Within the context of healthcare, there has been a long-standing interest in understanding the posture and movement of the human body. Gait analysis work over the years has looked to articulate the patterns and parameters of this movement both for a normal healthy body and in a range of movement-based disorders. In recent years, these efforts to understand the moving body have been transformed by significant advances in sensing technologies and computational analysis techniques all offering new ways for the moving body to be tracked, measured, and interpreted. While much of this work has been largely research focused, as the field matures, we are seeing more shifts into clinical practice. As a consequence, there is an increasing need to understand these sensing technologies over and above the specific capabilities to track, measure, and infer patterns of movement in themselves. Rather, there is an imperative to understand how the material form of these technologies enables them also tobe situated in everyday healthcare contexts and practices. There are significant mutually interdependent ties between the fundamental characteristics and assumptions of these technologies and the configurations of everyday collaborative practices that are possible them. Our attention then must look to social, clinical, and technical relations pertaining to these various body technologies that may play out in particular ways across a range of different healthcare contexts and stakeholders. Our aim in this book is to explore these issues with key examples illustrating how social contexts of use relate to the properties and assumptions bound up in particular choices of body-tracking technology. We do this through a focus on three core application areas in healthcare—assessment, rehabilitation, and surgical interaction—and recent efforts to apply body-tracking technologies to them.
Prof. Kenton O'Hara works in the Human Experience and Design Group at Microsoft Research and is a Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Bristol. His research explores everyday social and collaborative practices with technology with a view to informing design and innovation. His most recent research has focused on user experiences and practices with ""touchless"" gestural interaction technology with a particular emphasis on its application in surgery. Over the years, his research has investigated new technologies in a variety of domains including the home, mobile environments, urban settings, and the workplace. Kenton has authored over 100 publications and two books on public displays and music consumption. Prior to working for Microsoft Research, Kenton worked as a Senior Principal Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia where he was Director of the HxI Initiative. He also worked as a Senior Researcher at Xerox EuroPARC, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and the Appliance Studio. He has worked on numerous award-winning projects including the BBC’s BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winning ""Coast"" location-based experience.
Dr. Cecily Morrison is a researcher at Microsoft Research in the Human Experience & Design group. Cecily works in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, holding a B.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. Her interests lie in developing novel technologies to enable health and well-being in the broadest sense. Recent work has been focused on the integration of computer vision, and machine intelligence more generally, into useful real-world applications, such as the Assess MS system to support disease tracking in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. A key tenant of Cecily's research is to symbiotically bring together people and systems so that systems augment rather than replace what people do. Much of Cecily's inspiration came from years of working with health professionals to ""translate"" technology research into systems that could be used in practice.
Prof. Abigail Sellen is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, UK, where she manages the Human Experience & Design Group, a group concerned with human experiences with computing, drawing on diverse perspectives across the sciences, engineering, arts, and humanities. Designing systems which use computer vision and machine learning for real-world situations, particularly in the area of health and well-being, is a major research theme for the group. Prior to joining Microsoft, Abigail worked at Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, Xerox’s research lab in Cambridge UK (EuroPARC), the MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, and other corporate IT labs such as Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and Bell Northern Research. She has a doctorate in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego and an M.A.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto. She has published extensively on many topics including: computer input, help systems, reading, paper use in offices, videoconferencing design, search, photo use, gesture-based input, human error and computer support for human memory. This includes the book The Myth of the Paperless Office (with co-author Richard Harper), which won an IEEE award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Women's Engineering Society, an Honorary Professor of Interaction at the University of Nottingham, an Honorary Professor at UCLIC, University College London, and a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy.
Prof. Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze is a Full Professor in Affective Computing and Interaction at the Interaction Centre of the University College London (UCL). She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science for Biomedicine from the University of the Studies of Milan, Italy. Her research focuses on designing technology that can sense the affective state of its users and use that information to tailor the interaction process. She has pioneered the field of Affective Computing and for more than a decade she has investigated body movement and more recently touch behavior as means to recognize and measure the quality of the user experience in full-body computer games, physical rehabilitation, and textile design. She also studies how full-body technology and body sensory feedback can be used to modulate people's perception of themselves and of their capabilities to improve self-efficacy and copying capabilities. She has published more than 170 papers in Affective Computing, HCI, and Pattern Recognition.
Prof. Cathy Craig is a professor of Perception and Action Psychology and Director of the state-of-the-art Movement Innovation Lab at Queen's University Belfast, N. Ireland. Her cutting-edge research is primarily concerned with how sensory information picked up by the brain is subsequently used to guide all kinds of action. She uses this knowledge to develop innovative interventions that help improve movement performance in different groups of people (e.g. older adults, people with Parkinson’s disease, children with autism). The caliber of her work has been recognized through the award of a prestigious ERC (European Research Council) grant, reserved for the very best scientists in Europe. This funding has allowed her to test how different types of multi-sensory virtual environments can be used to invite users to move in certain ways, whilst taking into account the action capabilities of the end-user. By adopting some basic principles of perception/action coupling she has developed a series of gamified scenarios that intrinsically motivate older adults to perform certain actions. To date she has successfully applied her perception/action research to successfully improve balance control and mobility levels in older adults, but also to understand differences in performance in elite sportsmen and women. Her ERC funded work was one of only four projects chosen to be showcased at the 1st Innovation EU Convention in Brussels and the ERC's 5th Birthday celebrations. She was runner up in the Health Innovation Awards in N. Ireland in 2011 and was a finalist in the 25k Innovation awards for her work on Parkinson's and falls prevention in older adults.
