TY - JOUR A1 - Dumic, Emil A1 - Bjelopera, Anamaria A1 - Nüchter, Andreas T1 - Dynamic point cloud compression based on projections, surface reconstruction and video compression JF - Sensors N2 - In this paper we will present a new dynamic point cloud compression based on different projection types and bit depth, combined with the surface reconstruction algorithm and video compression for obtained geometry and texture maps. Texture maps have been compressed after creating Voronoi diagrams. Used video compression is specific for geometry (FFV1) and texture (H.265/HEVC). Decompressed point clouds are reconstructed using a Poisson surface reconstruction algorithm. Comparison with the original point clouds was performed using point-to-point and point-to-plane measures. Comprehensive experiments show better performance for some projection maps: cylindrical, Miller and Mercator projections. KW - 3DTK toolkit KW - map projections KW - point cloud compression KW - point-to-point measure KW - point-to-plane measure KW - Poisson surface reconstruction KW - octree Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-252231 SN - 1424-8220 VL - 22 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Madeira, Octavia A1 - Gromer, Daniel A1 - Latoschik, Marc Erich A1 - Pauli, Paul T1 - Effects of Acrophobic Fear and Trait Anxiety on Human Behavior in a Virtual Elevated Plus-Maze JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - The Elevated Plus-Maze (EPM) is a well-established apparatus to measure anxiety in rodents, i.e., animals exhibiting an increased relative time spent in the closed vs. the open arms are considered anxious. To examine whether such anxiety-modulated behaviors are conserved in humans, we re-translated this paradigm to a human setting using virtual reality in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) system. In two studies, we examined whether the EPM exploration behavior of humans is modulated by their trait anxiety and also assessed the individuals’ levels of acrophobia (fear of height), claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces), sensation seeking, and the reported anxiety when on the maze. First, we constructed an exact virtual copy of the animal EPM adjusted to human proportions. In analogy to animal EPM studies, participants (N = 30) freely explored the EPM for 5 min. In the second study (N = 61), we redesigned the EPM to make it more human-adapted and to differentiate influences of trait anxiety and acrophobia by introducing various floor textures and lower walls of closed arms to the height of standard handrails. In the first experiment, hierarchical regression analyses of exploration behavior revealed the expected association between open arm avoidance and Trait Anxiety, an even stronger association with acrophobic fear. In the second study, results revealed that acrophobia was associated with avoidance of open arms with mesh-floor texture, whereas for trait anxiety, claustrophobia, and sensation seeking, no effect was detected. Also, subjects’ fear rating was moderated by all psychometrics but trait anxiety. In sum, both studies consistently indicate that humans show no general open arm avoidance analogous to rodents and that human EPM behavior is modulated strongest by acrophobic fear, whereas trait anxiety plays a subordinate role. Thus, we conclude that the criteria for cross-species validity are met insufficiently in this case. Despite the exploratory nature, our studies provide in-depth insights into human exploration behavior on the virtual EPM. KW - elevated plus-maze KW - EPM KW - anxiety KW - virtual reality KW - translational neuroscience KW - acrophobia KW - trait anxiety Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-258709 VL - 2 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wienrich, Carolin A1 - Döllinger, Nina A1 - Hein, Rebecca T1 - Behavioral Framework of Immersive Technologies (BehaveFIT): How and why virtual reality can support behavioral change processes JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - The design and evaluation of assisting technologies to support behavior change processes have become an essential topic within the field of human-computer interaction research in general and the field of immersive intervention technologies in particular. The mechanisms and success of behavior change techniques and interventions are broadly investigated in the field of psychology. However, it is not always easy to adapt these psychological findings to the context of immersive technologies. The lack of theoretical foundation also leads to a lack of explanation as to why and how immersive interventions support behavior change processes. The Behavioral Framework for immersive Technologies (BehaveFIT) addresses this lack by 1) presenting an intelligible categorization and condensation of psychological barriers and immersive features, by 2) suggesting a mapping that shows why and how immersive technologies can help to overcome barriers and finally by 3) proposing a