Paulo Menezes

• PhD
• Associate Professor at University of Coimbra

Industry 4.0, characterized by the integration of advanced technologies across various industrial domains, is now evolving into Industry 5.0, which emphasizes the human perspective, resilience, and sustainability. In this context, the study of human behavior and attitudes towards human–robot interaction (HRI) is crucial for understanding the accept...

Lack of data on which to perform experimentation is a recurring issue in many areas of research, particularly in machine learning. The inability of most automated data mining techniques to be generalized to all types of data is inherently related with their dependency on those types which deems them ineffective against anything slightly different....

The Industry 5.0 Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) goals have the potential for significantly reducing production costs, but require factory workers to trust that robots will not cause them physical harm when sharing the workspace in order to be achieved. To this end, we propose a model that adjusts the robot's actions to an estimate of the workers' aw...

In recent years, the intersection of machine learning and dance has garnered increasing attention as a means to enhance the aesthetics and creativity of dance performance. Machine learning techniques, such as human-pose detection, have been utilized to analyze body movement and generate visual models in realtime, offering new approaches to traditio...

There are well-established benefits of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs for children within educational contexts. Combining social–emotional skills and compassion abilities has been seldomly done, and it may be valuable at individual and societal levels, for resilient, empathetic, and inclusive societies. This study explored the feasibi...

Eye gaze is a prominent feature of human social lives, but little is known on whether fitting eyes on machines makes humans trust them more. In this study we compared subjective and objective markers of human trust when collaborating with eyed and non-eyed robots of the same type. We used virtual reality scenes in which we manipulated distance and...

Movement-based interaction design is an innovative field that leverages the body's natural movements to create intuitive and engaging interfaces. This approach takes a sensorial approach to visual and auditory memory, seeking to enhance user engagement and create more meaningful experiences. The use of movement-based interfaces has significant impl...

Exploration of the physical environment is an indispensable precursor to data acquisition and enables knowledge generation via analytical or direct trialing. Artificial Intelligence lacks the exploratory capabilities of even the most underdeveloped organisms, hindering its autonomy and adaptability. Supported by cognitive psychology, this works lin...

This work aims to endow a social robot with the ability to mimic affective empathy, which represents the skill of inferring the other’s emotional state and mirroring the detected emotion. In this direction, we first designed a set of 52 facial expressions that may be representative of the primary emotions. Leveraging on the idea that the robot shou...

Human emotions can be seen as a valuable variable to explore in Human-Computer Interaction for effective, efficient, and satisfying interface development. The inclusion of appropriate emotional triggers in the design of interactive systems can play a decisive role in users' acceptance or rejection. It is well known that the major problem in motor r...

Eye gaze is a prominent feature of human social lives, but little is known on whether fitting eyes on machines makes humans trust them more. In this study we compared subjective and objective markers of human trust when collaborating with eyed and non-eyed robots of the same type. We used virtual reality scenes in which we manipulated distance and...

In vivo exposure is the most common treatment for phobias, although it has several drawbacks that can be mitigated by adopting technological alternatives such as virtual reality or augmented reality. Augmented reality provides some advantages over virtual reality, including fewer modelling costs and a higher level of realism. As a result, the goal...

Human pose detection is a research field that has provided different works on the analysis of body movement. Contemporary dance is a performing art that integrates beautiful human poses resulting from simple and complex movements. In this study, we present a new digital art concept that results from the intersection between dance movement and machi...

Temporal analysis of workout routines comes with a major difficulty: the observed actions or processes are naturally sequences of vari- able length. Besides being highly dependent on the exercise itself, the faster or slower repetition of the pattern’s temporal dynamics is also determined by the individual’s performance. In this paper, we present a...

What relationship exists between dance and visual arts? How can dance visually express lines, shapes, and visual compositions in space? It is true that performing arts and visual arts have common methodologies and connections with each other. However, how can the audience understand their relationship? The present work intersects art with technolog...

The use of serious games may be an appealing and complementary way to motivate curriculum-based social and emotional learning (SEL); still, investigation into this potential usefulness is scarce. This study aims to address the usefulness of serious games within the program ‘Me and Us of Emotions’. Specifically, we analyzed the differences in childr...

