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 Although much reseArch has been devoted to the effects of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on urban areas, little work has been dedicated to the potential impacts of AVs in rural areas, especially related to feasibility and accessibility [1]. Due to the lack of reliable public transportation, automobiles play a crucial role for rural residents to commute for work, shopping, and other reasons. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, rural households have on average more vehicles than urban households [2]. In 2015, the average rural household spent about 13.7% of their income on vehicle purchases, maintenance, and repairs in comparison to 8.3% for urban households [2]. As the cost of vehicles is one of the top concerns for many rural residents [5], there will be concerns about the affordability of AVs in these areas as their initial prices might be high [1]. Given the current struggles with affording and maintaining vehicles for rural residents, rural residents may not be able to afford or maintain personal AVs, at least not in the beginning. There is also a concern whether rural communities will have access to funding to build the necessary transportation infrastructure to deploy AVs.

Over the past 20 years, researchers have investigated the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to enhance rehabilitative therapies by improving motor control, supporting motivation, and offering analgesic effects. Prior work indicates that patient adherence to prescribed in-home regimens has significant impact on recovery time. Though Connected Health Technologies and Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR/VR) may maximize in-home adherence and recovery, questions about design and deployment remain. We designed a first-person Augmented Reality (AR) experience to elicit user and practitioner perspectives about AR for rehabilitative contexts. We found significant differences between patient and practitioner-report of regimen adherence. We also identified key attitude barriers to adopting VR/AR for clinical practice which may impact support for in-home VR/AR use. Findings from these studies inform directions for future research and development about the use of VR/AR in a therapeutic context.

When making routine and critical purchase decisions, consumers often have a need to process a surplus of information to make the right choice. Today’s technology must be able to assist them in this process. Although conversational voice user interfaces have the potential to help consumers in their decision-making, extensive testing is required to ensure that they are up to par with the expectations and the needs of users and contexts. Therefore, we focus on evaluating the ability of a multi-strategy conversational mobile decision-aid (MODA) (Alikhademi et al., in press) in correctly classifying the decision-making strategies used by consumers and recognizing attributes, brands, and criteria voiced in an air filter purchase context. Our system evaluation results revealed that MODA performed with high levels of accuracy with classifying the user’s decision-making strategy (over 80%) and recognizing decision parameters (over 75%). The main contribution of MODA is that it can support users in many domains and disciplines by recognizing voiced decision parameters.

Executive functions (EF) are a collection of cognitive domains governing task initiation, motor planning, attention, and goal-oriented action. Difficulties with EF have marked impacts on adaptive living skills, learning outcomes, and quality of life for people with cognitive and psychosocial disabilities, as well as the broader population. While there is considerable research interest in EF training intervention for disabled populations, very few studies explore metacognitive intervention for people with cognitive disabilities. Metacognition comprises conscious beliefs and strategies around task management and goal setting. Metacognitive awareness has been shown to mediate the effects of executive function on self-regulated learning. Metacognitive interventions have also shown promise in general education, military training, and medical practice. We present a virtual reality experience deploying agent-based modeling to support explicit metacognitive strategy instruction for undergraduate students of all neurotypes. Our results support that explicit instructional material explaining executive function and metacognition in relation to problem-solving experiences influenced participant self-concept and awareness of personal traits and cognitive processes.