generic prediction path that enables a structured, theory-based approach to the development and evaluation of immersive interventions. These three steps explain how BehaveFIT can be used, and include guiding questions for each step. Further, two use cases illustrate the usage of BehaveFIT. Thus, the present paper contributes to guidance for immersive intervention design and evaluation, showing that immersive interventions support behavior change processes and explain and predict 'why' and 'how' immersive interventions can bridge the intention-behavior-gap. KW - immersive technologies KW - behavior change KW - intervention design KW - intervention evaluation KW - framework KW - virtual reality KW - intention-behavior-gap KW - human-computer interaction Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-258796 VL - 2 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kraft, Robin A1 - Reichert, Manfred A1 - Pryss, Rüdiger T1 - Towards the interpretation of sound measurements from smartphones collected with mobile crowdsensing in the healthcare domain: an experiment with Android devices JF - Sensors N2 - The ubiquity of mobile devices fosters the combined use of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) and mobile crowdsensing (MCS) in the field of healthcare. This combination not only allows researchers to collect ecologically valid data, but also to use smartphone sensors to capture the context in which these data are collected. The TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) platform uses EMA to track users' individual subjective tinnitus perception and MCS to capture an objective environmental sound level while the EMA questionnaire is filled in. However, the sound level data cannot be used directly among the different smartphones used by TYT users, since uncalibrated raw values are stored. This work describes an approach towards making these values comparable. In the described setting, the evaluation of sensor measurements from different smartphone users becomes increasingly prevalent. Therefore, the shown approach can be also considered as a more general solution as it not only shows how it helped to interpret TYT sound level data, but may also stimulate other researchers, especially those who need to interpret sensor data in a similar setting. Altogether, the approach will show that measuring sound levels with mobile devices is possible in healthcare scenarios, but there are many challenges to ensuring that the measured values are interpretable. KW - mHealth KW - crowdsensing KW - tinnitus KW - noise measurement KW - environmental sound Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-252246 SN - 1424-8220 VL - 22 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ankenbrand, Markus J. A1 - Shainberg, Liliia A1 - Hock, Michael A1 - Lohr, David A1 - Schreiber, Laura M. T1 - Sensitivity analysis for interpretation of machine learning based segmentation models in cardiac MRI JF - BMC Medical Imaging N2 - Background Image segmentation is a common task in medical imaging e.g., for volumetry analysis in cardiac MRI. Artificial neural networks are used to automate this task with performance similar to manual operators. However, this performance is only achieved in the narrow tasks networks are trained on. Performance drops dramatically when data characteristics differ from the training set properties. Moreover, neural networks are commonly considered black boxes, because it is hard to understand how they make decisions and why they fail. Therefore, it is also hard to predict whether they will generalize and work well with new data. Here we present a generic method for segmentation model interpretation. Sensitivity analysis is an approach where model input is modified in a controlled manner and the effect of these modifications on the model output is evaluated. This method yields insights into the sensitivity of the model to these alterations and therefore to the importance of certain features on segmentation performance. Results We present an open-source Python library (misas), that facilitates the use of sensitivity analysis with arbitrary data and models. We show that this method is a suitable approach to answer practical questions regarding use and functionality of segmentation models. We demonstrate this in two case studies on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. The first case study explores the suitability of a published network for use on a public dataset the network has not been trained on. The second case study demonstrates how sensitivity analysis can be used to evaluate the robustness of a newly trained model. Conclusions Sensitivity analysis is a useful tool for deep learning developers as well as users such as clinicians. It extends their toolbox, enabling and improving interpretability of segmentation models. Enhancing our understanding of neural networks through sensitivity analysis also assists in decision making. Although demonstrated only on cardiac magnetic resonance images this