Modelling disease transmission from touchscreen user interfaces.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Di Battista A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8316822 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The ubiquitous use of public touchscreen user interfaces for commercial applications has created a credible risk for fomite-mediated disease transmission. This paper presents results from a stochastic simulation designed to assess this risk. The model incorporates a queueing network to simulate people flow and touchscreen interactions. It also describes an updated model for microbial transmission using an asymmetric gradient transfer assumption that incorporates literature reviewed empirical data concerning touch-transfer efficiency between fingers and surfaces. In addition to natural decay/die-off, pathogens are removed from the system by simulated cleaning / disinfection and personal-touching rates (e.g. face, dermal, hair and clothing). The dose response is implemented with an exponential moving average filter to model the temporal dynamics of exposure. Public touchscreens were shown to pose a considerable infection risk (∼3%) using plausible default simulation parameters. Sensitivity of key model parameters, including the rate of surface disinfection is examined and discussed. A distinctive and important advancement of this simulation was its ability to distinguish between infection risk from a primary contaminated source and that due to the re-deposition of pathogens onto secondary, initially uncontaminated touchscreens from sequential use. The simulator is easily configurable and readily adapted to more general fomite-mediated transmission modelling and may provide a valuable framework for future research.
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Project description:Mobile devices now rival desktop computers as the most popular devices for web surfing and E-commerce. As screen sizes of mobile devices continue to get larger, operating smartphones with a single-hand becomes increasingly difficult. Automatic operating hand detection would enable E-commerce applications to adapt their interfaces to better suit their user's handedness interaction requirements. This paper addresses the problem of identifying the operative hand by avoiding the use of mobile sensors that may pose a problem in terms of battery consumption or distortion due to different calibrations, improving the accuracy of user categorization through an evaluation of different classification strategies. A supervised classifier based on machine learning was constructed to label the operating hand as left or right. The classifier uses features extracted from touch traces such as scrolls and button clicks on a data-set of 174 users. The approach proposed by this paper is not platform-specific and does not rely on access to gyroscopes or accelerometers, widening its applicability to any device with a touchscreen.
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Project description:In this introduction to the Special Issue on methods for modelling of infectious disease epidemiology we provide a commentary and overview of the field. We suggest that the field has been through three revolutions that have focussed on specific methodological developments; disease dynamics and heterogeneity, advanced computing and inference, and complexity and application to the real-world. Infectious disease dynamics and heterogeneity dominated until the 1980s where the use of analytical models illustrated fundamental concepts such as herd immunity. The second revolution embraced the integration of data with models and the increased use of computing. From the turn of the century an emergence of novel datasets enabled improved modelling of real-world complexity. The emergence of more complex data that reflect the real-world heterogeneities in transmission resulted in the development of improved inference methods such as particle filtering. Each of these three revolutions have always kept the understanding of infectious disease spread as its motivation but have been developed through the use of new techniques, tools and the availability of data. We conclude by providing a commentary on what the next revoluition in infectious disease modelling may be.
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Project description:This study proposes a novel skinny button with multimodal audio and haptic feedback to enhance the touch user interface of electronic devices. The active material in the film-type actuator is relaxor ferroelectric polymer (RFP) poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene-chlorofluoroethylene) [P(VDF-TrFE-CFE)] blended with poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) [P(VDF-TrFE)], which produces mechanical vibrations via the fretting vibration phenomenon. Normal pressure applied by a human fingertip on the film-type skinny button mechanically activates the locally concentrated electric field under the contact area, thereby producing a large electrostrictive strain in the blended RFP film. Multimodal audio and haptic feedback is obtained by simultaneously applying various electric signals to the pairs of ribbon-shaped top and bottom electrodes. The fretting vibration provides tactile feedback at frequencies of 50-300 Hz and audible sounds at higher frequencies of 500 Hz to 1 kHz through a simple on-off mechanism. The advantage of the proposed audio-tactile skinny button is that it restores the "click" sensation to the popular virtual touch buttons employed in contemporary electronic devices.
