DIVISIÓN DE PROGRAMAS SOCIALES E INCLUSION SOCIAL 2.1. DEL NUTRICIONISTA I (Jefe)

In this thesis, animal biotelemetry tags are referred to as a kind of wearable computer. With respect to what has been said in section 2.3.4, human biotelemetry devices certainly are. In

15 _{The stance in this research is that UCD can be applied when the designer has an interest in fulfilling the} interactors’ needs. Although other interpretations might be considered (e.g. that animal wearers are passive users and they come under a broader definition of user), this research uses the umbrella term of interactors, while distinguishing such interactors on the basis of their interaction with the device.

fact, the definitions of wearable electronics available in the literature within the domain of human wearable computing regard interactors as simultaneously users and wearers. For example, Knight and colleagues define a wearable as a computer that “is attached to the body and does not require muscular effort to remain in contact with the body (i.e. you do not have to hold it, which would require muscular grip force); (…) remains attached to the body regardless of the body’s orientation or activity (i.e. you do not have to take it off to perform a task specific action, even when not using the computer); (…) does not have to be detached to be inreacted with” (Knight et al. 2006, p. 75). At the same time, however, the fundamental characteristic of a wearable expressed in such definitions is its close relationship with the body, which highlights the role of physical aspects as central in relation to the interaction.

As such, wearability concepts have been proposed exactly to interpret such bodily relations. Early proposals are from the early ‘80s, when Steve Mann pioneered the practice of devising, crafting and using his own body-borne computers and sensors (Mann 1996). Mann tells an early story of physical and social awkwardness due to the conspicuousness of the system he wore, where people around him conveyed astonishment about the cumbersome combination of body and machines. However, Mann’s goals were about functionality and capability rather than unobtrusiveness, such that he reported feeling more empowered than uncomfortable with his garish equipment and carried on wearing it in communal spaces such as banks. What Mann himself pointed out in his narrative, and which has importance for this research, is that wearables have a “very intimate form of interaction with the wearer” and such interaction might either violate the personal space (e.g. the interactor does not accept the device) or provide exceptional control over the wearer’s activities (e.g. the interactor feels enabled with extra capabilities) (Mann 1996). Ever since, in order to minimise obtrusion (which relates to physicality) and maximise control (which relates to usage), wearable devices have progressed to combine functionalities and capabilities with miniaturisation, leading to a much wider acceptance, normalisation and consumption of wearable devices by the public compared with Mann’s early developments.

Later on, Gemperle and colleagues named the physical properties of wearables ‘wearability’ and defined this as “the interaction between the human body and the wearable object” (Gemperle et al. 1998). Moving beyond the simple miniaturisation of wearable devices, the authors referred to the human body as the dynamic and sensory environment that supports the wearable. Consequently, the wearer’s body shape, motion, and sensory apparatus should determine form, location, and attachment features of the device. In this sense, wearability becomes the goal of shaping the physical features of a device in a way that conforms with an acceptable mobile and sensory interaction. In their study, the authors proposed 13 guidelines for accomplishing wearability based on the human form and dynamics (Gemperle et al. 1998). They are:

1- Placement: where the wearable should be placed on the human body in order to be

unobtrusive.

2- Humanistic form language: what human body curves (concavities and convexities) the wearable should reflect in order to be comfortable.

3- Human movement: how joints and muscle contractions limit the positioning of a wearable to allow freedom of motion, while shaping the form of the wearable itself. 4- Proxemics: to what extent the wearable can protrude from the body without hitting

against surfaces, so it is not perceived as foreign to the intimate space around the body. 5- Size variation: how a wearable can adjust to changes in muscle and fat mass.

6- Attachment: how a wearable can be fastened to the body in a comfortable and

adjustable way.

7- Containment: in what way the form of the electronic components inside a wearable

constrain the shape of the external case.

8- Weight: where to put a wearable without destabilising the balance of the body.

9- Accessibility: how to make a wearable more usable through sensory inputs (through the wearer’s body) such as visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli.

10- Sensory interaction: how something that is on the body is perceived.

11- Thermal: how a wearable affects the body’s need to breath and its sensitivity to the heat that the wearable may produce.