approach and software are much more broadly applicable. KW - deep learning KW - neural networks KW - cardiac magnetic resonance KW - sensitivity analysis KW - transformations KW - augmentation KW - segmentation Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-259169 VL - 21 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steinhaeusser, Sophia C. A1 - Oberdörfer, Sebastian A1 - von Mammen, Sebastian A1 - Latoschik, Marc Erich A1 - Lugrin, Birgit T1 - Joyful adventures and frightening places – designing emotion-inducing virtual environments JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - Virtual environments (VEs) can evoke and support emotions, as experienced when playing emotionally arousing games. We theoretically approach the design of fear and joy evoking VEs based on a literature review of empirical studies on virtual and real environments as well as video games’ reviews and content analyses. We define the design space and identify central design elements that evoke specific positive and negative emotions. Based on that, we derive and present guidelines for emotion-inducing VE design with respect to design themes, colors and textures, and lighting configurations. To validate our guidelines in two user studies, we 1) expose participants to 360° videos of VEs designed following the individual guidelines and 2) immerse them in a neutral, positive and negative emotion-inducing VEs combining all respective guidelines in Virtual Reality. The results support our theoretically derived guidelines by revealing significant differences in terms of fear and joy induction. KW - virtual reality KW - virtual environments KW - immersion KW - emotions KW - design Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-284831 SN - 2673-4192 VL - 3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Prantl, Thomas A1 - Zeck, Timo A1 - Bauer, Andre A1 - Ten, Peter A1 - Prantl, Dominik A1 - Yahya, Ala Eddine Ben A1 - Ifflaender, Lukas A1 - Dmitrienko, Alexandra A1 - Krupitzer, Christian A1 - Kounev, Samuel T1 - A Survey on Secure Group Communication Schemes With Focus on IoT Communication JF - IEEE Access N2 - A key feature for Internet of Things (IoT) is to control what content is available to each user. To handle this access management, encryption schemes can be used. Due to the diverse usage of encryption schemes, there are various realizations of 1-to-1, 1-to-n, and n-to-n schemes in the literature. This multitude of encryption methods with a wide variety of properties presents developers with the challenge of selecting the optimal method for a particular use case, which is further complicated by the fact that there is no overview of existing encryption schemes. To fill this gap, we envision a cryptography encyclopedia providing such an overview of existing encryption schemes. In this survey paper, we take a first step towards such an encyclopedia by creating a sub-encyclopedia for secure group communication (SGC) schemes, which belong to the n-to-n category. We extensively surveyed the state-of-the-art and classified 47 different schemes. More precisely, we provide (i) a comprehensive overview of the relevant security features, (ii) a set of relevant performance metrics, (iii) a classification for secure group communication schemes, and (iv) workflow descriptions of the 47 schemes. Moreover, we perform a detailed performance and security evaluation of the 47 secure group communication schemes. Based on this evaluation, we create a guideline for the selection of secure group communication schemes. KW - Internet of Things KW - encryption KW - secure group communication Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-300257 VL - 10 SP - 99944 EP - 99962 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Oberdörfer, Sebastian A1 - Heidrich, David A1 - Birnstiel, Sandra A1 - Latoschik, Marc Erich T1 - Enchanted by Your Surrounding? Measuring the Effects of Immersion and Design of Virtual Environments on Decision-Making JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - Impaired decision-making leads to the inability to distinguish between advantageous and disadvantageous choices. The impairment of a person’s decision-making is a common goal of gambling games. Given the recent trend of gambling using immersive Virtual Reality it is crucial to investigate the effects of both immersion and the virtual environment (VE) on decision-making. In a novel user study, we measured decision-making using three virtual versions of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). The versions differed with regard to the degree of immersion and design of the virtual environment. While emotions affect decision-making, we further measured the positive and negative affect of participants. A higher visual angle on a stimulus leads to an increased emotional response. Thus, we kept the visual angle on the Iowa Gambling Task the same between our conditions. Our results revealed no significant impact of immersion or the VE on the IGT. We further found no significant