Silvia Ceccacci

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at University of Macerata

Writing is first-order instrumental learning that develops throughout the life cycle, a complex process evolving from early childhood education. The identification of risk predictors of dysgraphia at age 5 has the potential to significantly reduce the impact of graphomotor difficulties in early primary school, which affects handwriting performance...

This study contributes to understanding semi-automated ergonomic risk assessments in industrial manufacturing environments, proposing a practical tool for enhancing worker safety and operational efficiency. In the Industry 5.0 era, the human-centric approach in manufacturing is crucial, especially considering the aging workforce and the dynamic nat...

The paper proposes a novel unified classification of digital games, i.e., video games and serious games, due to the recent interest of academia and industry for their use to achieve several educational purposes. The paper reviews existing cataloging systems and proposes a five-definition based matrix cataloging including a set of key digital game m...

Virtual museum systems have been shown to play a key role in enhancing visitor’s experience and increasing the accessibility of cultural artifacts. In this context, the use of haptic interfaces based on force feedback could increase the level of immersivity of these systems and the quality of the interaction between visitors and cultural artifacts,...

The use of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), has become increasingly popular in museums to enhance the visitor experience. However, the impact of XR technologies on Learning Performance in the context of archeological museums needs to be better understood. This study...

This paper aims to explore the potential offered by emotion recognition systems to provide a feasible response to the growing need for audience understanding and development in the field of arts organizations. Through an empirical study, it was investigated whether the emotional valence measured on the audience through an emotion recognition system...

This study aims at comparing three assembly training applications based on different XR technologies characterized by different degrees of immersion (i.e., an MR application based on Hololens 2, a desktop AR application and a digital handbook visualized on a monitor). A total of 54 subjects, recruited among students and personnel of Universit`a Pol...

Nowadays, web designers are forced to have an even deeper perception of how users approach their products in terms of user experience and usability. Remote Usability Testing (RUT) is the most appropriate tool to assess the usability of web platforms by measuring the level of user attention, satisfaction, and productivity. RUT does not require the p...

This study introduces a new operational tool based on the AEIOU observational framework to support the design of adaptive human machine interfaces (HMIs) that aim to modify people’s behavior and support people’s choices, to improve safety using emotional regulation techniques, through the management of environmental characteristics (e.g., temperatu...

This paper introduces a web-platform system that performs semi-automatic compute of several risk indexes, based on the considered evaluation method (e.g., RULA—Rapid Upper Limb Assessment, REBA—Rapid Entire Body Assessment, OCRA—OCcupational Repetitive Action) to support ergonomics risk estimation, and provides augmented analytics to proactively im...

This paper introduces a system that enable the collection of relevant data related to the emotional behavior and attention of both student and professor during exams. It exploits facial coding techniques to enable the collection of a large amount of data from the automatic analysis of students and professors faces using video analysis, advanced tec...

This article introduces at a conceptual level a system based on AI technologies, able to determine the customer profile, in order to support customer experience design and management accordingly to a customer-centered approach, by extracting information from video stream provided by the security cameras installed in a store. The system collects cus...

Driver behaviour recognition is of paramount importance for in-car automation assistance. It is widely recognized that not only attentional states, but also emotional ones have an impact on the safety of the driving behaviour. This research work proposes an emotion-aware in-car architecture where it is possible to adapt driver’s emotions to the veh...

In the face of the growing number of students with disabilities enrolled at the University, it is necessary to rethink the educational and teaching proposals from an inclusive perspective. This necessarily implies careful planning of even one of the most delicate phases of the teaching and learning process for all students: the final exam of a disc...

Featured Application We introduce a motion capture tool that uses at least one RGB-camera, exploiting an open-source deep learning model with low computational requirements, already used to im-plement mobile apps for mobility analysis. Experimental results suggest the suitability of this tool to perform posture analysis aimed at assessing the RULA...

There are several situations where the success of a product or a service depends on people’s emotional reactions while interacting with it. Feelings depends on the personal reaction to the values it offers. Therefore, it is not possible to presume that all persons will share the same reactions. An important challenge that designers have to face is...