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Project description:BackgroundAdvanced light microscopy methods are key to many biological studies. Their ease of use depends, besides experimental aspects, on intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUI). The open-source software Micro-Manager offers a universal GUI for microscope control but requires implementing plugins to further tailor it to specific systems. However, GUIs are often tailored to a single system. Since even similar devices can have different Micro-Manager device properties, such as power percentage versus absolute power, directly transferring a GUI to another instrument usually requires changing the source-code.ResultsWe developed Easier Micro-Manager User interface (EMU), a Micro-Manager plugin, to simplify building flexible and reconfigurable GUIs. EMU can be seamlessly used with the Java Swing library to create device-independent GUIs for Micro-Manager. Such GUIs are easily transferred to another microscope thanks to an intuitive configuration menu that includes mapping of the device properties to the GUI functionalities and customization of the graphical elements. We also provide resources such as user and programming guides, a tutorial and code examples.ConclusionsMicro-Manager users now have a powerful tool to improve the user experience on their instruments. EMU GUIs can be easily configured for new microscopes and shared with other research groups. In the future, newly developed GUIs will be added to EMU to benefit the whole community.
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Project description:This study evaluated the usability of a direct manipulation device (touchscreen) vs. indirect manipulation devices (mouse and touchpad) on the selected Microsoft (MS) Word tasks as per ISO-9241-11 standard. MS Word was taken as an example of a complex application. The tasks were evaluated in terms of touch-friendly or click-friendly using efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction parameters to propose a customized task menu. The experiment was conducted with fifty-four participants, divided into three MS Word usage-based expertise groups. Each participant performed fifty-six tasks using a mouse, a touchpad, and a touchscreen. To assess task-level usability, individual one-way ANOVAs were performed for each task to gauge both efficiency and effectiveness. It's worth noting that the touchscreen significantly outperformed other input methods in just one specific task regarding effectiveness. Consequently, an ANCOVA was employed, with task completion time as the independent variable and the number of errors as a covariate, to further investigate effectiveness. A total of 19 (34%) of the total tasks were found to be significantly efficient with a mouse, while 21 (37.5%) were significantly efficient with a touchscreen. Based on the results, a customized menu is recommended for MS Word-like applications that combine actions in touch-friendly tasks and mouse-friendly tasks separately.
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Project description:This study aims to identify the steps in which users of academic libraries search for information and interact with the libraries' web interfaces. The study draws on models from the disciplines of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information-seeking behaviour (ISB) to create and investigate a Unified Model. Interpretive case studies were conducted at two universities, one in the UK and one in Kuwait. Qualitative data was collected using observations with postgraduate students and analysed by a content analysis approach. The findings revealed seven steps taken in searching for information and interacting with academic libraries' web interfaces, but these steps are overlapped as users can change, move and go from one step to another based on the difficulties they encounter and the options they have.
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Project description:BackgroundA variety of human computer interfaces are used by robotic surgical systems to control and actuate camera scopes during minimally invasive surgery. The purpose of this review is to examine the different user interfaces used in both commercial systems and research prototypes.MethodsA comprehensive scoping review of scientific literature was conducted using PubMed and IEEE Xplore databases to identify user interfaces used in commercial products and research prototypes of robotic surgical systems and robotic scope holders. Papers related to actuated scopes with human-computer interfaces were included. Several aspects of user interfaces for scope manipulation in commercial and research systems were reviewed.ResultsScope assistance was classified into robotic surgical systems (for multiple port, single port, and natural orifice) and robotic scope holders (for rigid, articulated, and flexible endoscopes). Benefits and drawbacks of control by different user interfaces such as foot, hand, voice, head, eye, and tool tracking were outlined. In the review, it was observed that hand control, with its familiarity and intuitiveness, is the most used interface in commercially available systems. Control by foot, head tracking, and tool tracking are increasingly used to address limitations, such as interruptions to surgical workflow, caused by using a hand interface.ConclusionIntegrating a combination of different user interfaces for scope manipulation may provide maximum benefit for the surgeons. However, smooth transition between interfaces might pose a challenge while combining controls.
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Project description:Modelling the transmission dynamics of an infectious disease is a complex task. Not only it is difficult to accurately model the inherent non-stationarity and heterogeneity of transmission, but it is nearly impossible to describe, mechanistically, changes in extrinsic environmental factors including public behaviour and seasonal fluctuations. An elegant approach to capturing environmental stochasticity is to model the force of infection as a stochastic process. However, inference in this context requires solving a computationally expensive "missing data" problem, using data-augmentation techniques. We propose to model the time-varying transmission-potential as an approximate diffusion process using a path-wise series expansion of Brownian motion. This approximation replaces the "missing data" imputation step with the inference of the expansion coefficients: a simpler and computationally cheaper task. We illustrate the merit of this approach through three examples: modelling influenza using a canonical SIR model, capturing seasonality using a SIRS model, and the modelling of COVID-19 pandemic using a multi-type SEIR model.
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