Luciano Gamberini

• PhD
• Managing Director at University of Padua

The global rise of coworking spaces (CSs) underscores their potential to foster sustainable urban development by promoting collaboration, community engagement, and strengthening local communities. However, little is known about how CSs in smaller urban or suburban settings are managed. The COVID-19 pandemic added uncertainty to this sector, placing...

In the evolving landscape of retail environments after the Pandemic, the present study investigates the acceptance and safety perceptions of anti-COVID-19 Internet of Things (IoT) technologies among workers and customers within a retail setting. As businesses navigate the complexities of ensuring public health and maintaining economic viability, in...

Industry 5.0 marks a significant transition in the industrial sector, integrating human centricity with technological advancements. It redefines work dynamics, emphasizing social sustainability and sustainable development in shaping career paths. The necessity for equitable workforce training, prioritizing worker well-being alongside technological...

Detecting behavior and cognitive states of operators collaborating with industrial robots in the field is among the primary objectives and challenges in current human-robot collaboration research. To achieve this goal, it is first essential to introduce dynamic elements of the industrial settings into the lab to examine how to effectively detect, r...

Purpose Following the imperative for human-centric digital innovation brought by the paradigm of Industry 5.0, the article aims to integrate the dispersed and multi-disciplinary literature on individual risks for workers to define, explain and predict individual risks related to Industry 4.0 technologies. Design/methodology/approach The paper foll...

The increasingly aging workforce is bringing particular attention to senior individuals in production sectors. While the interest in Virtual Reality (VR) applications for industrial robotics grows, the question of whether and how senior workers can withstand VR-based repetitive tasks arises. We here aimed to answer such questions by systematically...

In 2021, a significant update was made to the household appliance classification system in Europe with the introduction of a new energy-efficient label (EE). This update is a step towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 7 of the United Nations, which focuses on sustainable energy. The EE label is an effective tool for reducing overall en...

Floods are an increasingly frequent phenomenon with catastrophic consequences for citizens and cities. Virtual reality (VR) has become a valuable training tool, simulating inaccessible or hazardous situations like emergencies and risk environments. This study evaluates a designed virtual training simulating a riverbank flood scenario. Beyond impart...

For about ten years now, we have been witnessing the constant, massive and exponential transformation of work in a technological key, in parallel with the academic race to understand the individual, organizational, social and institutional consequences of the same. The psychology of work and organizations does not go beyond all this: over the years...

Online shopping has become a widespread habit for millions of users all over the world. E-stores are very convenient for both customers and retailers, because they are accessible 24/7 from anywhere in the world. However, they also convey relevant drawbacks for both parties: customers can only explore endless grids of flat items, and retailers are l...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on the world, particularly the retail industry, which had to adapt to the new reality of exclusive remote shopping, determined by the lockdown condition of its customers. The impossibility of accessing physical stores has strengthened the need to improve the online journey. Over the past few years, th...

The condition of forced isolation due to the Covid-19 Pandemic clearly highlighted the importance of social support. Indeed, the absence of interaction with families and friends in the presence can lead to feelings of loneliness, abandonment, psychological discomfort, anxiety, and depression, especially for the elderly. On this premise, adopting a...

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining ground in the robotics and teleoperation industry, opening new prospects as a novel computerized methodology to make humans interact with robots. In contrast with more conventional button-based teleoperations, VR allows users to use their physical movements to drive robotic systems in the virtual environment. The lat...

Food choices are intimately related to individual health. Therefore, the food we buy should be carefully chosen. However, grocery shopping is typically done in noisy environments, and food products usually present cluttered labels with dense texts that make it hard to properly evaluate relevant nutritional data. Augmented reality (AR) allows a shop...

Physical inactivity is a plague for public health, especially in Western Countries. Among the countermeasures, mobile applications promoting physical activity seem particularly promising, thanks to the spread and adoption of mobile devices. However, the dropout rates of users are high, thereby calling for strategies to increase retention rates. Mor...

Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR, VR), collectively known as Extended Reality (XR), are increasingly gaining traction thanks to their technical advancement and the need for remote connections, recently accentuated by the pandemic. Remote surgery, telerobotics, and virtual offices are only some examples of their successes. As users interact with AR...

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining ground in the robotics and teleoperation industry, opening new prospects as a novel computerized methodology to make humans interact with robots. In contrast with more conventional button-based teleoperations, VR allows users to use their physical movements to drive robotic systems in the virtual environment. The lat...

