition physics between the two states. The book also contains design engineering details on PCM cell architecture, PCM cell arrays (including electrical circuit management), as well as the full spectrum of possible future applications.

This book introduces human factors engineering (HFE) principles, guidelines, and design methods for medical device design. It starts with an overview of physical, perceptual, and cognitive abilities and limitations, and their implications for design. This analysis produces a set of human factors principles that can be applied across many design challenges, which are then applied to guidelines for designing input controls, visual displays, auditory displays (alerts, alarms, warnings), and human-computer interaction. Specific challenges and solutions for various medical device domains, such as robotic surgery, laparoscopic surgery, artificial organs, wearables, continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, and reprocessing, are discussed. Human factors research and design methods are provided and integrated into a human factors design lifecycle, and a discussion of regulatory requirements and procedures is provided, including guidance on what human factors activities should be conducted when and how they should be documented.This hands-on professional reference is an essential introduction and resource for students and practitioners in HFE, biomedical engineering, industrial design, graphic design, user-experience design, quality engineering, product management, and regulatory affairs. Teaches readers to design medical devices that are safer, more effective, and less error prone; Explains the role and responsibilities of regulatory agencies in medical device design; Introduces analysis and research methods such as UFMEA, task analysis, heuristic evaluation, and usability testing.

There are rhythms of action and response to all human-computer interactions. As we click, swipe, tap and sway to their beats, these rhythms intersect with the rhythms of our everyday lives. Perhaps they synchronize, perhaps they disrupt each other or maybe they dance together. Whatever their impact our experience of these rhythms will colour our experience of an interaction design. In playful interactive applications, rhythm is especially crucial because of the role it performs in building and maintaining the precarious spirit of play. Play involves movement and this movement has a rhythm that drives the experience. But what is the character of these rhythms of play and how can they be used in the design of interactive applications? These questions are the focus of this book. Drawing on traditions of rhythmic design practice in dance, performance, music and architecture, this book reveals key insights into practical strategies for designing playful rhythmic experience. With playful experiences now being incorporated into almost every type of computer application, interaction design practitioners and researchers need to develop a deeper understanding of the specific character of rhythms within play. Written from a designer's perspective, with interviews from leading creative artists and interaction design practitioners, Rhythm, Play and Interaction Design will help practitioners, researchers and students understand, evaluate and create rhythmic experiences.

This book explores various e-Services related to health, learning, culture, media and the news, and the influences the Web and related technologies have had and continue to have in each of these areas, both on service providers and service users. It provides insights into the main technological and human issues regarding healthcare, aging population, recent challenges in the educational environment, the impact of digital technologies on culture and heritage, cultural diversity, freedom of expression, intellectual property, fake news and, last but not least, public opinion manipulation and ethical issues. Its main aim is to bridge the gap between technological solutions, their successful implementation, and the fruitful utilization of the main set of e-Services mostly delivered by private or public companies. Today, various parameters actively influence e-Services' success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational and privacy issues, bureaucracy and workflows, infrastructure and technology in general, user habits, literacy, capacity or merely interaction design. This includes having a significant population of citizens who are willing and able to adopt and use online services; as well as developing the managerial and technical capability to implement applications that meet citizens' needs. This book helps readers understand the mutual dependencies involved; further, a selection of success stories and failures, duly commented on, enables readers to identify the right approach to innovation in areas that offer the opportunity to reach a wide audience with minimal effort. With its balanced humanistic and technological approach, the book mainly targets public authorities, decision-makers, stakeholders, solution developers, and graduate students.

