Exploring domestic energy consumption feedback through interactive annotation

We report on a three-week field study in which participants from nine households were asked to annotate their domestic electricity consumption data using a prototype interactive visualisation. Through an analysis of the annotations and semi-structured interviews, our findings suggest that the intervention helped participants to develop a detailed and accurate understanding of their electricity consumption data. Our results suggest that energy data visualisations can be improved by having users actively manipulate and annotate their data, as doing so encourages reflection on how energy is being used, facilitating insights on how consumption can be reduced. One of the key findings from our thematic analysis was that participants went beyond the data in their reflections, talking about generational issues, upbringing, financial matters, socio-economic comparisons, environmental concern, mistrust towards utilities, convenience, comfort and self-reported waste. Reading beyond the data illustrates the importance of social practices in the context of energy feedback, embedding eco-feedback research into the relevant context of sociology and psychology research.

A remote and immersive setup for pandemic-safe surgical education

Existing challenges in surgical education (See one, do one, teach one) as well as the Covid-19 pandemic make it necessary to develop new ways for surgical training. This is also crucial for the dissemination of new technological developments. As today’s live transmissions of surgeries to remote locations always come with high information loss, e.g. stereoscopic depth perception, and limited communication channels. This work describes the implementation of a scalable remote solution for surgical training, called TeleSTAR (Telepresence for Surgical Assistance and Training using Augmented Reality), using immersive, interactive and augmented reality elements with a bi-lateral audio pipeline to foster direct communication. The system uses a full digital surgical microscope with a modular software-based AR interface, which consists of an interactive annotation mode to mark anatomical landmarks using an integrated touch panel as well as an intraoperative image-based stereo-spectral algorithm unit to measure anatomical details and highlight tissue characteristics.We broadcasted three cochlea implant surgeries in the context of otorhinolaryngology. The intervention scaled to five different remote locations in Germany and the Netherlands with lowlatency. In total, more than 150 persons could be reached and included an evaluation of a participant’s questionnaire indicating that annotated AR-based 3D live transmissions add an extra level of surgical transparency and improve the learning outcome.