Among the plethora of instruments present in healthcare environments, the hospital bed is undoubtedly one of the most important for patients and caregivers. However, their design usually follows a top-down approach without considering end-users opinions and desires. Exploiting Human-centered design (HCD) permits these users to have a substantial ro...

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) are increasingly gaining traction thanks to their technical advancement and the need for remote connections, recently accentuated by the pandemic. Remote surgery, telerobotics, and virtual offices are only some examples of their successes. As users interact with VR/AR, they generate extensive behavioral data u...

Recently, the paradigm of Industry 5.0 has been introduced to complement that of Industry 4.0, which turned out to be technology- rather than human-oriented. Industry 5.0 is meant to foster a transition toward a human-centric industry, where the worker’s well-being is prioritized. To meet this goal, it is crucial to directly involve employees from...

The COVID-19 spread abruptly changed the fruition of indoor environments, where necessary adaptive measures have since been implemented. Buildings open to the public were suddenly equipped with physical devices aiming to encourage users’ appropriate behaviors, such as hand sanitizing, social distancing, and temperature monitoring. Through a twofold...

Interest in the virtualization of human–robot interactions is increasing, yet the impact that collaborating with either virtual or physical robots has on the human operator’s mental state is still insufficiently studied. In the present work, we aimed to fill this gap by conducting a systematic assessment of a human–robot collaborative framework fro...

Urban green areas are of fundamental importance for the mental and physical well-being of citizens. However, these areas are often designed without considering the needs of all users, especially people with disabilities and the elderly. To fill this gap, the SHIP project aims at designing and developing urban furniture, rides, and tools for physica...

Health facilities worldwide have been struggling for years with the low number of care personnel compared to the demand for assistance, even before the recent pandemic emergency. This problem has made the caregivers a category characterized by a high-workload job, with consequent risks of stress and burnout. In these cases, technology can often hel...

Collaborative robots are increasingly common in modern production systems, since they allow to merge the productivity of automated systems with the flexibility and dexterity of manual ones. The direct interaction between the human and the robot can be the greatest advantage and the greatest limit of collaborative systems at the same time, depending...

A valid Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) should be effective for the majority of the population. However, gender, gaming experience, or other individual factors are often likely to affect users' performance when interacting with a robot. In the present study, we measured the performance and perceived workload of participants driving a robot through a...

The outbreak of the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic has changed our perception of safety in shared and public living environments including healthcare facilities, shops, schools, and enterprises. The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a suitable solution for managing anti-pandemic smart devices (e.g., UV lights, smart cameras, etc.) and increasing citizens’ s...

A typical protocol for the psychological study of helping behavior features two core roles: a help seeker suffering from some personal or situational emergency (often called “victim”) and a potential helper. The setting of these studies is such that the victim and the helper often share the same space. We wondered whether this spatial arrangement m...

Millions of people with motor and cognitive disabilities face hardships in daily life due to the limited accessibility and inclusiveness of living spaces which limit their autonomy and independence. The DOMHO project deals with these fundamental issues by leveraging an innovative solution: a smart co-housing apartment. Besides, the project aims at...

Digital health assistants are increasingly used to improve adherence to pharmaceutical treatments because of their intuitiveness, timeliness, and ubiquity. These applications serve the goals of different kinds of stakeholders, all interested in ensuring adherence: the patients, the physicians treating the patient, the pharmaceutical companies spons...

One of the most evident symptoms of the SARS-CoV-2 infection is fever. In response to the ongoing health emergency, Thermoscanners are becoming more and more popular to measure citizens’ body temperatures in many public places. Indeed, they can be a useful tool for preventing the spreading of Covid-19. Most of the current research focused on unders...

The last few decades have seen the hospital environment become more and more technologically advanced with the development of advanced diagnostic and surgical tools. The beds have also undergone a radical transformation, thanks to the integration of electrical and electronic components, that have allowed the birth of the modern widespread electric...

Professional kitchens are hectic and complex environments, due to the high working pace and the plethora of skills required to operators. Such complexity has become even more severe by the increasing number of unspecialized operators employed in the foodservice. Advanced machines hold the potential to help keeping high quality standards of the fina...

In the last decade, there has been a rapid widespread of applications that support different types of patients in self-managing some aspects concerning their health (e.g., drugs assumption) and reporting specific relevant events (e.g., symptoms) daily. Furthermore, these apps turn out to be very important for patients in social isolation and lockdo...

Virtual Reality (VR) is a popular technology to recreate reality-like scenarios, including dangerous ones, in a realistic but safe way. Because of this potential, VR based research has been applied in psychology studies to provide training and education about how to behave in emergencies such as fires, earthquakes, floods, or typhoons. All these di...

