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Computer‐based systems for motor function rehabilitation have been around for more than a decade, with work done to help recovery of function in the lower limb (ankle, leg) as well as upper limb (hand and arm).

More recently there has been a trend towards the use of game‐based systems to deliver rehabilitation goals. The authors' interdisciplinary group has been working in the area of motor function recovery of the hand and arm (following stroke) for a number of years, using both high‐end virtual reality (VR) technology as well as low‐cost video capture technology.

Over this time it has become clear that there are many challenges in designing usable, effective game‐based systems for motor function rehabilitation.

This paper reflects on user experiences across the range of technologies developed by the group. It presents a summary review of the authors' systems and details the protocols and user evaluation instruments used. It then critically reflects on this work and reviews other recent advances in game usability and playability, leading to suggestions for how the user experience of games for rehabilitation may be improved in future work.

The paper's objective is to empirically study the effects of building refurbishment on the prices of the dwelling units in a contiguous housing estate in Hong Kong.

In a congested living environment like Hong Kong, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a view unobstructed by buildings. As such, the quality of views is dependent on the aesthetic quality of surrounding buildings. It is likely that poorly maintained buildings will impose negative visual effects on their immediate surroundings. Refurbishing these poor buildings should, therefore, reduce or even counter this negative externality. To study the positive externality brought about by building refurbishment, a hedonic price analysis was conducted on a set of panel data consisting of property transactions in a large housing estate located in Pokfulam. This estate was chosen because its adjoining buildings underwent refurbishment in 1998.

The results showed that the refurbishment increased significantly the prices of those properties which faced refurbished buildings, keeping other things constant. The increments, on average, amounted 6.6 per cent of the prices of the properties.

Building refurbishment can have various scopes and scales but this study did not consider how the characteristics of the building refurbishment affected the prices of neighbourhood properties.

Given the problems of aging buildings in most urban areas, the results presented significant practical implications for building refurbishment and urban renewal as a whole. Developers or property owners may be lured to invest in the refurbishment of adjacent dilapidated properties with a view to enhancing the values of their own properties.

Although previous studies analytically suggested that building refurbishment created positive externality, this study is the first attempt to explore this connection.

The Leap Motion represents a new generation of depth sensing cameras designed for close range tracking of hands and fingers, operating with minimal latency and high spatial precision (0.01 mm). The purpose of this paper is to develop virtual reality (VR) simulations of three well-known hand-based rehabilitation tasks using a commercial game engine and utilising a Leap camera as the primary mode of interaction. The authors present results from an initial evaluation by professional clinicians of these VR simulations for use in their hand and finger physical therapy practice.

A cross-disciplinary team of researchers collaborated with a local software company to create three dimension interactive simulations of three hand focused rehabilitation tasks: Cotton Balls, Stacking Blocks, and the Nine Hole Peg Test. These simulations were presented to a group of eight physiotherapists and occupational therapists (n=8) based in the Regional Acquired Brain Injury Unit, Belfast Health, and Social Care Trust for evaluation. After induction, the clinicians attempted the tasks presented and provided feedback by filling out a questionnaire.

Results from questionnaires (using a Likert scale 1-7, where 1 was the most favourable response) revealed a positive response to the simulations with an overall mean score across all questions equal to 2.59. Clinicians indicated that the system contained tasks that were easy to understand (mean score 1.88), and though it took several attempts to become competent, they predicted that they would improve with practice (mean score 2.25). In general, clinicians thought the prototypes provided a good illustration of the tasks required in their practice (mean score 2.38) and that patients would likely be motivated to use the system (mean score 2.38), especially young patients (mean score 1.63), and in the home environment (mean score 2.5).

Cameras offer an unobtrusive and low maintenance approach to tracking user motion in VR therapy in comparison to methods based on wearable technologies. This paper presents positive results from an evaluation of the new Leap Motion camera for input control of VR simulations or games. This mode of interaction provides a low cost, easy to use, high-resolution system for tracking fingers and hands, and has great potential for home-based physical therapies, particularly for young people.

The emergence of mobile health (mHealth) products has created a capability of monitoring and managing the health of patients with chronic diseases. These mHealth technologies would not be beneficial unless they are adopted and used by their target users. This study identifies key factors affecting the usage of mHealth apps based on user usage data collected from an mHealth app.

Using a dataset collected from an mHealth app named mPower, developed for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), this paper investigated the effects of disease diagnosis, disease progression and mHealth app difficulty level on app usage, while controlling for user information. App usage is measured by five different activity counts of the app.