difference between the conditions with regard to positive and negative affect. This suggests that neither the medium used nor the design of the VE causes an impairment of decision-making. However, in combination with a recent study, we provide first evidence that a higher visual angle on the IGT leads to an effect of impairment. KW - virtual reality KW - virtual environments KW - immersion KW - decision-making KW - iowa gambling task Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-260101 VL - 2 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Loh, Frank A1 - Wamser, Florian A1 - Poignée, Fabian A1 - Geißler, Stefan A1 - Hoßfeld, Tobias T1 - YouTube Dataset on Mobile Streaming for Internet Traffic Modeling and Streaming Analysis JF - Scientific Data N2 - Around 4.9 billion Internet users worldwide watch billions of hours of online video every day. As a result, streaming is by far the predominant type of traffic in communication networks. According to Google statistics, three out of five video views come from mobile devices. Thus, in view of the continuous technological advances in end devices and increasing mobile use, datasets for mobile streaming are indispensable in research but only sparsely dealt with in literature so far. With this public dataset, we provide 1,081 hours of time-synchronous video measurements at network, transport, and application layer with the native YouTube streaming client on mobile devices. The dataset includes 80 network scenarios with 171 different individual bandwidth settings measured in 5,181 runs with limited bandwidth, 1,939 runs with emulated 3 G/4 G traces, and 4,022 runs with pre-defined bandwidth changes. This corresponds to 332 GB video payload. We present the most relevant quality indicators for scientific use, i.e., initial playback delay, streaming video quality, adaptive video quality changes, video rebuffering events, and streaming phases. KW - internet traffic KW - mobile streaming KW - YouTube Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-300240 VL - 9 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Breves, Priska A1 - Dodel, Nicola T1 - The influence of cybersickness and the media devices’ mobility on the persuasive effects of 360° commercials JF - Multimedia Tools and Applications N2 - With the rise of immersive media, advertisers have started to use 360° commercials to engage and persuade consumers. Two experiments were conducted to address research gaps and to validate the positive impact of 360° commercials in realistic settings. The first study (N = 62) compared the effects of 360° commercials using either a mobile cardboard head-mounted display (HMD) or a laptop. This experiment was conducted in the participants’ living rooms and incorporated individual feelings of cybersickness as a moderator. The participants who experienced the 360° commercial with the HMD reported higher spatial presence and product evaluation, but their purchase intentions were only increased when their reported cybersickness was low. The second experiment (N = 197) was conducted online and analyzed the impact of 360° commercials that were experienced with mobile (smartphone/tablet) or static (laptop/desktop) devices instead of HMDs. The positive effects of omnidirectional videos were stronger when participants used mobile devices. KW - virtual reality KW - immersive advertising KW - spatial presence KW - cybersickness KW - advertising effectiveness Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-269194 SN - 1573-7721 VL - 80 IS - 18 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steininger, Michael A1 - Kobs, Konstantin A1 - Davidson, Padraig A1 - Krause, Anna A1 - Hotho, Andreas T1 - Density-based weighting for imbalanced regression JF - Machine Learning N2 - In many real world settings, imbalanced data impedes model performance of learning algorithms, like neural networks, mostly for rare cases. This is especially problematic for tasks focusing on these rare occurrences. For example, when estimating precipitation, extreme rainfall events are scarce but important considering their potential consequences. While there are numerous well studied solutions for classification settings, most of them cannot be applied to regression easily. Of the few solutions for regression tasks, barely any have explored cost-sensitive learning which is known to have advantages compared to sampling-based methods in classification tasks. In this work, we propose a sample weighting approach for imbalanced regression datasets called DenseWeight and a cost-sensitive learning approach for neural network regression with imbalanced data called DenseLoss based on our weighting scheme. DenseWeight weights data points according to their target value rarities through kernel density estimation (KDE). DenseLoss adjusts each data point’s influence on the loss according to DenseWeight, giving rare data points more influence on model training compared to common data points. We show on multiple differently distributed datasets