Conferece proceedings by Samuel Navas-Medrano
2024 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), 2024
Despite advancements in mental healthcare, significant barriers such as social stigma, limited av... more Despite advancements in mental healthcare, significant barriers such as social stigma, limited availability of professionals, and geographic disparities hinder effective therapy access. Extended Reality technologies offer a promising solution by providing immersive, remote therapeutic experiences that can reduce stigma and improve accessibility. In this paper, we explore the development of innovative Mixed Reality therapeutic strategies for Emotional Regulation. By examining the design process of a gamified therapeutic activity, we focus on understanding the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. The immersive therapeutic activity presented in this paper facilitates emotion identification and regulation using visual metaphors and the externalisation of emotions, such as writing thoughts in the air, identifying which kind of emotions evokes on us, and then, disposing them. We present the results of a user study conducted with mental health professionals and patients to evaluate the efficacy and usability of the proposed therapeutic intervention. Our results inform the design and development of Mixed Reality therapeutic activities for emotional regulation, highlighting the importance of natural and intuitive interaction methods that leverage gesture recognition to enhance user engagement and therapeutic efficacy. This study also underscores the potential of Mixed Reality to positively influence emotional regulation and suggests future directions for incorporating personalised and multimodal elements to further enrich therapeutic experiences.
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), 2024
Mental health and wellbeing have become one of the signifcant challenges in global society, for w... more Mental health and wellbeing have become one of the signifcant challenges in global society, for which emotional regulation strategies hold the potential to ofer a transversal approach to addressing them. However, the persistently declining adherence of patients to therapeutic interventions, coupled with the limited applicability of current technological interventions across diverse individuals and diagnoses, underscores the need for innovative solutions. We present ARCADIA, a Mixed-Reality platform strategically codesigned with therapists to enhance emotional regulation and selfcompassion. ARCADIA comprises several gamifed therapeutic activities, with a strong emphasis on fostering patient motivation. Through a dual study involving therapists and mental health patients, we validate the fully functional prototype of ARCADIA. Encouraging results are observed in terms of system usability, user engagement, and therapeutic potential. These fndings lead us to believe that the combination of Mixed Reality and gamifed therapeutic activities could be a signifcant tool in the future of mental health.
Proceedings of the 32nd International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2018), 2018
Deictic expressions, such as 'what is that' while pointing at an object, play an important role i... more Deictic expressions, such as 'what is that' while pointing at an object, play an important role in face-to-face communication, for example when describing locations and orientation or when identifying objects. If two parties are not collocated, e.g. when communicating via mobile phones, such deictic expressions cannot easily be exchanged between the remote parties. In this paper, we propose three ways to visualise deictic pointing gestures to a remote communication partner: 1) fingerprint overlay, 2) natural hand overlay and 3) map-with-viewshed (see Fig. 1). We evaluated these visualisations in a lab-based user study, where participants had to identify various realistic targets on a mobile phone. Overall, participants preferred and were most successful with fingerprint overlay. We also identified properties of the target objects that affected how well a pointing gesture could be transmitted. Our results can inform the design of future interfaces to transmit pointing gestures across distances.
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, 2017
Mobile systems provide many means to relay information to a distant partner, but remote communica... more Mobile systems provide many means to relay information to a distant partner, but remote communication is still limited compared to face-to-face interaction. Deictic communication and pointing, in particular, are challenging when two parties communicate across distances. In this paper, we investigate how people envision remote pointing would work when using mobile devices. We report on an elicitation study where we asked participants to perform a series of remote pointing tasks. Our results provide initial insights into user behaviors and specific issues in this context. We discovered that most people follow one of two basic patterns, that their individual pointing behavior is very consistent and that the shape and location of the target object have little influence on the pointing gesture used. From our results, we derived a set of design guidelines for future user interfaces for remote pointing. Our contributions can benefit designers and researchers of such interfaces.
Journal articles by Samuel Navas-Medrano
Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2024
This research paper explores the significant transformative potential of Mixed Reality (MR) techn... more This research paper explores the significant transformative potential of Mixed Reality (MR) technology as enabler of the metaverse, specifically aimed at enhancing mental health therapies. The emerging world of the metaverse, a multiuser, adaptive, three-dimensional digital space, paired with the interactive and immersive benefits of MR technology, promises a paradigm shift in how mental health support is delivered. Unlike traditional platforms, MR allows for therapy within the comfort of the user's familiar surroundings, while incorporating the benefits of social collaboration and interactions. The metaverse environment fosters heightened personalization and deeper user engagement, thereby o ering a more tailored approach to computerized therapy. Beyond its immersive capabilities, MR o ers potential for real-time, smart adaptations to the users' psycho-physiological state, targeting unique patients' needs on a diverse spectrum of therapeutic techniques, thus broadening the scope of mental health support. Furthermore, it opens avenues for continuous emotional support in everyday life situations. This research discusses the benefits and potentials of integrating MR within a mental health metaverse, highlighting how this innovative approach could significantly complement traditional therapeutic methods, fostering improved treatment eficacy, focusing on social and collective experiences, and increasing patient engagement.