This paper introduces a design framework for mixed reality urban exploration (MRUE), based on a concrete implementation in a historical city. The framework integrates different modalities, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and haptics-audio interfaces, as well as advanced features such as personalized recommendations, social exp...

Virtual Reality (VR) allows to re-create risky situations in a safe and realistic environment and, in recent years, it has been proposed as a versatile training tool for fire emergencies. However, there is still the need to compare VR with other training formats, to better understand when and how it is advantageous to invest in virtual systems for...

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are widely employed to investigate human behavior in dangerous situations that cannot be safely reproduced in the real world, allowing researchers to study in an ecological way complex scenarios such as training for risky jobs, safety procedures, emergencies and, more recently, moral dilemmas in driving contex...

High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) seems to overcome a drawback of traditional bipolar tDCS: the wide-spread diffusion of the electric field. Nevertheless, most of the differences that characterise the two techniques are based on mathematical simulations and not on real, behavioural and neurophysiological, data. The s...

In the past few years, collaborative robots (i.e., cobots) have been largely adopted within industrial manufacturing. Although robots can support companies and workers in carrying out complex activities and improving productivity, human factors related to cobot operators have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The present study aims to understan...

Recently, mobile and in-home Voice Actuated Control Systems (VACs) have become affordable and reliable, allowing the control of several IoT devices from a distance. Individuals with motor impairments could benefit from VACS installed in smart domestic environments to operate home appliances and other devices. The present paper explores the potentia...

Hand gestures are an essential component of our behavior and are often considered a valuable way for Ambient Assisted Living solutions. Gestural commands are particularly helpful in hectic home environments, like the kitchen, where we often have greasy hands. Yet, gestures can be challenging to learn and recall especially for non-tech savvy users....

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been widely used over the past as an implicit measure of cognition. In a recent attempt to better understand the mechanisms underlying the IAT, Yu et al. (2012) modified the classical IAT paradigm introducing a novel classification method based on mouse dynamics analyses (Mouse Tracking IAT; MT-IAT). The pres...

High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) seems to overcome a drawback of Conventional tDCS: the wide-spread diffusion of the electric field. Nevertheless, most of the differences that characterise the two techniques are based on mathematical simulations and not on real, behavioural and neurophysiological, data. The study a...

Nowadays, in the context of Industry 4.0, advanced working environments aim at achieving a high degree of human–machine collaboration. This phenomenon occurs, on the one hand, through the correct interpretation of operators’ data by machines that can adapt their functioning to support workers, and on the other hand, by ensuring the transparency of...

This paper discusses the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in the context of assisted living for elderly and fragile people, in the light of the peculiar requirements of such users, both from a functional and a technological perspective. We stress some aspects that are often disregarded by the technical community, such as technolog...

VIDEO PRESENTATION AVAILABLE AT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbFjcmns6K8 Computerized solutions in the domain of creativity and expressive performance increasingly provide art and artists with exciting new opportunities. However, the combination of automation and creativity also raises controversies and resistance in some user groups. This pap...

In the last decade, faked reviews have become a growing issue. While most studies have focused on text analysis to identify false reviews, the big companies are now switching to simpler review systems exclusively based on ratings (such as number of stars or like/dislike systems). In this paper, the possibility of detecting faked ratings from the an...

BACKGROUND Voice assistants allow users to control appliances and functions of a domotic house by simply uttering a few words. Such systems hold the potential to significantly help users with motor and cognitive disabilities who currently depend on their caregiver even for basic needs, e.g., opening a door. The research on voice assistants is mainl...

Background: Voice assistants allow users to control appliances and functions of a smart home by simply uttering a few words. Such systems hold the potential to significantly help users with motor and cognitive disabilities who currently depend on their caregiver even for basic needs (eg, opening a door). The research on voice assistants is mainly...

Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) is widely used in the tourism industry, improving the tourist experience in several cultural heritage sites. However, little interest has been paid to naturalistic sites. This paper describes the project “This is (not) just a tree” that aims to develop a system offering an educational and engaging experience to allow...

The exploitation of Virtual and Augmented Reality in the context of cultural heritage and tourism is increasing. These new technologies enable to integrate the traditional cultural contents and innovative experience modalities. Several cultural sites provide visitors with such systems to create an immersive visiting experience. However, limited att...

We present a study that investigates whether the transparency of the data acquisition technique can work as a heuristic when making evaluations about data protection and sensitivity. The study (N = 40) compares an explicit data acquisition technique (questionnaires) with an implicit one (eye-tracker) and varies also the actual sensitivity of the da...