that DenseLoss significantly improves model performance for rare data points through its density-based weighting scheme. Additionally, we compare DenseLoss to the state-of-the-art method SMOGN, finding that our method mostly yields better performance. Our approach provides more control over model training as it enables us to actively decide on the trade-off between focusing on common or rare cases through a single hyperparameter, allowing the training of better models for rare data points. KW - supervised learning KW - imbalanced regression KW - cost-sensitive learning KW - sample weighting KW - Kerneldensity estimation Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-269177 SN - 1573-0565 VL - 110 IS - 8 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Caliskan, Aylin A1 - Crouch, Samantha A. W. A1 - Giddins, Sara A1 - Dandekar, Thomas A1 - Dangwal, Seema T1 - Progeria and aging — Omics based comparative analysis JF - Biomedicines N2 - Since ancient times aging has also been regarded as a disease, and humankind has always strived to extend the natural lifespan. Analyzing the genes involved in aging and disease allows for finding important indicators and biological markers for pathologies and possible therapeutic targets. An example of the use of omics technologies is the research regarding aging and the rare and fatal premature aging syndrome progeria (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, HGPS). In our study, we focused on the in silico analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in progeria and aging, using a publicly available RNA-Seq dataset (GEO dataset GSE113957) and a variety of bioinformatics tools. Despite the GSE113957 RNA-Seq dataset being well-known and frequently analyzed, the RNA-Seq data shared by Fleischer et al. is far from exhausted and reusing and repurposing the data still reveals new insights. By analyzing the literature citing the use of the dataset and subsequently conducting a comparative analysis comparing the RNA-Seq data analyses of different subsets of the dataset (healthy children, nonagenarians and progeria patients), we identified several genes involved in both natural aging and progeria (KRT8, KRT18, ACKR4, CCL2, UCP2, ADAMTS15, ACTN4P1, WNT16, IGFBP2). Further analyzing these genes and the pathways involved indicated their possible roles in aging, suggesting the need for further in vitro and in vivo research. In this paper, we (1) compare “normal aging” (nonagenarians vs. healthy children) and progeria (HGPS patients vs. healthy children), (2) enlist genes possibly involved in both the natural aging process and progeria, including the first mention of IGFBP2 in progeria, (3) predict miRNAs and interactomes for WNT16 (hsa-mir-181a-5p), UCP2 (hsa-mir-26a-5p and hsa-mir-124-3p), and IGFBP2 (hsa-mir-124-3p, hsa-mir-126-3p, and hsa-mir-27b-3p), (4) demonstrate the compatibility of well-established R packages for RNA-Seq analysis for researchers interested but not yet familiar with this kind of analysis, and (5) present comparative proteomics analyses to show an association between our RNA-Seq data analyses and corresponding changes in protein expression. KW - progeria KW - aging KW - omics KW - RNA sequencing KW - bioinformatics KW - sun exposure KW - HGPS KW - IGFBP2 KW - ACKR4 KW - WNT Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-289868 SN - 2227-9059 VL - 10 IS - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Latoschik, Marc Erich A1 - Wienrich, Carolin T1 - Congruence and plausibility, not presence: pivotal conditions for XR experiences and effects, a novel approach JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - Presence is often considered the most important quale describing the subjective feeling of being in a computer-generated and/or computer-mediated virtual environment. The identification and separation of orthogonal presence components, i.e., the place illusion and the plausibility illusion, has been an accepted theoretical model describing Virtual Reality (VR) experiences for some time. This perspective article challenges this presence-oriented VR theory. First, we argue that a place illusion cannot be the major construct to describe the much wider scope of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, MR: or XR for short). Second, we argue that there is no plausibility illusion but merely plausibility, and we derive the place illusion caused by the congruent and plausible generation of spatial cues and similarly for all the current model’s so-defined illusions. Finally, we propose congruence and plausibility to become the central essential conditions in a novel theoretical model describing XR experiences and effects. KW - XR KW - experience KW - presence KW - congruence KW - plausibility KW - coherence KW - theory KW - prediction Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-284787 SN - 2673-4192 VL - 3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Landeck, Maximilian A1 - Alvarez Igarzábal, Federico A1 - Unruh, Fabian A1 - Habenicht, Hannah A1 - Khoshnoud, Shiva A1 - Wittmann, Marc A1 - Lugrin, Jean-Luc A1 - Latoschik, Marc Erich T1 - Journey through a virtual tunnel: Simulated motion and its effects on the experience of time JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - This paper examines the relationship between time and motion perception in virtual environments. Previous work has shown that the perception of motion can affect the perception of time. We developed a virtual environment that simulates motion in a tunnel and measured its effects on the estimation of the duration of time, the speed at which perceived time passes, and the illusion of self-motion, also known as vection. When large areas of the visual field move in the same direction, vection can occur; observers often perceive this as self-motion rather than motion of the environment. To generate different levels of vection and investigate its effects on time perception, we developed an abstract procedural tunnel generator. The generator can simulate different speeds and densities of tunnel sections (visibly distinguishable sections that form the virtual tunnel), as well as the degree of embodiment of the user avatar (with or without virtual hands). We exposed participants to various tunnel simulations with different durations, speeds, and densities in a remote desktop and a virtual reality (VR) laboratory study. Time passed subjectively faster under high-speed and high-density conditions in both studies. The experience of self-motion was also stronger under high-speed and high-density conditions. Both studies revealed a significant correlation between the perceived passage of time and perceived self-motion. Subjects in the virtual reality study reported a stronger self-motion experience, a faster perceived passage of time, and shorter time estimates than subjects in the desktop study. Our results suggest that a virtual tunnel simulation can manipulate time perception in virtual reality. We will explore these results for the development of virtual reality applications for therapeutic approaches in our future work. This could be particularly useful in treating disorders like depression, autism, and schizophrenia, which are known to be associated with distortions in time perception. For example, the tunnel could be therapeutically applied by resetting patients’ time perceptions by exposing them to the tunnel under different conditions, such as increasing or decreasing perceived time. KW - passage of time KW - illusion of self-motion KW - vection KW - virtual tunnel KW - therapeutic application KW - virtual reality KW - extended reality (XR) Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-301519 SN - 2673-4192 VL - 3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Holfelder, Marc A1 - Mulansky, Lena A1 - Schlee, Winfried A1 - Baumeister, Harald A1 - Schobel, Johannes A1 - Greger, Helmut A1 - Hoff, Andreas A1 - Pryss, Rüdiger T1 - Medical device regulation efforts for mHealth apps during the COVID-19 pandemic — an experience report of Corona Check and Corona Health JF - J — Multidisciplinary Scientific Journal N2 - Within the healthcare environment, mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) are becoming more and more important. The number of new mHealth apps has risen steadily in the last years. Especially the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an enormous amount of app releases. In most countries, mHealth applications have to be compliant with several regulatory aspects to be declared a “medical app”. However, the latest applicable medical device regulation (MDR) does not provide more details on the requirements for mHealth applications. When developing a medical app, it is essential that all contributors in an interdisciplinary team — especially software engineers — are aware of the specific regulatory requirements beforehand. The development process, however, should not be stalled due to integration of the MDR. Therefore, a developing framework that includes these aspects is required to facilitate a reliable and quick development process. The paper at hand introduces the creation of such a framework on the basis of the Corona Health and Corona Check apps. The relevant regulatory guidelines are listed and summarized as a guidance for medical app developments during the pandemic and beyond. In particular, the important stages and challenges faced that emerged during the entire development process are highlighted. KW - mHealth KW - mobile application KW - MDR KW - medical device regulation KW - medical device software Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-285434 SN - 2571-8800 VL - 4 IS - 2 SP - 206 EP - 222 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Obremski, David A1 - Friedrich, Paula A1 - Haak, Nora A1 - Schaper, Philipp A1 - Lugrin, Birgit T1 - The impact of mixed-cultural speech on the stereotypical perception of a virtual robot JF - Frontiers in Robotics and AI N2 - Despite the fact that mixed-cultural backgrounds become of