Old age is currently the greatest risk factor for developing dementia. Since older people make up a larger portion of the population than ever before, the resulting increase in the incidence of dementia presents a major challenge for society. Dementia is complex and multifaceted and impacts not only the person with the diagnosis but also those caring for them and society as a whole. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design and development are pivotal in enabling people with dementia to live well and be supported in the communities around them. HCI is increasingly addressing the need for inclusivity and accessibility in the design and development of new technologies, interfaces, systems, services, and tools. Using interdisciplinary approaches HCI engages with the complexities and 'messiness' of real-world design spaces to provide novel perspectives and new ways of addressing the challenge of dementia and multi-stakeholder needs. HCI and Design in the Context of Dementia brings together the work of international experts, designers and researchers working across disciplines. It provides methodologies, methods and frameworks, approaches to participatory engagement and case studies showing how technology can impact the lives of people living with dementia and those around them. It includes examples of how to conduct dementia research and design in-context in the field of HCI, ethically and effectively and how these issues transcend the design space of dementia to inform HCI design and technology development more broadly. The book is valuable for and aimed at designers, researchers, scholars and caregivers that work with vulnerable groups like people with dementia, and those directly impacted.

This book provides an insight on the importance that Internet of Things (IoT) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions can have in taking care of people's health. Key features of this book present the recent and emerging developments in various specializations in curing health problems and finding their solutions by incorporating IoT and ICT. This book presents useful IoT and ICT applications and architectures that cater to their improved healthcare requirements. Topics include in-home healthcare services based on the Internet-of-Things; RFID technology for IoT based personal healthcare; Real-time reporting and monitoring; Interfacing devices to IoT; Smart medical services; Embedded gateway configuration (EGC); Health monitoring infrastructure; and more. Features a number of practical solutions and applications of IoT and ICT on healthcare; Includes application domains such as communication technology and electronic materials and devices; Applies to researchers, academics, students, and practitioners around the world.

This concise volume presents for the first time a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other practical applications.

This volume explores how context has been and can be used in computing to model human behaviors, actions and communications as well as to manage data and knowledge. It addresses context management and exploitation of context for sharing experience across domains. The book serves as a user-centric guide for readers wishing to develop context-based applications, as well as an intellectual reference on the concept of context. It provides a broad yet deep treatment of context in computing and related areas that depend heavily on computing. The coverage is broad because of its cross-disciplinary nature but treats topics at a sufficient depth to permit a reader to implement context in his/her computational endeavors. The volume addresses how context can be integrated in software and systems and how it can be used in a computing environment. Furthermore, the use of context to represent the human dimension, individually as well as collectively is explained. Contributions also include descriptions of how context has been represented in formal as well as non-formal, structured approaches. The last section describes several human behavior representation paradigms based on the concept of context as its central representational element. The depth and breadth of this content is certain to provide useful as well as intellectually enriching information to readers of diverse backgrounds who have an interest in or are intrigued by using context to assist in their representation of the real world.

Human computer interaction (HCI) plays a vital role in bridging the 'Digital Divide', bringing people closer to consumer electronics control in the 'lounge'. Keyboards and mouse or remotes do alienate old and new generations alike from control interfaces. Hand Gesture Recognition systems bring hope of connecting people with machines in a natural way. This will lead to consumers being able to use their hands naturally to communicate with any electronic equipment in their 'lounge.' This monograph will include the state of the art hand gesture recognition approaches and how they evolved from their inception. The author would also detail his research in this area for the past 8 years and how the future might turn out to be using HCI. This monograph will serve as a valuable guide for researchers (who would endeavour into) in the world of HCI.

Introducing mobile humanoid robots into human environments requires the systems to physically interact and execute multiple concurrent tasks. The monograph at hand presents a whole-body torque controller for dexterous and safe robotic manipulation. This control approach enables a mobile humanoid robot to simultaneously meet several control objectives with different pre-defined levels of priority, while providing the skills for compliant physical contacts with humans and the environment. After a general introduction into the topic of whole-body control, several essential reactive tasks are developed to extend the repertoire of robotic control objectives. Additionally, the classical Cartesian impedance is extended to the case of mobile robots. All of these tasks are then combined and integrated into an overall, priority-based control law. Besides the experimental validation of the approach, the formal proof of asymptotic stability for this hierarchical controller is presented. By interconnecting the whole-body controller with an artificial intelligence, the immense potential of the integrated approach for complex real-world applications is shown. Several typical household chores, such as autonomously wiping a window or sweeping the floor with a broom, are successfully performed on the mobile humanoid robot Rollin' Justin of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The results suggest the presented controller for a large variety of fields of application such as service robotics, human-robot cooperation in industry, telepresence in medical applications, space robotics scenarios, and the operation of mobile robots in dangerous and hazardous environments.

