Human–Machine Interaction

Dear Colleagues,Since the computer advent, to constantly improve the communication between human operators and automated systems, several studies and research in the domain of Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) have been conducted. The interest in HMI, that is also known as Man Machine Interaction/Interface, has gown in several fields, from medicine to entertainment, but also in education and in the industrial domain as well, seeing the opportunity to impact the performance of all the stakeholders involved in the manufacturing process. Moreover, HMI is boosting the transition to Industry 4.0, fostering the spread of new technologies to increase efficiency and product quality.

The human component of HMI requires the engagement of behavioral sciences to study users’ behavior and to identify their peculiarities in terms of habits and ease of interaction with a intelligent machines. In this sense, HMI falls within the user-centered design (UCD) theory, according to which a full understanding of tasks, environments and users is essential in the product design and development. These processes should focus on users and their feedback should be constantly assessed for subsequent refinements to achieve the final result. For instance, monitoring users’ emotional response through the adoption of different methodologies, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and face expression recognition (FER), turned out to be very effective to retrieve a truthful evaluation of the proposed solution. On the other hand, the technological component of HMI can benefit of the most recent development in the field of RGB-D cameras and smartphone devices, which have allowed the possibility of creating a tangible interaction between the real and the virtual domain that could be perceived as a “window on the real world”.

All these possibilities can be further strengthened by extended reality (XR). Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) flexibility could support their synergic usage with other technologies representing an “integration platform” for technology empowerment, for instance, in machine and deep learning (AI), which particularly in the computer vision domain may be able to provide very disruptive solutions, e.g., in the medical domain for disease diagnosis and for precise surgery assistance. The introduction of headset and smart glasses has changed the way of interacting with the environment, opening doors to mutual influence the psychical and the virtual world.

The aim of this Topic is to advance both scholarly, understanding of how to improve HMI theoretically, empirically, methodologically, and practically, integrating innovative technologies and new methodologies to impact the society through the design of cutting-edge frameworks according to the principles of UCD.

Prof. Dr. Enrico Vezzetti
Dr. Andrea Luigi Guerra
Dr. Gabriele Baronio
Dr. Domenico Speranza
Dr. Luca Ulrich

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