The literature reports research efforts allowing the editing of interactive TV multimedia documents by end-users. In this article we propose complementary contributions relative to end-user generated interactive video, video tagging, and collaboration. In earlier work we proposed the watch-and-comment (WaC) paradigm as the seamless capture of an individual's comments so that corresponding annotated interactive videos be automatically generated. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype application, the WACTOOL, that supports the capture of digital ink and voice comments over individual frames and segments of the video, producing a declarative document that specifies both: different media stream structure and synchronization.In this article, we extend the WaC paradigm in two ways. First, user-video interactions are associated with edit commands and digital ink operations. Second, focusing on collaboration and distribution issues, we employ annotations as simple containers for context information by using them as tags in order to organize, store and distribute information in a P2P-based multimedia capture platform. We highlight the design principles of the watch-and-comment paradigm, and demonstrate related results including the current version of the WACTOOL and its architecture. We also illustrate how an interactive video produced by the WACTOOL can be rendered in an interactive video environment, the Ginga-NCL player, and include results from a preliminary evaluation.

BackgroundBeing socially connected is related to well-being, and one way of avoiding social isolation is to deepen existing relationships. Even though existing relationships can be reinforced by regular and meaningful communication, state-of-the-art communication technologies alone do not increase the quality of social connections. Thus, there is a need for the involvement of a trained human facilitator in a network of older adults, preferably for a short period, to promote the deepening of their relationships.ObjectiveThis study aimed to evaluate the hypothesis that a human-facilitated, media-sharing social networking system can improve social connection in a small group of older people, who are more vulnerable to social isolation than most, and deepen their relationships over a period of a few weeks.MethodsWe conducted the design and evaluation of Media Parcels, a novel human-facilitated social networking system. Media Parcels is based on the metaphor of a facilitator collecting and delivering parcels in the physical mail. Extending the metaphor, the system supports a facilitator in designing time-based dialogue requesting parcels from participants that bring out their memories and feelings, in collecting the parcels, wrapping them in annotations that communicate the corresponding requests, and delivering the wrapped parcel to a target person. Qualitative evaluation was carried out in two trials with a group of three people each, one with family members (children and father; aged 55, 56, and 82 years old) and the other with a group of friends (aged 72, 72, and 74 years old), over two weeks. In each trial, data were collected in three interviews (pre-, mid-, and posttrial) and via system logging.ResultsCollected data indicate positive social effects for deepening and developing relationships. The parcel metaphor was easily understood and the computational system was readily adopted. Preferences with regard to media production or consumption varied among participants. In the family group, children preferred receiving media parcels (because of their sentimental value) to producing them, whereas the father enjoyed both. In the friendship group, preferences varied: one friend enjoyed both producing and receiving, while the other two preferred one over the other. In general, participants reported a preference for the production of items of a certain type depending on the associated content. Apart from having a strong engagement with the system, participants reported feeling closer to each other than usual.ConclusionsFor both groups, Media Parcels was effective in promoting media sharing and social connections, resulting in the deepening of existing relationships. Its design informs researchers who are attempting to promote social connection in older adults.

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BackgroundResearch on Genomic medicine has suggested that the exposure of patients to early life risk factors may induce the development of chronic diseases in adulthood, as the presence of premature risk factors can influence gene expression. The large number of scientific papers published in this research area makes it difficult for the healthcare professional to keep up with individual results and to establish association between them. Therefore, in our work we aim at building a computational system that will offer an innovative approach that alerts health professionals about human development problems such as cardiovascular disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes.MethodsWe built a computational system called Chronic Illness Surveillance System (CISS), which retrieves scientific studies that establish associations (conceptual relationships) between chronic diseases (cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity) and the risk factors described on clinical records. To evaluate our approach, we submitted ten queries to CISS as well as to three other search engines (Google™, Google Scholar™ and Pubmed®;) — the queries were composed of terms and expressions from a list of risk factors provided by specialists.ResultsCISS retrieved a higher number of closely related (+) and somewhat related (+/-) documents, and a smaller number of unrelated (-) and almost unrelated (-/+) documents, in comparison with the three other systems. The results from the Friedman’s test carried out with the post-hoc Holm procedure (95% confidence) for our system (control) versus the results for the three other engines indicate that our system had the best performance in three of the categories (+), (-) and (+/-). This is an important result, since these are the most relevant categories for our users.ConclusionOur system should be able to assist researchers and health professionals in finding out relationships between potential risk factors and chronic diseases in scientific papers.

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The ability to use the movements of the eyes to write is extremely important for individuals with a severe motor disability. With eye typing, a virtual keyboard is shown on the screen and the user enters text by gazing at the intended keys one at a time. With dwell-based eye typing, a key is selected by continuously gazing at it for a specific amount of time. However, this approach has two possible drawbacks: unwanted selections and slow typing rates. In this study, we propose a dwell-free eye typing technique that filters out unintentionally selected letters from the sequence of letters looked at by the user. It ranks possible words based on their length and frequency of use and suggests them to the user. We evaluated Filteryedping with a series of experiments. First, we recruited participants without disabilities to compare it with another potential dwell-free technique and with a dwell-based eye typing interface. The results indicate it is a fast technique that allows an average of 15.95 words per minute after 100min of typing. Then, we improved the technique through iterative design and evaluation with individuals who have severe motor disabilities. This phase helped to identify and create parameters that allow the technique to be adapted to different users.

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Interactive video technology is meant to support user-interaction with video in scene objects associated with navigation in video segments and access to text-based metadata. Interactive TV is one of the most important applications of this area, which has required the development of standards, techniques and tools, such as MPEG-4 and MPEG-7, to create, to describe, to deliver and to present interactive content.In this scenario, the structure and organization of documents containing multimedia metadata play an important role. However, the Interactive TV documents structuring and organization has not been properly explored during the development of advanced Interactive TV services.This work presents a model to structure and to organize documents describing Interactive TV programs and its related media objects, as well as the links between them. This model gives support to represent contextual information, and makes possible to use relevant metadata information in order to implement advanced services like object-based searches, inmovie (scenes, frames, in-frame regions) navigation, and personalization. To demonstrate the functionalities of our model, we have developed an application which uses an Interactive TV program's documents descriptions to present information about in-frame video objects.