Hasta La Gadget!

The Optical Illusion concept watch Tokyoflash Design Studio not only tests your mind, but also how much you value your eyesight.

Aman Behal’s automated robotic arm functioned perfectly. Outfitted with sensors that could “see” objects, grasp them with enough force to hold but not crush them, and return them to the user, it easily outperformed the same arm under manual control on every quantitative measurement.

Except one. The arm’s users — patients with spinal cord injuries in an Orlando hospital — didn’t like it. It was too easy.

“Think about the Roomba,” Behal told Wired.com. “People like robots, and they like them to work automatically. But if you had to watch and supervise the Roomba while it worked, you’d get frustrated pretty quickly. Or bored.”

This wasn’t what Behal had expected. This was the new sensor’s system first time in the field; the user satisfaction survey was supposed to be one more data point, secondary to measuring the performance of the device itself. But it made his team rethink their entire project.

Behal’s arm is just one in a long line of robotic arms aimed at giving paraplegics and quadriplegics greater freedom and mobility. Recent advances have made robot arms far more sensitive, powerful, and realistic than ever before. In many cases the enhancements depend on software that allows the robot arms to take simple commands (or even signals from the user’s brain) and translate them into complex movements involving multiple motors without requiring their users to specify the exact movements of each servo. But in this study, Behal found that there’s such a thing as too much automation.

Behal, an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, had initially used the arm in a 2006 study at the University of Pennsylvania funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. In addition to weakening physical control, MS often impairs attention and memory, and the complexity of the arm’s controls overwhelmed them. At that time, the arm’s sensors and AI were much more limited, and users were mostly frustrated by its complicated controls.

For these patients, according to Behal, something that might seem as simple as scratching their heads was a prolonged struggle. They needed something that took the guesswork of movement, rotation, and force out of the equation.

The quadriplegics at Orlando Health were the opposite. They were cognitively high-functioning, and some had experience with computers or video games. All had ample experience using assistive technology. Regardless of the extent of their disability or whether they were using a touchscreen, mouse, joystick, or voice controls, they preferred using the arm on manual. The more experience they had with tech, the happier they were.

It didn’t matter that the arm performed faster and more accurately when it was fully automated. Users were actually more forgiving of the arm when they were piloting it. If the arm made a mistake on automatic mode, they panned it. Harshly. (“You see a big vertical spike downward,” when that happened, Behal said.) On manual mode, the users learned how to operate it better — and how to explain their problems with the device to someone else.

To users accustomed to navigating the world in a wheelchair — and frequently having to explain how their chair worked to others — this made the arm both more familiar and more useful. It felt less like an alien presence, and more like a tool: a natural extension of the body and the will.

This feeling is essential for anyone’s satisfaction using technology, but particularly so for disabled users, according to John Bricout, Behal’s collaborator and the associate dean for Research and Community Outreach at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work.

“If we’re too challenged, we get angry and frustrated. But if we aren’t challenged enough, we get bored,” said Bricout. He’s seen this repeatedly with both disabled and older adults.

In an interview with Wired.com, he expanded on this, drawing on psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of flow: “We stay engaged when our capabilities are matched by our challenges and our opportunities,” Bricout said. If that balance tilts too far to one direction, we get anxious; if it tilts to the other, we get bored. Match them, and we’re at our happiest, most creative, and most productive.

Behal and Bricout hadn’t anticipated, for example, that users operating the arm using the manual mode would begin to show increased physical functionality.

“There’s rehabilitation potential here,” Bricout said. Thinking through multiple steps to coordinate and improve physical actions “activated latent physical and cognitive resources… It makes you rethink what rehabilitation itself might mean.”

For now, Behal, Bricout and their team plan on repeating their study with a larger group of users to see if they can replicate their results. They’re also going back to users with MS, and perhaps traumatic brain injuries, early next year. Colleagues at other institutions are experimenting with the arms with even more diverse disabled populations.

The engineering team has already given the robotic arm a “voice” that announces its actions and makes it feel more responsive and less alien, even on automatic mode. They’re revamping the software interface again, including exploring the possibility of adding haptic feedback, so users can feel when the robotic arm can grasp an object — or the user’s body itself. If you’re going to scratch your head, the fingertips benefit from touch almost as much.

“You have to listen to users,” Behal said. “If they don’t like using the technology, they won’t. Then it doesn’t matter how well it does its job.”

