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We contribute MIDAS as a novel sensing solution for characterizing everyday objects using thermal dissipation. MIDAS takes advantage of the fact that anytime a person touches an object, it results in heat transfer. By capturing and modeling the dissipation of the transferred heat, e.g., through the decrease in the captured thermal radiation, MIDAS can characterize the object and determine its material. We validate MIDAS through extensive empirical benchmarks and demonstrate that MIDAS offers an innovative sensing modality that can recognize a wide range of materials - with up to 83% accuracy - and generalize to variations in the people interacting with objects.

Funding: N.C. was funded by a doctoral grant (SFRH/BD/146881/2019) awarded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT). S.S. was supported by Agência Regional para o Desenvolvimento da Investigação, Tecnologia e Inovação (ARDITI) research fellowship in the scope of the H2020 project GoJelly. P.P. was funded by a PhD grant ref. M3.1.a/F/065/2015 by Fundo Regional de Ciência e Tecnologia (FRCT) and the program AÇORES 2020. A post-doctoral research fellowship by ARDITI (ARDITI–M1420-09-5369-FSE-000002) supported J.G.M. F.G. was endorsed by a post-doctoral research fellowship granted by ARDITI in the framework of project RAGES (ARDITI-RAGES-2019-001). R.F. was supported by the funding from project INTERWHALE (PTDC/CCI-COM/0450/2020) by FCT. Doctoral fellowships were financially supported S.C. by ARDITI (ARDITI-M1420-09-5369-FSE-000002). R.S. was supported by a research fellowship in the framework of project PLASMAR+(MAC2/1.1a/347). J.C.-C. is funded by national funds through FCT under the Scientific Employment Stimulus—Institutional Call—[CEECINST/00098/2018]. This work was partially funded by MIMAR+(MAC2/4.6.d/249) in the INTERREG MAC 2014–2020 Programme framework. This study also had the support of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, through the strategic project (UIDB/04292/2020) granted to MARE UI&IUIDB/04292/2020. Finally, the present paper benefited from underwater surveys during the expedition ‘MARE@Porto Santo 20200 conducted by MARE-Madeira. Current trends in the global climate facilitate the displacement of numerous marine species from their native distribution ranges to higher latitudes when facing warming conditions. In this work, we analyzed occurrences of a circumtropical reef fish, the spotfin burrfish, Chilomycterus reticulatus (Linnaeus, 1958), in the Madeira Archipelago (NE Atlantic) between 1898 and 2021. In addition to available data sources, we performed an online survey to assess the distribution and presence of this species in the Madeira Archipelago, along with other relevant information, such as size class and year of the first sighting. In total, 28 valid participants responded to the online survey, georeferencing 119 C. reticulatus sightings and confirming its presence in all archipelago islands. The invasiveness of the species was screened using the Aquatic Species Invasiveness Screening Kit. Five assessments rated the fish as being of medium risk of establishing a local population and becoming invasive. Current temperature trends might have facilitated multiple sightings of this thermophilic species in the Madeira Archipelago. The present study indicates an increase in C. reticulatus sightings in the region. This underlines the need for updated comprehensive information on species diversity and distribution to support informed management and decisions. The spread of yet another thermophilic species in Madeiran waters provides further evidence of an ongoing tropicalization, emphasizing the need for monitoring programs and the potential of citizen science in complementing such programs. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

While HCI remains vastly abundant in human- and land- centric applications, in this work we focus on exploring further the Human Computer Biosphere Interaction (HCBI) concept in aquatic settings. Based on the existing techniques for prototyping the geodesic domes, we design them as five marine megafauna species, for the on- and off- shore locations. We describe novel interaction concepts with and within such structures: (i) Turtle AR nesting, (ii) Bird XR watching, (iii) Dolphin acoustic swimming, (iv) Seal night scuba-diving, and (v) Whale projection mapping. We report the design of such interaquatic environments, focused at depicting the ongoing concerns with such marina megafauna species, discussing their feasibility, suggesting research, implementation and validation for all interaquatic domes, planned in our future work.