12- Aesthetics: what shapes, materials, textures and colours are preferred by users. 13- Long-term use: what are the physical and mental effects that may be produced by a

device that is continuously attached to the human body (which implies that wearing a device is somewhat equivalent to using it).

Most of these guidelines (namely placement, form language, movement, proxemics, sizing, attachment, containment, weight, thermal, aesthetics, and long-term use) could be applied to the design of animal wearables, consistently with the animals’ characteristics. For example, the suggestion of considering joint and muscle contraction for designing a wearable that allows freedom of motion on the site of attachment is applicable to any animal (human or non-human) and would need to take into account the joint and muscle qualities of the target species.

However, these guidelines also consider aspects of the design that are not relevant to the design of animal biotelemetry. For example, accessibility does not apply in the case of animal wearers, since they are not users; and since they are not users, sensory inputs (i.e.

sensory stimuli) are not required and are, in fact, undesirable. Indeed, if animal wearers are not trained to use a device, any sensory interaction is foreign and therefore liable to produce an effect (for example, an electronic sound coming from a body-attached tag might mystify the wearer about its origin). Then arguably, the device should produce no stimuli for the wearer, that is it should be imperceptible, in order to avoid interference with the wearer’s daily activities and experiences.

Overall, these guidelines provide a good basis from which to start designing wearables for animals, taking into account the target species-specific sensory, physical and cognitive characteristics, consistent with the existing guidelines for animal biotelemetry described in section 2.3.1. Indeed, merging human-centred and animal-minded guidelines is the approach currently taken by ACI designers such as Valentin and colleagues (Valentin et al. 2015a). (The authors’ work and its limitations will be more extensively described in the next section 2.4.2, dedicated to animal wearability). However, as discussed in section 2.3.2 (p. 28), a guideline approach is limited with respect to a framework, since it does not foster the exploration of other variables and contexts other than those prescribed by the guidelines themselves, and since it is vulnerable to subjective thinking rather than facilitate systematic reasoning informed by established principles (Gould and Lewis 1985; Blackwell and Green 2003).

A different approach to human wearability is that of Anliker and colleagues (2004), who proposed a systematic methodology for the design of wearability in human wearable systems, which integrates functionality and hardware aspects. Particularly with regards to the hardware properties, the authors explicitly refer to wearability as a design goal and state that “the wearable system needs to be unobtrusive to the degree that it does not interfere with the user’s activity and does not change his appearance in any unacceptable way” (Anliker et al. 2004). In this respect, they refer to wearability as a physical constraint and developed a metric to calculate a wearability factor with which to determine how obtrusive a device might be for a human wearer. The tool that they provide is a generic flexible formula whose terms have to be determined case by case. In other words, in order to calculate the wearability factor, other parameters and values are needed to replace the generic formula terms. Relevant parameters include size, mass, or heat dissipation. However, Anliker and colleagues do not discuss them further; instead, the authors delegate the decision as to which aspects need to be considered and quantified to research fields such as ergonomics and sociology (Anliker et al. 2004).

This kind of quantification still is missing in animal biotelemetry, rendering the Anliker’s tool inapplicable with animals. At present, there is little prior quantitative work specifically focussing on animal wearability factors. What work is there refers to aspects related to animal usability of wearables when animals are concurrently wearers and users, thus intertwining wearability and usability aspects of a design, as in (most of) human

biotelemetry (e.g. trained search and rescue dogs who wear vests allowing them to remotely communicate with their handlers through a wearable interface). So far, snout reachability in dogs has been investigated by Valentin and colleagues at Georgia Tech’s ACI Lab (Valentin et al. 2014) to establish the twisting capabilities of canine trunks and which part of their body dogs can access more easily with their nose, and thus where to place a wearable interface for the dog to use to complete given tasks. In this case, ‘reachability’ is accountable as a usability-wearability factor; however, this factor loses its relevance when animals are only wearers.

Although both Anliker (2004) and Valentin (2014)’s work provides a solid basis on which to build a systematic approach to wearability design for animal wearables, Anliker’s proposed framework is not detailed enough and not applicable given current animal wearability knowledge, while Valentin’s detailed model is relevant to wearability only when this is linked to usability. Hence, there is a need for a comprehensive but more detailed framework that is specifically focused on aspects that directly pertain to wearability (i.e. the very fact of wearing a device). Next, section reviews some of the work that has such a focus on animals.