Background This pilot study aims to test the usability of the iACTwithPain platform, an online ACT-based intervention for people with chronic pain, to obtain information on which intervention and usability aspects need improvement and on expected retention rates. Methods Seventy-three Portuguese women with chronic pain were invited to complete the...

Collaborative robots (cobots) could help humans in tasks that are mundane, dangerous or where direct human contact carries risk. Yet, the collaboration between humans and robots is severely limited by the aspects of the safety and comfort of human operators. In this paper, we outline the use of extended reality (XR) as a way to test and develop col...

Telepresence robots are becoming popular in social interactions involving health care, elderly assistance, guidance, or office meetings. There are two types of human psychological experiences to consider in robot-mediated interactions: (1) telepresence, in which a user develops a sense of being present near the remote interlocutor, and (2) co-prese...

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained immense traction over the past decade, producing increasingly successful applications as research strives to understand and exploit neural processing specifics. Nonetheless emotion, despite its demonstrated significance to reinforcement, social integration and general development, remains a large...

En la actualidad, la mayor parte de las misiones de intervención llevadas a cabo en ambientes submarinos, son realizadas por robots teleoperados conocidos como Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV). Sin embargo, debido a sus elevados costes económicos y logísticos, recientemente se están empezando a usar un nuevo sistema autónomo conocido como Interventio...

Emotionally pleasant experiences trigger repetition in humans whilst their emotional opposite lead to avoidance/refusal of activities. Human interest, a key factor in everyday human life, can be quite useful in the evaluation of participant engagement on activities and their optimization, so as to maximize interest and motivation. A glaring issue h...

The increasing number of robots performing certain tasks in our society, especially in the industrial environ- ment, introduces more scenarios where a human must collaborate with a robot to achieve a common goal which, in turn, raises the need to study how safe and natural this interaction is and how it can be improved. Virtual reality is an excell...

Exposure therapy (ET) is often used as a therapeutic process for the treatment of a psychological disorder. Usually, this type of therapy is challenging to apply traditionally as the therapist must expose the patient safely to the cause of the disorder. To help surpass this problem, a virtual reality (VR) application was de- veloped to support expo...

Sleep is a fundamental daily process of several species, during which the brain cycles through critical stages for both resting and learning. A phenomenon known as dreaming may occur during that cycle, whose purpose and functioning have yet to be agreed upon by the research community. Despite the controversy, some have hypothesized dreaming to be a...

Vestibular vertigo accounts for about a quarter of dizziness complaints. Loss of vestibular function is a debilitating condition that causes nausea, spontaneous nystagmus, or disequilibrium, which is known to highly influence day-to-day tasks. Therefore, recovery should start as soon as possible, targeting the affected side of the vestibular appara...

Vestibular impairment is often mistaken for just dizziness. Diagnosis and treatment, starting as soon as possible and repeated several times, are essential for returning to a normal life. However, it is a long process in which patients tend to get tired and bored with the exercises they have to perform and eventually lose interest in doing them. Th...

The study of the human body motion throughout different activities is one of the most challenging and long-standing problems in Computer Vision. With the recent advances in Deep Learning algorithms, the information acquired from conventional frame sensors can be used to infer the human body pose for further analysis. Specifically, one can contempla...

Collaborative robots (cobots) could help humans in tasks that are mundane, dangerous or where human contact carries risk, as it has been recently uncovered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the collaboration between humans and robots is severely limited by the aspects of safety and comfort of human operators. In this paper, we propose the use of virtu...

Given the challenges of the modern world, specifically at schools, and the alarming increase in mental health difficulties in young people, it is crucial to universally foster social and emotional skills in the school context. This study aims to present the development and preliminary results of a program to promote socioemotional skills for childr...

Societies in the most developed countries have witnessed a significant ageing of the population in recent decades, which increases the demand for healthcare services and caregivers. The development of technologies to help the elderly, so that they can remain active and independent for a longer time, helps to mitigate the sustainability problem pose...

Human beings have developed fantastic abilities to integrate information from various sensory sources exploring their inherent complementarity. Perceptual capabilities are therefore heightened, enabling, for instance, the well-known "cocktail party" and McGurk effects, i.e., speech disambiguation from a panoply of sound signals. This fusion ability...