While ubiquitous computing remains vastly applied in urban environments, their applications in ocean environment remain scarce due to the limitations in range and cost of current radio technology. This hinders environmental telemetry in the oceans and other remote areas. In this study, we explore the usage of IoT and Long Range Radio Communication (LoRa) in ocean environments. We study the maximum distance for LoRa and a potential location estimation based on the same technology using the passive RSSI analysis. Using three coastal based nodes and a node mounted on a sea vessel, we report a maximum range of 83.6km. We also achieve a location error within a radius of 3.4km (4% of maximum distance) in the sea. These results support marine biologist expeditions, allowing them to use low-cost, long-lasting and easy to deploy solutions for tracking marine objects and species in open ocean, providing them data in near-real-time. We discuss the findings from used models, outlining limitations, and providing a scenario for future ubiquitous IoT applications for tracking sea objects.

Whale watching is a prime example of ecotourism services reaching millions of people worldwide. In this paper, we describe a prototype of a mobile application designed to enhance the whale watching experience. Integrating eco-acoustics and entertainment components, the authors designed an App that enhances customer satisfaction even in the case of distant sighing, which helps preserve animal well-being in this growing ecotourism activity. This paper presents the design and preliminary evaluation of the system, which involves many different components, from usability and presence known scales. We asked 12 participants to conduct several activities, including (i) report a sighting, (ii) classify a cetacean vocal call, and (iii) gather a cetacean photo. Because of the system’s novelty, we report on an extensive evaluation framework, including usability and presence scales reported by 12 whale watchers. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of future applications for ecotourism services.

IoT has been widely adopted by HCI communities and citizen scientists to sense and control the surrounding environments. While their applications are mostly reported in urban settings, they remain scarce in aquatic settings. Oceans are undergoing an immense increase of human generated pollution ranging from noise to marine litter, where current USV solutions to detect its impact on environment remain at high cost. In our study, we design a first low-cost, long-range, radio controlled USV, based on IoT and LoRa, intended to be used for aquatic expeditions collecting environmental telemetry. We gather temperature, humidity, GPS position, footage and provide a mobile interface for remote controlling the USV. With this pilot study, we provide an initial study of the suitable simplistic GUI for long-range remote sensing in aquatic setting. We discuss the findings and propose future applications and Internet of Water Things as future research direction.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening new possibilities for sensing, monitoring and actuating in urban environments. They support a shift to a hybrid network of humans and things collaborating in production, transmission and processing of data through low-cost and low power devices connected via long-range (LoRa) wide area networks (WAN). This paper describes a 2-player duel game based on IoT controllers and LoRa radio communication protocol. Here we report on the main evaluation dimensions of this new design space for games, namely: (i) game usability (SUS) leading to an above average score; (ii) affective states of the players (SAM) depicting pleasant and engaging gameplay, while players retain control; (iii) radio coverage perception (RCP) showing that most participants did not change their perception of the radio distance after playing. Finally, we discuss the findings and propose future interactive applications to take advantage of this design space.

Part 8: Interactive Posters; International audience; In this poster, we are addressing the topic of “system’s evaluation” from the point of view of assessing the usability of a gamified experience with 20 teenagers aged 15–17 years. The currently tested experience was ideally designed for children 9–10 years. In order to adapt the application to teenagers, we tested it with 20 targeted users. In this poster, we share the results and encourage a discussion among the researchers about how to adapt the gamified experience designed for children to a teenage audience.

The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. Adopting a user-driven innovation framework along with cooperative inquiry, we report and discuss a case study that has been designed to involve users in the ideation of interpretive experiences for a local museum. Working in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Funchal, this contribution will present and discuss co-design sessions that were aimed at participants with ages 15 to 17 and where they were asked to ideate an interactive museum experience. As a result of the co-design sessions, we have found several design patterns. We have grouped these patterns into four categories that express the interests of a teenage audience; these categories are: “interactions”, “gaming”, “localization” and “social media”. Our findings suggest that teenagers value interactive technologies when visiting museums and that user-driven innovation plays an important role when involving this specific audience in the design of user experiences for museums.

Recent years demonstrate an increased research in automatic recognition of emotions in whole-body gestures. However, most of them rely on emotional models that are still being contested or require an obtrusive way of collecting the data. We study primitive postures based on 7 primary-process and clinically measured emotions. We portray postures from theatre in front of the motion capture sensor and we conduct online surveys to discriminate primary-process emotions. We analyze low-level features from postural joints data and reveal RAGE patterns which we will use in future real-time affective interactions.