Understanding and predicting people's displacement movement is particularly important for professionals involved in planning complex buildings (e.g., hospitals, convention centers, subway stations and university campus). Some decisions taken by the visitors while choosing what route to follow can be influenced by some environmental cues which can act as a factor of attraction, influencing the wayfinding process. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to evaluate the hypotheses that, in the context of a simulated emergency egress, people prefer to move along either a wider and with more lighting corridor or to bear right. To collect the users' responses, a constant stimulus method was used, combined with a twoforced choices method, involving the projection of stereoscopic images in a wall-screen. Results suggest that, in a "T-type" intersection, users randomly chose which direction to follow. However, if there is an increment in the width of the side corridor, users tend to follow the wider corridor. When light is inserted, users also prefer to choose the corridors with more lighting. In situations where the variables corridor width and existence of lighting are concurrent, the corridors with light are the most chosen by the users.
Background: Exergames have been used as an innovative motor rehabilitation method with the main aim of improving motivation and exercise. As research interest in exergaming for rehabilitation is rapidly growing, a review of existing systematic reviews is important to synthesize the available evidence and provide recommendations. Objectives: In this article we systematically synthesized the information from reviews that have examined the effects if exergames on different body movement parameters in older adults with and without specific pathologies. Method: Searches were conducted in Web of Science, Scopus, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, PubMed, SciELO, B-On and Google Scholar, articulating different terms and Boolean operators. Systematic reviews, meta-analysis and literature reviews published until May 2017 that investigated exergame interventions on physical outcomes, such as balance, gait, limb movements, muscle strength, in healthy and nonhealthy older adults. Results: Based on prior reviews, exergaming, as a standalone intervention, has a positive effect on balance, gait, muscle strength, upper limb function, and dexterity. When compared to traditional physiotherapy, exergaming has at least similar effects on these outcomes. Many of the investigated studies indicated low methodological quality for the evaluation of the effects of exergames on different outcomes related to motor rehabilitation. Conclusions: Exergames could be used as a complement to traditional forms of motor rehabilitation, but future individual studies and reviews should follow more rigorous methodological standards in order to improve the quality of the evidence and provide guidelines for the use of exergames in motor rehabilitation.
Remote sensing and Virtual Reality (VR) are technologies that create new development opportunities in the field of serious games with application in physiotherapy. Thus, during a physiotherapy training session expressed by a game round the remote sensing of user body motion provides measurements that can be used for objective evaluation of physical therapy outcomes. In this work is presented a serious game for physiotherapy characterized by Kinect natural user interface and a set of VR games developed in the Unity3D. To provide patient electronic health record, game remote configuration as well as for data presentation for physiotherapist a mobile application was developed. Additionally, several training results expressed by upper limb, neck and spine angles are included in the paper.
Informing users about the correct hazard level associated with products can be one of the most important measures to help promote user safety while they handle hazardous household chemicals. The aim of this paper is to present pilot study's results about the effectiveness of using a VR-based methodology to examine the influence of a container's features (e.g., shapes) on the users' perception of hazardousness. Previous works have mostly used 2D drawings for this type of study. Issues which may compromise the quality of future experiments: e.g., adequacy of VR devices, interaction quality, simulatorsickness, procedure and quality of the instruments (i.e., questionnaires) are discussed. Despite the fact that the key experiment has not yet been completed, very promising results have been obtained, suggesting that the VR simulator and the methodology adopted may provide a successful evaluation of the packages' hazardousness.
This paper presents a Virtual Reality (VR) system -ErgoVRthat is being developed to allow the visualization and measurement of Human behavior interaction's variables in virtual environments, to be mainly used in studies in Ergonomics in Design. The first section of the paper justifies this system's creation compared to the commercial solutions available. The second section describes the development of ErgoVR, in particular the definition of its concept and implementation in a User-Centered Design perspective. As the most important feature of ErgoVR, stands the automatic data collection of variables of behavioral interaction such as: dislocation paths, trajectories, collisions with objects, orientation of the field of view and occurrence of events triggered by user's actions. ErgoVR is being developed and validated in studies at the Ergonomics Laboratory of FMH -Technical University of Lisbon and serves as a tool for two research projects, supported by a grant from the Portuguese Science Foundation.
Videogame worlds can be read like built environments, so the approaches used to plan real environments may help the design of virtual worlds. In this way, this paper presents a pilot study that the main objective is to investigate affordances of the environment that can influence people's path selection, namely the corridor width. The main hypothesis is that the corridor width will influence people's preference regarding the path they choose in order to escape from a building (in an emergency situation). Stereoscopic images projected in a screen were presented using a constant stimulus method combined with a two-forced choice method to collect user's responses. Findings suggests that there is a tendency to bear right when users are in an "T" intersection where the right and left corridors are equal, and they tend to turn to the larger corridor regardless its direction.
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