In the last years, museums have begun to apply new technological solutions to manage their exhibits in a more open, inclusive, and creative way, to improve the visitors’ experience to respond to the need to expand the audience. The main goal is to face the increasing competition in an economy referred to as the “Experience Economy”. To this end, Au...

In the last years, museums have begun to apply new technological solutions to manage their exhibits in a more open, inclusive, and creative way, to improve the visitors’ experience to respond to the need to expand the audience. The main goal is to face the increasing competition in an economy referred to as the “Experience Economy”. To this end, Au...

This paper introduces a new recommendation system for museums able to profile the visitors and propose them the most suitable exhibition path accordingly, to improve visitors’ satisfaction. It consists of an interactive touch screen totem, which implements a USB camera and exploits Convolutional Neural Network to perform facial coding to measure vi...

This paper reports the results of a research, aimed to evaluate the ability of a haptic interface to improve the user experience with virtual museum systems. In particular, two user studies have been carried out in order to: (1) determine similarities between visual and tactile experiences during manipulation of a 3D printed replica of an artefact...

What is User Experience (UX) and how does it relate to Usability? The understanding of the mutual relationship between UX and product usability has a strong impact on product design methodologies and on the design outcomes’ success. This paper aims to investigate such relationship thanks to a set of experiments around the design of interactive prod...

This paper introduces an e-learning platform for the management courses based on MOOCs, able to continuously monitoring student’s behavior through facial coding techniques, with a low computational effort client-side and provide useful insight for the instructor. The system exploits the most recent developments in Deep Learning and Computer Vision...

Thispaperintroducesanewrecommendationsystemformuseumsabletoprofilethevisitorsandproposethemthemostsuitableexhibitionpathaccordingly,toimprovevisitors’satisfaction.Itconsistsofaninteractivetouchscreentotem,whichimplementsaUSBcameraandexploitsConvolutionalNeu-ralNetworktoperformfacialcodingtomeasurevisitors’emotionsandestimatetheirageandgender.Basedo...

Virtual museum systems, based on different X-reality technologies, has begun to spread, as they represent decisive tools to promote exhibitions and reaching out to audiences. Although budgetary considerations have so far limited the choice of technologies a wide range of possible technological options are available today at low cost. This paper pro...

This paper introduces a motion analysis system based on a network of common RGB cameras, which provides the measurement of various angles considered for postural assessment, in order to facilitate the evaluation of the ergonomic indices commonly used for the determination of risk of musculoskeletal disorders of operators in manufacturing workplaces...

The paper describes the conceptual model of an emotion-aware car interface able to: map both the driver’s cognitive and emotional states with the vehicle dynamics; adapt the level of automation or support the decision-making process if emotions negatively affecting the driving performance are detected; ensure emotion regulation and provide a unique...

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is a prominent strategy comprising all the operational techniques and actions required to ensure machine availability and to prevent a machine-down failure. One of the main challenges of PdM is to design and develop an embedded smart system to monitor and predict the health status of the machine. In this work, we use a...

Very often historical buildings used as museums are characterized by rooms completely covered with decorations (e.g. frescoes, inlay, etc.) rich in details and symbolic contents. Providing adequate information to the visitors to allow them to fully appreciate the artworks is of paramount importance in this context. X-reality technologies have the p...

Nowadays, smartphones and laptops equipped with cameras have become an integral part of our daily lives. The pervasive use of cameras enables the collection of an enormous amount of data, which can be easily extracted through video images processing. This opens up the possibility of using technologies that until now had been restricted to laborator...

Predictive Maintenance concerns the smart monitoring of machine to avoid possible future failures, since because it is better to intervene before the damage occurs, saving time and money. In this paper, a Predictive Maintenance methodology based on Machine learning approach is presented and it is applied to a real cutting machine, a woodworking mac...

This paper describes the conceptual model and the implementation of an emotion aware system able to manage multimedia contents (i.e., music tracks) and lightning scenarios, based on the user’s emotion, detected from facial expressions. The system captures the emotions from the user’s face expressions, mapping them into a 2D valence-arousal space wh...

The Internet of Things market is rapidly increasing and offers a wide variety of Smart Products (SPs) apparently similar but with different potentialities that the average user fails to perceive. In order to reduce purchase risks, consumers rely on online product reviews, which do not often reflect the effective quality of the products. For this ai...