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has been widely tested for chronic pain, with demonstrated efficacy. Nevertheless, although there is meta-analytical evidence on the efficacy of face-to-face ACT, no reviews have been performed on online ACT in this population. The aim of this meta-analysis is to determine the efficacy of online ACT for adult...

This work seeks to register in real-time the dance movement through the principles of Augmented Reality. From the reading and analyzing of this movement is intended to explore different visual approaches, such as drawing or an abstract painting. For this purpose, this work aims to develop a mobile system that detects, different parts of the human b...

Background Chronic pain (CP) has serious medical and social consequences and leads to economic burden that threatens the sustainability of healthcare services. Thus, optimized management of pain tools to support CP patients in adjusting to their condition and improving their quality of life is timely. Although acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT...

It is predicted that longevity will keep increasing in the forthcoming centuries. Thus, the elder demographic will grow, and the surge of age-related diseases will become more prevalent. These conditions can affect autonomy and affect the quality of life by reducing cognitive and motor capacities. While medical interven- tions have been progressing...

Determining the factors influencing students’ intention to use Augmented Reality (AR) allows a deeper understanding on how students react to the use of such technologies in their training as engineers. This study aims to identify the emotional and cognitive factors that influence the students’ intention of using AR in their future professional life...

This work describes a system for occupational therapy based on a traditional pedal system instrumented with a simple sensor for providing the rotating speed value and Oculus Rift headset and their hand trackers all to be used interactively with a Virtual Reality application. A virtual city is used as the environment to be explored by the user. The...

Transferring skills and expertise to remote places, without being present, is a new challenge for our digitally interconnected society. People can experience and perform actions in distant places through a robotic agent wearing immersive interfaces to feel physically there. However, technological contingencies can affect human perception, compromis...

There has been increasing interest in the application of virtual reality (VR) to occupational therapy and rehabilitation fields. This work presents a VR-based city adventure framework designed for occupational therapy. Its concept is based on taking the user to travel around a virtual city, where the motion is powered by the execution of some type...

In recent years, Internet of Things has been gaining popularity due to its capabilities and flexible implementation. Current developments make use of several sensor types build- ing large wireless sensor networks, where each sensor can have a degree of connection over the others. It is usually more perceptible with the use of motion sensors in diff...

Health applications have increasingly been used to improve physical, mental and social well-being. Chronic pain (CP) is defined as pain that lasts for a period of three months and causes sporadic or constant discomfort. In Portugal, the treatments for this type of pain are almost exclusively pharmacological and with known limited effects. Endowing...

Affective systems are getting increasingly more attention from researchers and high-tech companies in order to enable the acknowledgment or adaptation to a user’s mood. Emotion classification is typically a hard problem due to the number of subtle cues which are present in human facial and body expressions, or in voiced utterances. Another critical...

Studying human motion from images and videos has turned into an interesting topic of research given the recent advances in computer vision and deep learning algorithms. When focusing on the automatic procedure of tracking physical exercises, cameras can be used for full human pose estimation in relation to worn sensors. In this work, we propose a m...

span lang="EN-US">Conventional motor rehabilitation therapies followed by stroke survivors during their recovery process, are typically intense and involve numerous repetitions of task-specific recommended exercises. However, due to the lack of short-term or immediate results, patients tend to lose motivation on the rehabilitation process, and on p...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> The idea of recognizing human emotion through speech (SER) has recently received considerable attention from the research community, mostly due to the current machine learning trend. Nevertheless, even the most successful methods are still rather lacking in terms of adaptation to specific speakers and scenarios, ev...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> The latest advances in computational power of small portable devices enables the development of new forms of Augmented Realities, namely Augmented Reality Shared Spaces. In this work, we will explore this technolo- gy to improve the collaborative work between people in the same physical space allowing them to share...

The increase of life expectancy in last decades brought with it an increase in the number of technologies developed to assist this growing population segment. Some of the developed technologies focus on assisting older adults age in a more active way, remaining active and independent for longer. In accordance with the concept of active ageing we pr...

Human beings have developed fantastic abilities to integrate information from various sensory sources exploring their inherent complementarity. Perceptual capabilities are therefore heightened enabling, for instance, the well known "cocktail party" and McGurk effects, i.e. speech disambiguation from a panoply of sound signals. This fusion ability i...