- Unlike other AI titles, this book takes a step further towards the real applicability and transferability of AI, through detailed examples in a very important region of Spain - Includes chapters on health and social welfare, transportation, digital economy, energy efficiency and sustainability, agro-industry and tourism - Great diversity of authors, expert in the varied sectors and problems addressed, belonging to powerful research groups from the University of Seville with proven experience in the transfer of knowledge to the productive sector and agents attached to the Andalucia TECH Campus

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the field of software processes, covering in particular the following essential topics: software process modelling, software process and lifecycle models, software process management, deployment and governance, and software process improvement (including assessment and measurement). It does not propose any new processes or methods; rather, it introduces students and software engineers to software processes and life cycle models, covering the different types ranging from "classical", plan-driven via hybrid to agile approaches. The book is structured as follows: In chapter 1, the fundamentals of the topic are introduced: the basic concepts, a historical overview, and the terminology used. Next, chapter 2 covers the various approaches to modelling software processes and lifecycle models, before chapter 3 discusses the contents of these models, addressing plan-driven, agile and hybrid approaches. The following three chapters address various aspects of using software processes and lifecycle models within organisations, and consider the management of these processes, their assessment and improvement, and the measurement of both software and software processes. Working with software processes normally involves various tools, which are the focus of chapter 7, before a look at current trends in software processes in chapter 8 rounds out the book. This book is mainly intended for graduate students and practicing professionals. It can be used as a textbook for courses and lectures, for self-study, and as a reference guide. When used as a textbook, it may support courses and lectures on software processes, or be used as complementary literature for more basic courses, such as introductory courses on software engineering or project management. To this end, it includes a wealth of examples and case studies, and each chapter is complemented by exercises that help readers gain a better command of the concepts discussed.

Information resource management is too often seen as a domain dominated by technology, or, at best, one in which human considerations are secondary to and dependent on technological systems. Socio-Technical and Human Cognition Elements of Information Systems brings together chapters from Europe, Australasia, Canada and the Americas, all drawn together by the common theme of the book. It will present information management not as technology influenced by people, but as fundamentally a people-centred domain.

Features interviews and personal stories from a range of industry-leading UX professionals to show readers how they broke into the industry, stayed with it, and evolved with it. Accompanied by a companion website that provides readers with featured articles and updated resources covering new and changing information to help them stay on top of this fast-paced industry. Provides worksheets and activities to help readers make decisions for their careers and build their soft business skills and portfolios

Mobile Data Visualization is about facilitating access to and understanding of data on mobile devices. Wearable trackers, mobile phones, and tablets are used by millions of people each day to read weather maps, financial charts, or personal health meters. What is required to create e ffective visualizations for mobile devices? This book introduces key concepts of mobile data visualization and discusses opportunities and challenges from both research and practical perspectives. Mobile Data Visualization is the first book to provide an overview of how to e ffectively visualize, analyze, and communicate data on mobile devices. Drawing from the expertise, research, and experience of an international range of academics and practitioners from across the domains of Visualization, Human Computer Interaction, and Ubiquitous Computing, the book explores the challenges of mobile visualization and explains how it diff ers from traditional data visualization. It highlights opportunities for reaching new audiences with engaging, interactive, and compelling mobile content. In nine chapters, this book presents interesting perspectives on mobile data visualization including: how to characterize and classify mobile visualizations; how to interact with them while on the go and with limited attention spans; how to adapt them to various mobile contexts; specific methods on how to design and evaluate them; reflections on privacy, ethical and other challenges, as well as an outlook to a future of ubiquitous visualization. This accessible book is a valuable and rich resource for visualization designers, practitioners, researchers, and students alike.