The professional kitchen is hectic and crowded, and many tasks need to be accomplished in a short time. Such environment could benefit from connecting and integrating different appliances to better coordinate the preparation and preservation processes. Yet, professional kitchens have received only limited attention from IT researchers and no compre...

The current study was carried out to investigate users’ preferences for different input modalities (i.e., mouse or gaze) when involved in scientific information-seeking tasks. According to the task that they had to perform (i.e., abstract opening, gaze bookmarking, or keyword highlighting), participants were randomly assigned to three different con...

Abstract retrieved from EAWOP 2019 Abstract Book available at http://www.eawop.org/ckeditor_assets/attachments/1285/eawop-2019_abstract-book_rev2_compressed-2.pdf?1583929976 (p. 1624)

The persuasiveness of a narrative is increased by the audience’s engagement with it, which in turn depends on the extent to which its needs and goals are served by the narrative. This study considers whether indulging the audience’s prejudice might be a way to serve their needs and increase engagement. Two different versions of a news videoclip, on...

The use of implicit relevance feedback from neurophysiology could deliver effortless information retrieval. However, both computing neurophysiologic responses and retrieving documents are characterized by uncertainty because of noisy signals and incomplete or inconsistent representations of the data. We present the first‐of‐its‐kind, fully integrat...

Locating places in cities is typically facilitated by handheld mobile devices, which draw the visual attention of the user on the screen of the device instead of the surroundings. In this research, we aim at strengthening the connection between people and their surroundings through enabling mid-air gestural interaction with real-world landmarks and...

Around 50% of the world population is now active on internet, often subscribing websites, social networks or other online services. In this scenario, the issue of online faked identities is more and more present, with the phenomena of identity alteration, identity theft and identity fraud. To date, there are no systems able to detect people who sub...

Older adults are required to adjust their eating habits to maintain a good health status. However, they may struggle to adopt these new practices. Given their increasing spread, smartphone-based interventions may be a good option for providing older adults an aid to keep track of their food intake. In the present work we adopted a user centered des...

Due to better living conditions and progress in medicine older adults today are the main group of population in terms of growing speed. Furthermore, together with disabled people, they represent the most frail category of individuals. Indeed, they are likely to present different constellations of impairments (both at physical and cognitive level)....

Searching during conversations and social interactions is becoming increasingly common. Although searching could be helpful for solving arguments, building common ground, and reinforcing mutual assumptions, it can also cause interactional problems. Proactive search approaches can enrich conversations with additional information without neglecting t...

Ambivalence, frequently encountered when collecting users' spontaneous opinions about new software or devices, is rarely addressed as an object of investigation in itself. We suggest that adopting a qualitative approach based on discursive psychology would allow researchers to deal comfortably and usefully with ambivalence, turning it into a precio...

Due to better living conditions and progress in medicine older adults today are the main group of population in terms of growing speed. Furthermore, together with disabled people, they represent the most frail category of individuals. Indeed, they are likely to present different constellations of impairments (both at physical and cognitive level)....

Conversations among people involve solving disputes, building common ground, and reinforce mutual beliefs and assumptions. Conversations often require external information that can support these human activities. In this paper, we study how a spoken conversation can be supported by a proactive search agent that listens to the conversation, detects...

While ordinary touchscreen-based interfaces on urban explorer applications draw much of a user's attention onto the screen, visual and audio-haptic augmented reality interfaces have emerged as the two main streams for enabling direct focus on the surroundings. However, neither interface alone satisfies users in the highly dynamic urban environment....

In mobile devices for travellers and tourists, haptic stimulation is mainly employed to provide directions and alerts; but it could also be employed to influence the user’s affective experience. Here we consider providing relaxing stimulation via a symbiotic vibrotactile vest and compare implicit triggers that are or not contextually consistent. We...

This paper describes a game directed to young adults and aimed at sensitizing them about potential risks of psychoactive substance abuse during nightlife events. Of interest here is that this game targets a domain in which the credibility of a persuasive intervention is particularly fragile. The design decisions and the recommendations inspiring th...

Nowadays, user authentication onmobiledevicesisprincipallybased on a secret (e.g., password, PIN), while recently two-factors authentication methods have been proposed to make more secure such secret-based methods. Two-factors authentication methods typically combine knowledge factors with user’s characteristics or possessions, obtaining high authe...

ANOVA R code. File description: the file contains the R code used to compute ANOVA on data in Additional file 1. (.txt 1 kb).

Test set data. Data Description: the file contains the data (raw features) of the 10 test set participants. (.xlsx 10 kb).