Nowadays, smartphones and laptops equipped with cameras have become an integral part of our daily lives. The pervasive use of cameras enables the collection of an enormous amount of data, which can be easily extracted through video images processing. This opens up the possibility of using technologies that until now had been restricted to laborator...

This article proposes the use of an expert knowledge-based system capable of identifying possible machine tool failures caused by accidental events (e.g., cable disconnection, incorrect parameterization of machining, impact event, etc.). The proposed approach aims to identify the unpredictable causes of failures, starting from the analysis of the p...

The technology has become a common part of our daily lives, and the integration of touchscreen technology into devices is quickly becoming equally common. In recent years, much research has been conducted on how people interact with handheld devices and on different types and uses of touchscreen technology, but there are few studies regarding peopl...

The present work introduces an emotional tracking system to monitor Shopping Experience at different touchpoints in a store, based on the elaboration of the information extracted from biometric data and facial expressions. Preliminary tests suggest that the proposed system can be effectively used in a retail context.

This research aims to develop a system that examines and reacts to the changing behaviors and emotions of individuals in order to improve their shopping experience. The system is able to track emotions in real time at different touchpoints in a store and control a set of networked devices to configure the sensing space and all provided services res...

In the last decade, the environmental sustainability has become an important issue that drives more and more the consumer decisions. Consequently, industrial companies are called to meet the growing demand for more sustainable products. Especially in the furniture sector, customers pay serious attention to the emissions that negatively affect human...

Spatial Augmented reality (SAR) represents a key technology for the development of smart manufacturing as it is barrier free, does not require the use of Head Mounted Displays or any other wearable devices and it fits most of the industrial constraints. The paper presents a novel SAR-based system to support the manual work in future smart factories...

Touchscreen technologies have become increasingly common in personal devices, so it seems necessary to improve their accessibility and usability for the older people. In the past years, a lot of studies have been conducted to improve touch interfaces, however, most them do not consider older people with very low attitude with ICTs. Moreover, the ma...

This study describes an User-Centered approach to design an User Interface (UI) to support daily activities of people with dementia. Such interface is the main hub of a home automation system able to monitor the house and reminds to the users some information when they approach the door to leave the home. In order to involve end users in UI evaluat...

The purpose of the research is to develop an intelligent system able to support the design and management of a Customer Experience (CX) strategy based on the emotions tracked in real time at the different touchpoints in a store. The system aim is to make the shopping experience responsive to the customers’ emotional state and behaviour and to sugge...

In the recent years, the creation of a good Customer Experience has become one of means to help companies in competing in the arena of retail. This have led to a focus shift from product design to the customer services’ design and customer marketing with the aim to elicit a unique experience able to improve customer satisfaction, influence customer...

This paper presents a structured User Centered Design (UCD) method to design and develop a highly usable smart home platform to manage the energy consumption of connected appliances. It exploits advanced Tangible Augmented Reality (TAR) technologies to virtually prototype the conceived design solutions and carry out usability testing with sample us...

Search engines play an important role in determining the success of e-commerce. Despite many efforts have been made to improve searching methods (SM) they remain mostly limited to semantic elaboration of keywords. This implies that the SM are not capable of supporting the research of products that best satisfy customers, according to their characte...

Wearable computers allow users to record and access information at any time. The adoption and use of such devices is largely dependent on the users’ acceptance of the technology. Previous studies investigated technology acceptance of wearables without having end-users directly trying the technology. The present paper aims at assessing the user acce...

Over the last years, several approaches have been defined to support Universal Design. However, a method that allows supporting universal design process in a systematic way is still lacking. Consequently, very often, products are merely designed according to design guidelines, without considering their effective context of use, while the success of...

In an inclusive and accessible smart environments context the implementation of the “design for all” method presents several critical issues. In fact, the universal design represents a difficult challenge for the designer because it depends on the complexity of human intentions in a particular time and place. For this reason, we propose a new appro...

What is User Experience (UX) and how does it relate to Usability? The understanding of the mutual relationship between UX and product usability has a strong impact on product design methodologies and on the design outcomes’ success. This paper aims to investigate such relationship thanks to a set of experiments around the design of interactive prod...

