INTERFACE

experimenting with walking algorithms, which attempt to stimulate muscles in the right order to effect walking-like motion in the legs. Though this is incredibly exciting work, the control of motion resides within a computer algorithm over which the subject has only rudimentary control (on or off). It may be possible to use information detected from other parts of the body (ideally, this would eventually be directly from the brain) in order to control the manner in which the leg muscles are stimulated, giving control back to the subject. This may sound like science fiction, but the availability of cheap, portable, intelligent physiological sensing devices means that the work that needs to be done to establish the feasibility of this (i.e. much research into conscious physiological control) could proceed far more quickly.

7.4.3 Produce Application-specific JavaBean Assemblers for Different Domains

Sun’s Bean Box is a very simple, but generally useful example of the type of component construction tool that would be useful for non-programmers. In order to support fully the requirements of this group of users, application-specific construction environments are required. Take, as an example, the BioGraph software that runs on the ProComp device (both of which were described in Chapter 2). Biofeedback as a discipline supports a prototype as final interface

strategy to user interface development. That is, for a given biofeedback session with a particular patient a graphical interface containing multimedia representations of one or more physiological signals of interest is constructed by selecting those multimedia entities from a menu and setting the attributes via a dialogue. Through provision of a suitable bean builder, the toolkit components themselves could be the multimedia entities that the user selects from a menu and whose attributes are manipulated. This would preclude the requirement, demonstrated in Chapter 6, of having to explicitly package the components in a manner as to make them usable by a non- programmer who is comfortable with windowing applications.

In a similar manner, a specific builder could be provided that included only that functionality required by psychophysiologists interested in monitoring the physiological condition of a user for either health and safety reasons, or as part of the systems evaluation process. Here again, we are not talking about using the components to design a system that would be useful for monitoring

create an explicit windows-style application for a particular domain, and instead create application-specific bean builders to provide the actual interface to a running system which is custom built by the user for each new session of monitoring, or biofeedback training, and so on.

The use of standard JavaBean technology for the development of the components toolkit presented in this thesis means that the toolkit is immediately interoperable with other Java beans, including all of the elements of the SWING foundation classes for Java. As demonstrated through the description of the biofeedback application provided in Chapter 6, this means that traditional WIMP-style interactive systems can be built which have embedded physiological sensing capabilities. This implies that systems such as NASA’s Closed Biocybernetic System, which detect and dynamically respond to changing user state, could be constructed easily and cheaply at this time.

7.5 Implications of this Work

The research contained in this thesis shows that our technological and physiological knowledge has reached a point where it is realistic to envisage mobile integrated EPIC devices being commercially available within the next 3 to 5 years. Initially these may be functionally quite simple, involving the monitoring of one or two physiological parameters in individuals with known medical conditions. This information will be used to help them manage their conditions, perhaps warning them of the potential onset of particular episodes such as epileptic seizures or heart attacks. There is every possibility that in medical EPICS part the system will be physically implanted into the user.

Developments in computer cognition will thereafter enable the development of the types of intelligent and responsive systems introduced in Chapter 3. These will be the first truly personal

computers maintaining a physiological link to their users, watching and learning their responses to different situations, and perhaps using this knowledge in turn to affect the users’ environment. During the current epoch in human-computer interactivity the major research focus is on the notion of ubiquity. EPIC systems are inherently ubiquitous, ultimately blending into the

environment and blurring the lines between user and machine.

There is much work to be done in order to understand the implications of our bodies’ physiological responses to their environment. Sensing technologies such as those described in

Chapters 2 and 3 are allowing the scrutinization of this information and thus we have the opportunity to adjust our environments in order to lessen their detrimental emotional and physiological effects. This is a reflective process however, in that by applying these same technologies in order to examine how we respond to our environment, it may be possible to gain control over those responses. By these opposite yet complementary methods, a marriage between humans and suitably enabled computing devices may result in more calming, intuitive and supportive computer-based technologies.

Realisation of electrophysiologically-aware systems depends on more researchers taking on the challenges of electrophysiologically interactive computer systems development. Hopefully, the work contained in this thesis will serve to convince the reader that rudimentary EPICS are feasible now and that working to evolve these opens the door to many exciting possibilities for the future of human-machine interaction.