The results across five measures of mHealth app usage vary slightly. On average, previous professional diagnosis and high user performance scores encourage user participation and engagement, while disease progression hinders app usage.

The findings potentially provide insights into better design and promotion of mHealth products and improve the capability of health management of patients with chronic diseases.

Studies on the mHealth app usage are critical but sparse because large-scale and reliable mHealth app usage data are limited. Unlike earlier works based solely on survey data, this research used a large user usage data collected from an mHealth app to study key factors affecting app usage. The methods presented in this study can serve as a pioneering work for the design and promotion of mHealth technologies.

A finite element method for the analysis of combined radiative and conductive heat transport in a finite axisymmetric configuration is presented. The appropriate integro‐differential governing equations for a grey and non‐scattering medium with grey and diffuse walls are developed and solved for several model problems. We consider axisymmetric, cylindrical geometries with top and bottom boundaries of arbitrary convex shape. The method is accurate for media of any optical thickness and is capable of handling a wide array of axisymmetric geometries and boundary conditions. Several techniques are presented to reduce computational overhead, such as employing a Swartz‐Wendroff approximation and cut‐off criteria for evaluating radiation integrals. The method is successfully tested against several cases from the literature and is applied to some additional example problems to demonstrate its versatility. Solution of a free‐boundary, combined‐mode heat transfer problem representing the solidification of a semitransparent material, the Bridgman growth of an yttrium aluminium garnet (YAG) crystal, demonstrates the utility of this method for analysis of a complex materials processing system. The method is suitable for application to other research areas, such as the study of glass processing and the design of combustion furnace systems.

Strokes are the most common cause of long-term disability of adults in developed countries. Continuous participation in rehabilitation can alleviate some of the consequences, and support recovery of stroke patients. However, physical rehabilitation requires commitment to tedious exercise routines over lengthy periods of time, which often cause patients to dropout of this form of therapy. In this context, game-based stroke rehabilitation has the potential to address two important barriers: accessibility of rehabilitation, and patient motivation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper provides a review of design efforts in human-computer interaction (HCI) and gaming research to support stroke rehabilitation.

Based on extensive review, this paper highlights challenges and opportunities in this area, and discusses an architecture guideline for a game-based stroke rehabilitation system.

This study was an original study.

Black fathers, and specifically fathers who identify as African American, represent a group of parents who are at once not well understood and pervasively stereotyped in negative ways. In this chapter, we describe the risks and resilience of Black fathers and their children, with a special focus on mental health and coping with stress. We emphasize a cultural practices approach that takes into account both the risks specific to Black fathers’ capacity to parent their children and a theoretical foundation for understanding the inherent strengths of Black men and their families. Finally, we address the need for early childhood educators to partner with Black fathers as a means to best support children and their families.

Design Studio Pedagogy - Horizons For the Future

The solution of radiative heat transfer problems in participating media is often obtained using the standard discrete ordinates method (SDOM). This method produces anomalies caused by ray effects if radiative boundary conditions have discontinuities or abrupt changes. Ray effects may be mitigated using the modified discrete ordinates method (MDOM), which is based on superposition of the solutions obtained by considering separately radiation from the walls and radiation from the medium. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of ray effects in combined conduction‐radiation problems and investigate the superiority of the MDOM over SDOM.

The MDOM has been used to calculate radiative heat transfer in irregular geometries using body‐fitted coordinates. Here, the blocked‐off region concept, originally developed in computational fluid dynamics, is used along with the finite volume method and SDOM or MDOM to solve combined conduction‐radiation heat transport problems in irregular geometries. Enclosures with an absorbing, emitting and isotropically or anisotropically scattering medium are analyzed.

The results confirm the capability of the MDOM to minimize the anomalies due to ray effects in combined heat transfer problems, and demonstrate that MDOM is more computationally efficient than SDOM.

The paper demonstrates the application of MDOM to combined conduction‐radiation heat transfer problems in irregular geometries using blocked‐off method.

The tendency to study autistic children has resulted in the lack of research about autistic seniors. This chapter begins by showing the results of two studies that have measured the volume of research about autistics based on age brackets. Two factors that have hampered research about autistic seniors are then presented. This chapter then concludes by highlighting seven topics where more research can be conducted about autistic seniors. These topics are research about their physical health, cognitive abilities, mental health, employment, transport, healthcare and specific issues relating to autistics residing in a nursing home/aged care facility.

The original contribution that this chapter makes to autism spectrum research is to examine the imbalance in research between autistic children and autistic seniors and to provide several suggestions where more research can be conducted about autistic seniors.