Recovering from a traumatic incident (e.g, a stroke) implies rigorous and demanding therapies to ensure recovery of the lost capabilities. Due to the lack of short-term visible results, stroke patients tend to lose interest in their recovery process and frequently do not follow their therapists’ suggestions to continue performing their training at...

Health applications have increasingly been used to improve physical, mental and social well-being. Chronic pain (CP) is defined as pain that lasts for a period of three months and causes sporadic or con- stant discomfort. In Portugal, the treatments for this type of pain are almost exclusively pharmacological and with known limited effects. En- dow...

The transdisciplinary experience between art and technology has grown over the last decade. The application of augmented reality and virtual reality on other areas has opened doors for hybrid projects and consequently new experimental ideas. Taking it as motivation, a new application concept is proposed in this work, which will allow to someone to...

Over the past few years, virtual and mixed reality systems have evolved significantly yielding high immersive experiences. Most of the metaphors used for interaction with the virtual environment do not provide the same meaningful feedback, to which the users are used to in the real world. This paper proposes a cyber-glove to improve the immersive s...

Over the past few years, virtual and mixed reality systems have evolved significantly yielding high immersive experiences. Most of the metaphors used for interaction with the virtual environment do not provide the same meaningful feedback, to which the users are used to in the real world. This paper proposes a cyber-glove to improve the immersive s...

Emotion recognition from speech, the ability to identify expressed emotional states in vocal utterances, is an inherent ability humans apply in their daily interactions. Though a highly researched topic, it has yet to conform with real human performance levels, which may be due to the overspecialization or inability of most automatic recognition sy...

The recognition of emotions is an inherent ability possessed by humans, which has long intrigued many researchers. Primarily due to the possibility of its successful emulation and integration in independent systems. Further, speech, being a mixture of utterances conveying a state of mind, proves to be a suitable candidate from which emotionality ca...

The purpose of this paper was to understand how an agent's performance is affected when interaction workflows are incorporated in its information model and decision-making process. Our expectation was that this incorporation could reduce errors and faults on agent's operation, improving its interaction performance. We based this expectation on the...

This article discusses the use of Virtual Reality as a tool for supporting learning and some of its opportunities. The importance of using gaze tracking in immersive learning setups is also discussed. This serves as a motivation for the construction of an low-cost eye tracker adapted to an head mounted display (Oculus Rift DK2), which is described....

This article presents the idea of adding real objects representations to Virtual Reality as a way to improve the immersive experience. To this end, a low-cost hand tracking device and an instrumented cube based on the use of inertial measurement units is presented. Some preliminary results that show the use of the hand tracker for the animation of...

The purpose of this study was to understand the challenges in designing and implementing artificial social agents, where an approach based on pre-defined user scenarios and action scripts is insufficient to take into account uncertainty in perception or unclear expectations from the user. Therefore, we developed a framework that captures the expect...

In this work, we presented the updated version for the knowledge information model used in our framework and a Genetic Algorithm approach for solving the knowledge matching problem. In general terms the ontology matching problem is modelled as a global optimization of a mapping between two ontologies. We applied a modern heuristic method to achieve...

p class="0abstract">A module for learning about virtual and augmented reality is being developed under the U-Academy project. The module is composed of three parts. The first part is an introduction to the basic concepts of virtual and augmented reality with the help of illustrative examples. The second part presents some of the current uses of aug...

This paper investigates approaches capable of inducing sensations of tele-presence in robotic tele-operations. Operator’s control actions are simpler, if he feels being in the remote environment. The goal is to replicate some conditions of the remote environment to let operator’s perception behaviours approximate to the natural ones. Since immersio...

Nowadays, an increasing need of intervention robotic systems can be observed in all kind of hazardous environments. In all these intervention systems, the human expert continues playing a central role from the decision making point of view. For instance, in underwater domains, when manipulation capabilities are required, only Remote Operated Vehicl...

This work discusses the applicability of the augmented reality technology as a tool for learning/teaching and its role in engineering training. Online Experimentation Resources at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto permits and fosters contact with technologies that are used currently in industry, medicine, development, services and r...