Tan Gemicioglu

BreathePulse: Peripheral Guided Breathing via Implicit Airflow Cues for Information Work | Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Workplace stress contributes to poor performance and adverse health outcomes, yet current stress management tools often fall short in the fast-paced modern workforce. Guided slow breathing is a promis...

Check out the paper in the recent issue of IMWUT: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Breathing with the airflow guide increased workload, but more research is needed on the impact of habit formation and attention.

We found that the airflow guide was able to encourage slower and deeper breathing, but was less effective during harder tasks.

Our system was mounted on a laptop screen to replicate an information work setting in the lab. A fan pulsed on and off at 75% of the breathing rate of its user, and an air nozzle guided a subtle, gentle stream of air to the user's nose.

Guided slow breathing is one of the best ways to stay calm, but typically involves focused effort. Can guided breathing work unconsciously?
In a new paper with Thalia Viranda and Yiran Zhao, we designed the first airflow-based guided breathing system and evaluated its cognitive demands.

I had a few people whose profiles I learned from Twitter, then found yours by scrolling through who they followed and seeing who I recognized.

On a personal note, this project concludes my research at Georgia Tech after three years of development and experiments involving many students in GT Computing. Going forward, I'll be sharing work on more health-focused technology, including another paper that just got published.

Passive Haptic Rehearsal for Augmented Piano Learning in the Wild | Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Passive haptic learning (PHL) is a method for training motor skills via intensive repetition of haptic stimuli while a user is focused on other tasks. For the practical application of PHL to music edu...

If that sounds interesting, check out the paper in IMWUT's recent issue:
dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Or the public PDF on my website:
tangemicioglu.com/files/papers...

Instead of forgetting, participants kept learning between sessions thanks to the effect of the glove. In the future, our team is considering how we can make the gloves robust enough for daily wear and our learning system functional with any piano or keyboard.

Our approach significantly sped up learning the sequence of notes in piano. Across proficiency levels, participants were able to reach mastery two days earlier when using the glove.

We had twenty participants learn two piano pieces for one week each, with and without haptic gloves. They practiced piano at home, in the manner they preferred, and were supported by our web platform giving them performance feedback based on MIDI recordings from a keyboard.

Early studies showed that even people with no experience could play musical sequences, and later complete songs, with just vibrational instructions. Now, for the first time, we show that PHL works outside the lab and can be used with conventional piano practice.

YouTube video by Thad Starner Mobile Music Touch: Learning to Play Piano Melodies Without Attention

The principle behind this is an approach we call passive haptic learning (PHL). PHL has been studied for over 10 years in my former group at Georgia Tech. Here's a video on CNN from 14 years ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEdr...

We had study participants wear the gloves and receive vibrotactile sensations mimicking the piano sequence during their daily life: When they were cooking, watching a movie, taking a walk, etc., they continued to learn piano despite not paying attention to the vibration.

What if you could learn to play a new musical piece in just a few practice sessions? In my new paper, we show that using haptic gloves to passively rehearse piano pieces can speed up learning by 49.7%, and negating forgetting between practice sessions.

Thanks for including me! I would also recommend @sachinpendse.bsky.social and @dadler.bsky.social for the list.