Search engine efficiency is an essential prerequisite to ensure a satisfactory on-line purchasing experience. Despite powerful tools available today, search engine is limited to a semantic elaboration of keywords and they do not allow users finding product categories that do not belong to their knowledge sphere. In this context, in order to make an...

Smart Objects (SOs) market offers a wide variety of products apparently similar but characterized by different features that the average users fail to perceive. Consequently, their purchasing is often based on price and brand affection. In this context, users need a tool able to guide them in choosing the most suitable object to satisfy their expec...

The continuous progress of interaction technologies reveals that we are witnessing a revolution that is leading to a redefinition of the concept of “user interface” and to the development of new ways to interact with the electronic devices of all sizes and capabilities. Current trends in research related to the HumanMachine Interaction (HMI) show a...

Nowadays to design a product able to adapt to end-users with different needs and abilities it is necessary to manage a multitude of information coming from the analysis of different context of use. This means that we have to handle parallel and interdependent UCD multiple process. This research aims to define a methodology, which may apply this phi...

The present paper proposes a new adaptive smart kitchen environment able to support different users with several typologies of impairment (i.e., visual, motor, cognitive) in performing cooking activities. This system is managed through an adaptive user interface, which guides the user in food preparation according to users’ capabilities and needs a...

The present study proposes a new method to manage adaptation behaviour of adaptive system according to the output information provide by a user model based on Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). Such method has been applied in the development of smart interfaces for cooking and kitchen management, such as meal preparation and interaction with the major...

The present study proposes a new method to manage adaptation behaviour of adaptive system according to the output information provide by a user model based on Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). Such method has been applied in the development of smart interfaces for cooking and kitchen management, such as meal preparation and interaction with the major...

User involvement during design process is an important issue in inclusive design ID. To this purpose, in the last years, virtual reality VR technologies have been introduced to construct virtual prototypes, in order to allow test with users even at the end of the conceptual design phase. The present paper aims to propose a method to support the sel...

In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modelling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction to generate...

In order to study and develop adaptive user interfaces with the purpose to guarantee socialization, safety and environmental sustainability in a domestic day-by-day living space, a new method of holistic and adaptive user interface is proposed to support the modelling of information related to the user and the context of the interaction to generate...

Demographic changes resulting in increasing of elderly population will have substantial societal implications, ranging from the workforce to the funding of welfare system. Maintaining independent living for longer is essential to ensure a sustainable welfare system: this is why inclusion is an important topic for European Union. In this context, te...

Designing a multiuser adaptive interface means designing for diversity in end-users and contexts of use, and implies making alternative design decisions, at various levels of the interaction project, inherently leading to diversity in the final design outcomes. Nowadays Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) is becoming one of the major objectives address...

Quality of life of various types of people can strongly benefit of a design process developed to take into account needs and requirements of end users. In this context the paper present a study on the cognitive and physical abilities of elderly persons, to design a friendly kitchen, that is considered one of the most complex home environment for th...

Designing a multiuser adaptive interface means designing for diversity in end-users and contexts of use, and implies making alternative design decisions, at various levels of the interaction project, inherently leading to diversity in the final design outcomes. Nowadays Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) is becoming one of the major objectives address...

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting people’s independent living. However an inventory of characteristics of smart products currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products in o...

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting independent living. However, an inventory of characteristics of smart assistive devices currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products and...

Smart home grids require that their control devices are both usable and acceptable. The assessment of device usability and acceptability is often neglected due to the cost of prototyping solutions to be submitted to end-user during the different stages of the design process. In this context, the present paper describes a structured User-Centered De...

Highly usable human-system interfaces can have a large benefit on the quality of life for the elderly and disabled. New emerging product design technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), give many opportunities to evaluate and improve system usability in the early design stages. In this way different design alternatives...

Quality of life of elderly and disabled people can strongly benefit of highly usable human-systems interfaces. New emerging product design technologies give many opportunities in order to evaluate and improve systems usability in early design stages. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality tools allow simulating the behaviour of user that interacts w...

Modern technological products, working and living environments, are ever more rich in potential functionalities for end-users (e.g. communication support, facilitation of physical actions, etc.). The increasing functionalities make these products complex to develop. Research efforts are focused on the development of highly usable products and envir...