Frontiers in Computer Science, 2022
Virtual and augmented reality have been used to diagnose and treat several mental health disorder... more Virtual and augmented reality have been used to diagnose and treat several mental health disorders for decades. Technological advances in these fields have facilitated the availability of commercial solutions for end customers and practitioners. However, there are still some barriers and limitations that prevent these technologies from being widely used by professionals on a daily basis. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a variety of new scenarios in which these technologies could play an essential role, like providing remote treatment. Disorders that traditionally had received less attention are also getting in the spotlight, such as depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Improvements in equipment and hardware, like Mixed Reality Head Mounted Displays, could help open new opportunities in the mental health field. Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term meant to comprise Virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and augmented reality (AR). While XR applications are eminently visual, other senses are being explored in literature around multisensory interactions, such as auditory, olfactory, or haptic feedback. Applying such stimuli within XR experiences around mental disorders is still under-explored and could greatly enrich the therapeutic experience. This manuscript reviews recent research regarding the use of XR for mental health scenarios, highlighting trends, and potential applications as well as areas for improvement. It also discusses future challenges and research areas in upcoming topics such as the use of wearables, multisensory, and multimodal interaction. The main goal of this paper is to unpack how these technologies could be applied to XR scenarios for mental health to exploit their full potential and follow the path of other health technologies by promoting personalized medicine.
International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction
Deictic expressions-such as uttering "this tool" and pointing at a hammer-are important and frequ... more Deictic expressions-such as uttering "this tool" and pointing at a hammer-are important and frequent elements of everyday communication. They are used, for example, when conveying location and orientation information, or when identifying objects. Pointing gestures exist among all known cultures, languages and ethnicities, but they depend on parties to be collocated. When communicating across distances, deictic expressions are usually lost. In this paper, we introduce an approach for communicating deictic pointing across distances by simulating the sender hand posture in the receiver's hand using electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). We describe our prototypical implementation of this approach and report on a lab-based user study evaluating it. Our results indicate that it is technically feasible to use EMS for communicating deictic pointing gestures across distances. Participants in our study were successful in resolving deictic expressions consisting of verbal and gestural components. Furthermore, our results provide initial insights into user behavior, user satisfaction and specific challenges in this context. Our contributions can inform the design of future interfaces for naturally transmitting pointing gestures across distances.
Cognitive Processing , 2023
When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining mea... more When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining measures of participants’ survey knowledge, i.e., their estimate of distant locations relative to other places. Previous work showed that distance estimations are consistently biased when no direct route is available to the queried target or when participants follow a detour. Here we investigated whether a corresponding bias is manifested in two other popular measures of survey knowledge: a pointing task and a sketchmapping task. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a systematic bias in pointing/sketchmapping performance associated with the preferred route choice in an applied urban setting. The results were mixed. We found moderate evidence for the presence of a systematic bias, but only for a subset of urban locations. When two plausible routes to the target were available, survey knowledge estimates were significantly biased in the direction of the route chosen by the participant. When only one plausible route was available, we did not find a statistically significant pattern. The results may have methodological implications for spatial cognition studies in applied urban settings that might be obtaining systematically biased survey knowledge estimates at some urban locations. Researchers should be aware that the choice of urban locations from which pointing and sketchmapping are performed might systematically distort the results, in particular when two plausible but diverging routes to the target are visible from the location.
Extended abstracts by Samuel Navas-Medrano
Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019
Training employees on workplace procedures in virtual environments (VEs) is becoming popular sinc... more Training employees on workplace procedures in virtual environments (VEs) is becoming popular since it reduces cost and risks. Although haptic enhancements with force feedback make such VEs more realistic and increase performance. Such enhancements are only available for 'spatial' scenarios. One potential enhancement for low-cost VEs is electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), but it remains open how EMS can be used to support trainees. Therefore we present WONDER: A virtual training environment with an EMS feedback enhancing layer. In an initial study, we show the feasibility of the approach and that it can successfully support trainees in remembering workflows. We test feedback that supports participants by pushing their hand towards a button or pulling their hand away from it. Participants preferred a combination of both feedback types.
1st International Workshop on Human-Drone Interaction, 2019
Gesture interaction is a common way to control drones. Often it is done by mid-air gestures i.e. ... more Gesture interaction is a common way to control drones. Often it is done by mid-air gestures i.e. the operator does not need to hold any controller. Hence, such interaction is lacking force feedback while the other senses are overloaded by the noise of the drone or occupied by following the behavior of the drone. Therefore, we present an approach in which we use electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to provide force feedback for controlling drones. We build on existing gesture sets and discuss different feedback options for operating drones.
Gesture-Enabled Remote Communication and Collaboration in Urban Planning (GECCO)
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Conferece proceedings by Samuel Navas-Medrano
Journal articles by Samuel Navas-Medrano
Extended abstracts by Samuel Navas-Medrano