This book presents computational methods for extracting the useful information from audio signals, collecting the state of the art in the field of sound event and scene analysis. The authors cover the entire procedure for developing such methods, ranging from data acquisition and labeling, through the design of taxonomies used in the systems, to signal processing methods for feature extraction and machine learning methods for sound recognition. The book also covers advanced techniques for dealing with environmental variation and multiple overlapping sound sources, and taking advantage of multiple microphones or other modalities. The book gives examples of usage scenarios in large media databases, acoustic monitoring, bioacoustics, and context-aware devices. Graphical illustrations of sound signals and their spectrographic representations are presented, as well as block diagrams and pseudocode of algorithms.

Providing insights into methodologies for designing adaptive systems based on semantic data, and introducing semantic models that can be used for building interactive systems, this book showcases many of the applications made possible by the use of semantic models. Ontologies may enhance the functional coverage of an interactive system as well as its visualization and interaction capabilities in various ways. Semantic models can also contribute to bridging gaps; for example, between user models, context-aware interfaces, and model-driven UI generation. There is considerable potential for using semantic models as a basis for adaptive interactive systems. A variety of reasoning and machine learning techniques exist that can be employed to achieve adaptive system behavior. The advent and rapid growth of Linked Open Data as a large-scale collection of semantic data has also paved the way for a new breed of intelligent, knowledge-intensive applications. Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems includes ten complementary chapters written by experts from both industry and academia. Rounded off by a number of case studies in real world application domains, this book will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners exploring the use of semantic models within HCI.

This book highlights cooperative coverage control approaches of multi-agent systems in uncertain environments and their applications in various fields. A novel theoretical formulation of multi-agent coverage is proposed to fulfill the coverage task via divide-and-conquer scheme. By taking workload partition and sweeping operations simultaneously, a distributed sweep coverage algorithm of multi-agent systems is developed to cooperatively complete the workload on the given region, and its input-to-state stability is guaranteed in theory. Moreover, the coverage performance is evaluated by estimating the error between the actual coverage time and the optimal time. Three application scenarios are presented to demonstrate the advantages of cooperative coverage control approaches in missile interception, intelligent transportation systems and environment monitoring, respectively.

Features interviews and personal stories from a range of industry-leading UX professionals to show readers how they broke into the industry, stayed with it, and evolved with it. Accompanied by a companion website that provides readers with featured articles and updated resources covering new and changing information to help them stay on top of this fast-paced industry. Provides worksheets and activities to help readers make decisions for their careers and build their soft business skills and portfolios

Key Features: This work aims to be the most approachable book about UX. Many books on the topic are highly specialized and are not easy to read for people who just want to understand it better. This book is easy to read and aims to popularize the UX mindset while debunking its main misconceptions. Small format size makes it easy to carry around. Includes content relatable and meaningful to the readers by taking many examples from everyday life with a conversational and light writing style. It tackles the psychology, design, research, process, strategy, and ethics behind offering the best experience with products, systems, or services. Includes a glossary.

This book demystifies what artificial intelligence is, examines its strength and limitations in comparison to what humans are capable of, and investigates the nature of human adaptive expertise across the concept of metis. It also examines a particular family of mindsets that we as humans have adopted over the ages, namely epistemologies of representational knowledge. These representational perspectives have followed us into numerous fields, including how we perceive and comprehend human cognition - leading to 'with a hammer everything looks like a nail' syndrome. As such, this book presents the alternative phenomenological viewpoint of embodied direct reality within the cognitive sciences in the form of radical embodied cognition and, more importantly, how it allows us to better highlight and comprehend human metis and its adaptive expertise. We then examine why we collectively continue to enact and perpetuate predominant mindsets of representations across the phenomena of mindlessness. To counter this, we re-visit the practice of individual and collective mindfulness, providing a potential 'beachhead' in our re-appropriation of technology (artificial intelligence) towards achieving the best of both worlds - that is, allowing human creativity and ingenuity to be expressed with artificial intelligence as a tool to help us do just that across meaningful human control. Finally, we conclude by examining current top-of-the-horizon activities and debates regarding quantum physics in relation to the human mind and artificial intelligence and how, once again, representational mindsets need not be the only tool in town.

