It is shown that thin layers of palladium coated magnesium lanthanide alloys reversibly go through an optical transition by variation of the hydrogen concentration, just as has recently been shown for pure lanthanides. With these layers optical switches can be constructed that exhibit three different optical states: a color-neutral transparent state at high hydrogen concentration, a nontransparent dark absorbing state at intermediate hydrogen pressures, and a highly reflective metallic state at low hydrogen pressures. The ratio in transmission between the transparent state and the reflecting state is more than 1000.

Due to the growing pace of life, stress became one of the major factors causing health problems. We have developed a framework for measuring stress in real-life conditions continuously and unobtrusively. In order to provide meaningful, useful and actionable information, we present stress information, derived from sensor measurements, in the context of person's activities. In this paper, we describe our framework, discuss how we address arising challenges and evaluate our approach on basis of the field studies we have conducted. The main results of the evaluation are that the results of long-term measurements of stress reveal people information about their behavioral patterns that they perceive as meaningful and useful, and trigger their ideas about behavioral changes necessary to achieve a better stress balance.

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The growing interest in affective computing is expected to have its beneficial impact on consumer lifestyle products. Especially emphatic applicationsapplications that make you feel they really understand you -will serve the current consumer interest in enhanced and meaningful experiences.To do so, the applications will have to measure the user's emotional experience. Well-established psychophysiological techniques bear promise, but so far have mainly been validated in laboratory situations. To also apply them in real-life situations, we built an emotion measurement platform.This platform shows that emotional experiences can be measured in a relatively unobtrusive way, while at the same time it enables us to gather knowledge on emotional experiences in everyday-life and it offers the opportunity to prototype emphatic application concepts and test them in relevant situations..