Robotic arm’s big flaw: Patients say it’s ‘too easy’ [UCF Press Release]

See Also:

• Paging Dr. Robot
• Toyota Sees Robotic Nurses in Your Lonely Final Years
• Kid, Meet Your Old Man (and his Robot Body)
• Robo-Therapist Helps Ailing Limbs
• A Wheelchair That Reads Your Mind
• A Question of Mind Over Matter

Wireless tethering is rapidly becoming a desirable option in top-tier smartphones, but which device delivers the best? Laptop Magazine swore to find out, pitting six Android favorites (two HTC, two Motorola and two Samsung) against one another in a brutal data-sucking showdown in New York City. Unsurprisingly, the HTC EVO 4G came out on top, averaging 5.09 Mbit / sec downloads and a 3.65 second page load time when 4G connectivity was present, but intriguingly enough it’s the freshly-upgraded Droid Incredible that pulled the best speeds on 3G. Lest you think Motorola was trounced in this little competition, the Droid 2 actually delivered websites the fastest at 4.425 seconds on average — besting the Samsung Epic 4G on 4G — and Droid X owners can find consolation in the fact their handset is really good at loading ESPN for some reason. Sadly, the study failed to include the most important item for comparison across the board: a dedicated MiFi or aircard.

EVO 4G and Droid Incredible vie for title of best Android hotspot in informal test originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A number of customers who ordered an Apple TV have bragged about receiving shipment notifications for their orders, despite last week’s rumors that the product might see delays.

Some Apple TV orders have been updated to read “Prepared for shipment” (meaning FedEx is packing the item into a box), so those who placed orders very early could get their new Apple TV as soon as this week.

Last week, some customers who requested expedited shipping received refunds from Apple, who cited a possible delay. It would appear that only new orders might take longer to ship, while the early batch of orders are on schedule for a late September delivery.

See Also:

• Hands-On With New $100 Apple TV
• How Apple Just Disrupted the Cable Guys

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Tablet startup Kno has created a single screen slate specifically for students in the hopes of making electronic textbooks a widespread reality on college campuses.

The tablet will have a 14.1-inch screen, making it the biggest slate to become available. It will have a touchscreen and a stylus to take notes on the device.

In June, Kno showed off a dual-screen device that would have two 14-inch LCD touchscreens that fold in like a book. The idea behind the device was to make textbook pages fit perfectly across the screen and flow from one digital page to another.

The company plans to ship both the single and dual-screen tablet by the end of the year. However, it hasn’t announced pricing for either of the products. The dual-screen version was expected to cost “under a $1000.”

“Our new tablet will be absolutely cheaper than the dual screen version,” Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno said at the TechCrunch Disrupt event where the device was introduced.

Detailed specs for the single screen tablet are not yet available. But it is expected to be powered by a Nvidia Tegra processor. The tablet will also have a stylus for handwriting recognition, a full browser and support Flash.

Apple’s iPad has led to renewed interest in tablets. Companies such as Dell and Samsung have released tablets in the last few months. But most of those devices are targeted at general consumers. Kno bills itself as the first tablet created exclusively for students.

But Kno’s competition is likely to come from iPad apps. For instance, a startup calledInkling has created a rich, beautifully designed iPad app that delivers textbooks to students. Inkling is working with publishers to offer coursework and texbooks in areas such as biology, management and engineering. Users can pay for just a chapter of a book or buy an entire textbook through the app.

The Kno tablet, says Rashid, will help students do more. The device lets users draw, take notes, create stickies on it, highlight text and collaborate with other students.

Kno, which was started in September last year and now has more than 90 employees, says it has written its own software that will “normalize” books in the PDF format. It will also add interactive elements to the books and allow students to make notes and annotate the margins of an electronic textbooks.

Similar to Amazon’s Kindle, Kno hopes to have its own bookstore.

The company has inked deals with four major textbook publishers, including McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley.

Check out more photos of the Kno:

Kno tablet has a touchscreen and a stylus

Students can take notes and highlight text on the tablet.

See Also:

• Dual-Screen Tablet Maker Hopes to Reinvent the Textbook
• Kno Releases Details and Video of Multi-Screen Reading Tablet …
• Toshiba Dual Screen PC Folds Like a Book
• Startup Gives Digital Textbooks the Ol’ College Try
• Startup Plans Pocketable Dual-Screen E-Reader

Photos: Kno