Philipp Brauner

RWTH Aachen University · Center for Human-Computer Interaction

In this study, we address the problem of low retention and high dropout rates of computer science university students in early semesters of the studies. Complex and high abstract mathematical learning materials have been identified as one reason for the dropout rate. In order to support the understanding and practicing of core mathematical concepts...

Ubiquitous computing and ambient assisted living environments offer promising solutions to meet the demographic change. An example are serious games for health care: Regular exercises mediated through games increase health, well-being, and autonomy of the residents whilst at the same time reducing the costs for caregiving. To understand which facto...

With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, smart decision support systems are becoming ubiquitous. Such systems help reduce complexity for operators by automating data integration tasks and recommending actions. However, these systems are sometimes flawed. It is not sufficiently understood whether, when and why operators comply with s...

The Internet of Things promises to bring significant improvements to manufacturing by facilitating the integration of manufacturing devices to collect sensor data and to control production processes. In contrast to previous industrial revolutions , today's change is driven by applied computer science technologies on several layers: Improved interfa...

Ubiquitous computing strives to reach the calm computing state where sensors and actuators disappear from the foreground of our surroundings into the fabric of everyday objects. Despite the great progress in embedded technology, artificial interfaces, such as remote controls and touch screens, remain the dominant media for interacting with smart ev...

Understanding public perception of technology is crucial to aligning research, development, and governance of technology. This article introduces micro scenarios as an integrative method to evaluate mental models and social acceptance across numerous technologies and concepts using a few single-item scales within a single comprehensive survey. This...

Social acceptance of medical technology is crucial for the viability of the healthcare systems in the demographic change. In contrast to most studies that focus on individual technologies, we conducted a comprehensive survey on the perceived risk, utility, and valence of 20 different medical technologies through an online questionnaire with N=193 p...

In recent years, brain research has indisputably entered a new epoch, driven by substantial methodological advances and digitally enabled data integration and modelling at multiple scales— from molecules to the whole brain. Major advances are emerging at the intersection of neuroscience with technology and computing. This new science of the brain c...

As technology evolves rapidly, understanding public perception becomes increasingly crucial. This article introduces an integrative method for evaluating mental models and social acceptance of various technologies. Our approach utilizes micro scenarios coupled with visual-spatial mapping, offering a comprehensive perspective that contrasts with tra...

The Internet of Production (IoP) promises to be the answer to major challenges facing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0. The lack of inter-company communication channels and standards, the need for heightened safety in Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) scenarios, and the opacity of data-driven decision support systems are only...

Like all preceding transformations of the manufacturing industry, the large-scale usage of production data will reshape the role of humans within the sociotechnical production ecosystem. To ensure that this transformation creates work systems in which employees are empowered, productive, healthy, and motivated, the transformation must be guided by...

The Internet of Production (IoP) promises to be the answer to major challenges facing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0. The lack of inter-company communication channels and standards, the need for heightened safety in Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) scenarios, and the opacity of data-driven decision support systems are only...

The vision of the Internet of Production (IoP) is focused on optimizing manufacturing processes, with the help of Industry 4.0 technologies (I4Ts). However, considering global megatrends such as climate change and the need to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is a growing imperative for the manufacturing industry to become more s...

Systematic knowledge management is a decisive competitive advantage. While large companies can successfully implement knowledge management through dedicated people, tools, and processes, this topic poses major challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study of knowledge management prac...

The Tiptoi smart pen has a huge fan following among children and their parents. Interacting with the pen makes it easy to see why: the pen has been designed to help children learn and explore complex information about a vast array of topics, from farms to learning about the human body. This work examined whether the Tiptoi pen could be similarly us...

By optimising data-driven processes and improving automation, the digital transformation in production aims to increase effectiveness, efficiency and improve the working conditions of employees. In such a networked working environment, the performance and actions of workers need to be captured in form of digital data. However, the collection of per...

Like all preceding transformations of the manufacturing industry, the large-scale usage of production data will reshape the role of humans within the sociotechnical production ecosystem. To ensure that this transformation creates work systems in which employees are empowered, productive, healthy, and motivated, the transformation must be guided by...