increasing importance in our daily life, the representation of multiple cultural backgrounds in one entity is still rare in socially interactive agents (SIAs). This paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it provides a survey of research on mixed-cultured SIAs. Second, it presents a study investigating how mixed-cultural speech (in this case, non-native accent) influences how a virtual robot is perceived in terms of personality, warmth, competence and credibility. Participants with English or German respectively as their first language watched a video of a virtual robot speaking in either standard English or German-accented English. It was expected that the German-accented speech would be rated more positively by native German participants as well as elicit the German stereotypes credibility and conscientiousness for both German and English participants. Contrary to the expectations, German participants rated the virtual robot lower in terms of competence and credibility when it spoke with a German accent, whereas English participants perceived the virtual robot with a German accent as more credible compared to the version without an accent. Both the native English and native German listeners classified the virtual robot with a German accent as significantly more neurotic than the virtual robot speaking standard English. This work shows that by solely implementing a non-native accent in a virtual robot, stereotypes are partly transferred. It also shows that the implementation of a non-native accent leads to differences in the perception of the virtual robot. KW - non-native accent KW - social robotics KW - intelligent virtual agents KW - stereotypes KW - mixed-cultural KW - culturally aware KW - socially interactive agents Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-293531 SN - 2296-9144 VL - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tsoulias, Nikos A1 - Jörissen, Sven A1 - Nüchter, Andreas T1 - An approach for monitoring temperature on fruit surface by means of thermal point cloud JF - MethodsX N2 - Heat and excessive solar radiation can produce abiotic stresses during apple maturation, resulting fruit quality. Therefore, the monitoring of temperature on fruit surface (FST) over the growing period can allow to identify thresholds, above of which several physiological disorders such as sunburn may occur in apple. The current approaches neglect spatial variation of FST and have reduced repeatability, resulting in unreliable predictions. In this study, LiDAR laser scanning and thermal imaging were employed to detect the temperature on fruit surface by means of 3D point cloud. A process for calibrating the two sensors based on an active board target and producing a 3D thermal point cloud was suggested. After calibration, the sensor system was utilised to scan the fruit trees, while temperature values assigned in the corresponding 3D point cloud were based on the extrinsic calibration. Whereas a fruit detection algorithm was performed to segment the FST from each apple. • The approach allows the calibration of LiDAR laser scanner with thermal camera in order to produce a 3D thermal point cloud. • The method can be applied in apple trees for segmenting FST in 3D. Whereas the approach can be utilised to predict several physiological disorders including sunburn on fruit surface. KW - point cloud KW - thermal point cloud KW - fruit temperature KW - sunburn KW - food quality KW - precision horticulture Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-300270 SN - 2215-0161 VL - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Seufert, Anika A1 - Poignée, Fabian A1 - Hoßfeld, Tobias A1 - Seufert, Michael T1 - Pandemic in the digital age: analyzing WhatsApp communication behavior before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown JF - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications N2 - The strict restrictions introduced by the COVID-19 lockdowns, which started from March 2020, changed people’s daily lives and habits on many different levels. In this work, we investigate the impact of the lockdown on the communication behavior in the mobile instant messaging application WhatsApp. Our evaluations are based on a large dataset of 2577 private chat histories with 25,378,093 messages from 51,973 users. The analysis of the one-to-one and group conversations confirms that the lockdown severely altered the communication in WhatsApp chats compared to pre-pandemic time ranges. In particular, we observe short-term effects, which caused an increased message frequency in the first lockdown months and a shifted communication activity during the day in March and April 2020. Moreover, we also see long-term effects of the ongoing pandemic situation until February 2021, which indicate a change of communication behavior towards more regular messaging, as well as a persisting change in activity during the day. The results of our work show that even anonymized chat histories can tell us a lot about people’s behavior and