Somaye Rahini and Ines Ayed have been with us for the last few months, on short-term PhD studentship visits. Now they have finished their time here: Somaye has returned to the University of Teheran in Iran, and Ines will return to Palma and the University of the Balearics.
Somaye worked mostly on designing a Virtual Human Resources Development (VHRD) social network, including building an interactive prototype for testing her ideas. She also completed a paper that has now been submitted to a major journal in the area.
Ines has been developing games aimed at encouraging older people to exercise and improve their balance, using the Kinect platform. She made a set of movement games, with and without a cognitive puzzle element, investigating how this factor affects motivation and the sense of presence in the game. We are currently testing them with our Senior-IT group in Åsele.
We wish Somaye and Ines all the best for 2020 and their future careers!