The Internet of Production (IoP) promises to be the answer to major challenges facing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0. The lack of inter-company communication channels and standards, the need for heightened safety in Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) scenarios, and the opacity of data-driven decision support systems are only...

Brain research has in recent years indisputably entered a new epoch, driven by substantial methodological advances and digitally enabled data integration and modeling at multiple scales – from molecules to the whole system. Major advances are emerging at the intersection of neuroscience with technology and computing. This new science of the brain i...

Introduction: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in medicine, business, manufacturing and transportation, and is entering our personal lives. Public perceptions of AI are often shaped either by admiration for its benefits and possibilities, or by uncertainties, potential threats and fears about this opaque and perceived as mysteriou...

Shorter product lifecycles, more product variants, individualised production, and the desire for sustainable production call for agile control frameworks that enable smarter robotic control and collaborating human-robot teams. We propose generalising and standardising “Behaviour Trees” that use human action nodes as a process model and taskexecutio...

Over the last couple of years, artificial intelligence (AI)—namely machine learning algorithms—has rapidly entered our daily lives. Applications can be found in medicine, law, finance, production, education, mobility, and entertainment. To achieve this, a large amount of research has been undertaken, to optimize algorithms that by learning from dat...

The Digital Transformation is changing production and creates both new opportunities and requirements to support human operators in their work. To fully exploit the benefits, the integration of digital technology in the work processes needs to be balanced with the human factor by understanding users’ requirements and integrating these in the work p...

The digital transformation of production (“Industry 4.0”) has the potential to enormously accelerate and improve the efficiency of manufacturing processes and value chains. But it also entails recruiting new employees, as well as re- and upskilling current employees of diverse ages groups for new and increasingly more complex tasks to manage increa...

Next Generation Manufacturing promises significant improvements in performance, productivity, and value creation. In addition to the desired and projected improvements regarding the planning, production, and usage cycles of products, this digital transformation will have a huge impact on work, workers, and workplace design. Given the high uncertain...

The future of industrial manufacturing and production will increasingly manifest in the form of cyber physical production systems. Here, Digital Shadows will act as mediators between the physical and digital world to model and operationalize the interactions and relationships between different entities in production systems. Until now, the associat...

Digitalization promises huge improvements in various domains, such as production, health care, or mobility, through the integration of big data and artificial intelligence (AI). However, AI often builds on labelled data but labeling data can be complex or expensive, depending on both the properties of the data and access to people with domain knowl...

Aims Although ambient assisted living (AAL) environments and serious games for healthcare have been proposed as solutions to meet the changing demographics, the two approaches are rarely combined. We present the development and empirical evaluation of two serious games for healthcare in AAL. The first uses a cooking scenario for training of cogniti...

Understanding why (non-) users are motivated to use life-logging devices requires to consider wishes and concerns associated with life-logging as well as the influence of personality on usage motivation. We analyze whether the intention to use life-logging is more strongly influenced by the desire for support or by potential barriers with the first...

Despite digitization and automation in everyday life and at the workplace, traditional craftsmanship continues to be primarily analogue and manual. This specifically applies to decision-making processes that are predominantly influenced by experience and intuition. As a result, established best-practice solutions are commonly used and promising alt...

With increasing digitization, intelligent software systems are taking over more tasks in everyday human life, both in private and professional contexts. So-called artificial intelligence (AI) ranges from subtle and often unnoticed improvements in daily life, optimizations in data evaluation, assistance systems with which the people interact directl...

Circular Economy approaches are increasingly recognized as a solution also in the textile industry to foster a world-wide call to action in terms of sustainable production, sale, use, and recycling of materials and products. When supported by technical, economic, and political systems, such efforts help to integrate more efficient process-es and pr...

With the advent of digitization and automation in industry, the use of technological innovations is increasing especially in areas that were previously exclusively processed manually. The interdisciplinary research cluster “Internet of Production” (IoP) has made this very fact its research task precisely to reshape production through technologies s...

Industrial production systems are facing radical change in multiple dimensions. This change is caused by technological developments and the digital transformation of production, as well as the call for political and social change to facilitate a transformation toward sustainability. These changes affect both the capabilities of production systems a...