especially behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and thus are of great relevance for behavioral researchers. Furthermore, looking at the pandemic from an Internet provider perspective, these insights can be used during the next pandemic, or if the current COVID-19 situation worsens, to adapt communication networks to the changed usage behavior early on and thus avoid network congestion. KW - cultural and media studies KW - information systems and information technology KW - science, technology and society Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-300261 VL - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hentschel, Simon A1 - Kobs, Konstantin A1 - Hotho, Andreas T1 - CLIP knows image aesthetics JF - Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence N2 - Most Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) methods use a pretrained ImageNet classification model as a base to fine-tune. We hypothesize that content classification is not an optimal pretraining task for IAA, since the task discourages the extraction of features that are useful for IAA, e.g., composition, lighting, or style. On the other hand, we argue that the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model is a better base for IAA models, since it has been trained using natural language supervision. Due to the rich nature of language, CLIP needs to learn a broad range of image features that correlate with sentences describing the image content, composition, environments, and even subjective feelings about the image. While it has been shown that CLIP extracts features useful for content classification tasks, its suitability for tasks that require the extraction of style-based features like IAA has not yet been shown. We test our hypothesis by conducting a three-step study, investigating the usefulness of features extracted by CLIP compared to features obtained from the last layer of a comparable ImageNet classification model. In each step, we get more computationally expensive. First, we engineer natural language prompts that let CLIP assess an image's aesthetic without adjusting any weights in the model. To overcome the challenge that CLIP's prompting only is applicable to classification tasks, we propose a simple but effective strategy to convert multiple prompts to a continuous scalar as required when predicting an image's mean aesthetic score. Second, we train a linear regression on the AVA dataset using image features obtained by CLIP's image encoder. The resulting model outperforms a linear regression trained on features from an ImageNet classification model. It also shows competitive performance with fully fine-tuned networks based on ImageNet, while only training a single layer. Finally, by fine-tuning CLIP's image encoder on the AVA dataset, we show that CLIP only needs a fraction of training epochs to converge, while also performing better than a fine-tuned ImageNet model. Overall, our experiments suggest that CLIP is better suited as a base model for IAA methods than ImageNet pretrained networks. KW - Image Aesthetic Assessment KW - CLIP KW - language-image pre-training KW - text supervision KW - prompt engineering KW - AVA Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-297150 SN - 2624-8212 VL - 5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gupta, Shishir K. A1 - Minocha, Rashmi A1 - Thapa, Prithivi Jung A1 - Srivastava, Mugdha A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - Role of the pangolin in origin of SARS-CoV-2: an evolutionary perspective JF - International Journal of Molecular Sciences N2 - After the recent emergence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, unanswered questions remain related to its evolutionary history, path of transmission or divergence and role of recombination. There is emerging evidence on amino acid substitutions occurring in key residues of the receptor-binding domain of the spike glycoprotein in coronavirus isolates from bat and pangolins. In this article, we summarize our current knowledge on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. We also analyze the host ACE2-interacting residues of the receptor-binding domain of spike glycoprotein in SARS-CoV-2 isolates from bats, and compare it to pangolin SARS-CoV-2 isolates collected from Guangdong province (GD Pangolin-CoV) and Guangxi autonomous regions (GX Pangolin-CoV) of South China. Based on our comparative analysis, we support the view that the Guangdong Pangolins are the intermediate hosts that adapted the SARS-CoV-2 and represented a significant evolutionary link in the path of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus. We also discuss the role of intermediate hosts in the origin of Omicron. KW - COVID-19 KW - SARS-CoV-2 KW - origin KW - evolution KW - intermediate host KW - pangolin KW - mutation KW - recombination KW - adaptation KW - transmission KW - comparative sequence analysis Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-285995 SN - 1422-0067 VL - 23 IS - 16 ER -