Nanoelectronic Devices for Hardware and Software Security has comprehensive coverage of the principles, basic concepts, structure, modeling, practices, and circuit applications of nanoelectronics in hardware/software security. It also covers the future research directions in this domain. In this evolving era, nanotechnology is converting semiconductor devices dimensions from micron technology to nanotechnology. Nanoelectronics would be the key enabler for innovation in nanoscale devices, circuits, and systems. The motive for this research book is to provide relevant theoretical frameworks that include device physics, modeling, circuit design, and the latest developments in experimental fabrication in the field of nanotechnology for hardware/software security. There are numerous challenges in the development of models for nanoscale devices (e.g., FinFET, gate-all-around devices, TFET, etc.), short channel effects, fringing effects, high leakage current, and power dissipation, among others. This book will help to identify areas where there are challenges and apply nanodevice and circuit techniques to address hardware/software security issues.

The new frontiers of robotics research foresee future scenarios where artificial agents will leave the laboratory to progressively take part in the activities of our daily life. This will require robots to have very sophisticated perceptual and action skills in many intelligence-demanding applications, with particular reference to the ability to seamlessly interact with humans. It will be crucial for the next generation of robots to understand their human partners and at the same time to be intuitively understood by them. In this context, a deep understanding of human motion is essential for robotics applications, where the ability to detect, represent and recognize human dynamics and the capability for generating appropriate movements in response sets the scene for higher-level tasks. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this challenging research field, closing the loop between perception and action, and between human-studies and robotics. The book is organized in three main parts. The first part focuses on human motion perception, with contributions analyzing the neural substrates of human action understanding, how perception is influenced by motor control, and how it develops over time and is exploited in social contexts. The second part considers motion perception from the computational perspective, providing perspectives on cutting-edge solutions available from the Computer Vision and Machine Learning research fields, addressing higher-level perceptual tasks. Finally, the third part takes into account the implications for robotics, with chapters on how motor control is achieved in the latest generation of artificial agents and how such technologies have been exploited to favor human-robot interaction. This book considers the complete human-robot cycle, from an examination of how humans perceive motion and act in the world, to models for motion perception and control in artificial agents. In this respect, the book will provide insights into the perception and action loop in humans and machines, joining together aspects that are often addressed in independent investigations. As a consequence, this book positions itself in a field at the intersection of such different disciplines as Robotics, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning. By bridging these different research domains, the book offers a common reference point for researchers interested in human motion for different applications and from different standpoints, spanning Neuroscience, Human Motor Control, Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Chapter 'The Importance of the Affective Component of Movement in Action Understanding' of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

"User Experience in the Age of Sustainability" focuses on the economic, sociological and environmental movement in business to make all products including digital ones more sustainable. Not only are businesses finding a significant ROI from these choices, customers are demanding this responsible behaviour. The author looks at user experience practice through the lens of sustainability whether it be a smart phone, service - based subscription solutions or sustainable packaging to expose the ways in which user researchers and designers can begin to connect to the sustainability not merely as a theoretical. This book has a practical take on the matter providing a framework along with case studies and personal stories from doing this work successfully. Both hardware and software design are covered.
Learn about the fundamentals of sustainability and how it can change the future of user experience professionals

Learn how to integrate sustainability into designs with a solid framework using user research methodology, techniques, and purposeful metrics

Find out how to integrate sustainability frameworks into the software and product development cycles

Find out how sustainability applies to mobile and digital products with discussions on user messaging, dematerialization, and efficient design

See how companies have made it work with case studies