With the advent of Next Generation Manufacturing, information and communications technologies have become an essential part of the production process, creating and providing data for all stakeholders. Given the high uncertainty in the likelihood of occurrence and the technical, economic, and societal impacts of associated transformations in product...

The rapid development of automation has led to machines increasingly taking over tasks previously reserved for human operators, especially those involving high-risk settings and moral decision making. To best benefit from the advantages of automation, these systems must be integrated into work environments, and into the society as a whole. Successf...

In increasingly digitized working and living environments, human-robot collaboration is growing fast with human trust toward robotic collaboration as a key factor for the innovative teamwork to succeed. This article explores the impact of design factors of the robotic interface (anthropomorphic vs functional) and usage context (production vs care)...

Today’s production is massively influenced by fundamental digitalisation. IoP as the industrial realisation of the IoT idea is mainly based on the further processing and analysis of the accruing data volumes, e.g. sensor data, as well as the direct connection of integrated technical and human entities. For the technical implementation, this means t...

Digitalization in the production sector aims at transferring concepts and methods from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the industry and is, as a result, currently reshaping the production area. Besides technological progress, changes in work processes and organization are relevant for a successful implementation of the “Internet of Production” (IoP...

Maintaining good health gains importance, especially with increased life-expectancy. However, digitalization leads to more and more jobs that happen sitting down. So-called life-logging technologies, apps and specialized devices meant to record, e.g., steps and heart rate, can support people in staying active and, by extension, healthy. The possibl...

Digitalization is changing the working world of tomorrow and complex decisions are increasingly being made by hybrid teams of people and automated decision support systems. The interaction of user, task, and interface plays a decisive role, but is insufficiently studied, especially in the context of decision making under uncertainty, risk, and mora...

Background Many societies are facing demographic changes that challenge the viability of health and welfare systems. Serious games for health care and ambient assisted living (AAL) offer health benefits and support for older adults and may mitigate some of the negative effects of the demographic shift. Objective This study aimed to examine the acc...

Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) are materials with excellent mechanical properties. However, slight variations in the manufacturing process lead to substantially decreasing mechanical stability and additional production costs for assuring the product’s quality. For large lot sizes a high process quality can be achieved through automation. H...

Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Production can increase efficiency and effectiveness of workflows in manufacturing companies and production networks. Despite ubiquitous automation, people are essential in socio-technical cyber-physical production systems due to unique cognitive capabilities, as final arbitrators, or for ethical and legal reasons....

Shifts in demographic developments have led to changed needs and requirements in healthcare. Rising life expectancy and improved medical healthcare enable a more independent and healthier lifestyle of (older) persons , but also changes expectations and perceptions of aging, and health-supporting technologies. Knowledge about attitudes towards aging...

Human-Computer Interaction Center, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany {vanheek, wilkowska, brauner, ziefle}@comm.rwth-aachen.de Technology Acceptance, Lifelogging Technology, Ethics, User Diversity, Guidelines. Lifelogging technologies have the potential to facilitate and enrich the everyday life of younger as well as older people. On the one...

Sedentary behavior and lack of exercise pose a threat to both individual health and the viability of health-care systems and societies. Portable fitness trackers as prominent persuasive technologies are seen as a way to increase the level of physical activity. Yet, despite their technical capabilities, their affordability, and their advantages in r...

UNSTRUCTURED Many societies face a demographic change that challenges the viability of health and welfare systems. Serious Games for Healthcare as well as Ambient Assisted Living offer support and health benefits for older adults and mitigate the negative effects of the demographic shift. We developed a motion-based serious exercise game for older...

A pronounced deficit of physical activity is one of the challenges in today’s societies. Lacking the minimum of activity recommended for a healthy lifestyle can be avoided by so-called life-logging technologies. However, usage is still low. To understand what factors contribute to an acceptance and use of these technologies, we conducted a quantita...

Advancing automation in many technical areas (mobility, production, medicine, etc.) is accompanied by new challenges for the interaction between humans and technical systems. Trust in automation is a key element for the use of technology and for compliance with its recommendations. This also applies to decision support systems (DSS) in the producti...

The emergence of cyber-physical production systems poses new challenges for designing the interface between production systems and the human-in-the-loop. In this study, we investigate how human operators interact with risks in a supply chain scenario. We varied the financial magnitude and the expected value of the decisions, the combination of two...

Interactive digital textiles are both light and shadow in regard to users’ perception and technology acceptance. To understand people’s perceived barriers and benefits in regard to interactive digital textiles and to derive empirically founded design and communication guidelines, we conducted an empirical study based on a synthesis of the Unified T...

As an interdisciplinary research network, the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” (CoE) comprises of around 150 researchers. Their scientific background ranges from mechanical engineering and computer science to social sciences such as sociology and psychology. In addition to content- and methodbased ch...

Interactive textiles are reaching maturity. First technology augmented textiles in form of clothes and furnitures are becoming commercially available. In contrast to the close link between technological development and innovations, future users’ acceptance and usage of such interactive textiles has not been integrated sufficiently, yet. The current...

Supply Chains and production networks are complex sociotechnical systems whose performance is determined by system, interface, and human factors. While the influence of system factors (e.g., variances in delivery times and amount, queuing strategies) is increasingly well understood, the influence of the interface and human factors is currently insu...

The omnipresence and familiarity of textiles in combination with the integration of invisible sensors, actuators, and information and communication technology under the term “interactive digital textiles” offer the potential of bridging the gap between age, the aging-population, and latest information and communication technology. Digital textiles...

The omnipresence and familiarity of textiles in combination with the integration of invisible sensors, actuators, and information and communication technology under the term “interactive digital textiles” offer the potential of bridging the gap between age, the aging-population, and latest information and communication technology. Digital textiles...

Despite great efforts, women are underrepresented in computer science and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. To understand the root of this we studied 112 high school students (51 female, 61 male) aged between 10 to 13 years. The questionnaire-based survey revealed a significant effect of gender on technical self-e...

Based on the demographic shift and challenges resulting from the increasing number of elderly, the idea of a smart home, supporting its inhabitants in their daily life, gains importance. In this chapter we present two experimental studies that investigate health-supporting technologies integrated into a living environment. We discuss (older) people...

Smart Interactive Textiles combine the warmth and omnipresence of textiles in our everyday lives with the benefits of modern information and communication technologies. The potential of innovation is not only based on technical ingenuity, but also on the consideration and embedding of peoples’ fears, requirements, desires, and wishes regarding thes...

Keeping an active lifestyle has been important and recommended for decades. The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunities to simplify the tracking and logging of data supporting that lifestyle. So-called activity or fitness trackers have become smaller and more affordable over the past few years. However, their use is not as wide...

Supply Chains and production networks are complex sociotechnical cyber-physical systems whose performance is determined by system, interface, and human factors. While the influence of system factors (e.g., variances in de- livery times and amount, queuing strategies) is well understood, the influence of interface and human factors on supply chain p...

Smart interactive textiles are the next frontier of ubiquitous computing and may serve as novel and accepted interfaces that go beyond conventional human-computer interaction. Apart from the technical perspective, it is important to understand if and under which conditions people adopt these technologies and which factors constitute perceived barri...

This research area focuses on the management systems and principles of a production system. It aims at controlling the complex interplay of heterogeneous processes in a highly dynamic environment, with special focus on individualized products in high-wage countries. The project addresses the comprehensive application of self-optimizing principles o...

With the increase in data availability and data volume it becomes increasingly important to extract information and actionable knowledge from data. Information Visualization helps the user to understand data by utilizing vision as a relatively parallel input channel to the user's mind. Decision Support systems on the other hand help users in making...

Deep penetration of modern information and communication technology in manufacturing companies (vertical integration) and across supply chains (horizontal integration) leads to an increasing amount and complexity of information that needs to be perceived, filtered, processed, and reacted to. Yet, the human factors that influence performance are ins...

Textile controls so far, have mostly been envisioned to be integrated to clothing. In our environment, however, much more textile interaction surfaces are available. In this paper, we present a capacitive textile sensor, seamlessly integrated into a motorized curtain. While the basic functionality is simply to open and close the curtain, its design...