afrodrigues@fc.ul.pt

André Rodrigues

Assistant Professor

I am a Computer Science researcher focused on Human-Computer Interaction with a particular interest in how technology can be leveraged in gaming. Most of my research centres around inclusive gaming, attempting to maximise the opportunities for play across individuals with disparate requirements/abilities, with the goal of promoting positive social outcomes. For the last ten years, I have dedicated myself to learning, designing, developing and evaluating mobile services, games, applications and platforms for a variety of contexts (e.g. people with visual and/or motor impairments, people experiencing homelessness, people with Parkinson’s Disease), always working closely with and/or within the communities I engage with.

Publications

Speed-of-Light VR for Blind People: Conveying the Location of Arm-Reach Targets

Diogo Lança, Manuel Piçarra, Inês Gonçalves, Uran Oh, André Rodrigues, João Guerreiro

ASSETS 2024 ‑ 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

PDF

Promoting Family Play through Asymmetric Game Design

Pedro Pais, David Gonçalves, Kathrin Gerling, Teresa Romão, Tiago Guerreiro, André Rodrigues

CSCW 2024 ‑ ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, October, 2024

PDF

Investigating Virtual Reality Locomotion Techniques with Blind People

Renato Alexandre Ribeiro, Inês Gonçalves, Manuel Piçarra, Letícia Seixas Pereira, Carlos Duarte, André Rodrigues, João Guerreiro

CHI 2024 ‑ ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May, 2024

A Living Framework for Understanding Cooperative Games

Pedro Pais, David Gonçalves, Daniel Reis, João Godinho, João Morais, Manuel Piçarra, Pedro Trindade, Dmitry Alexandrovsky, Kathrin Gerling, João Guerreiro, André Rodrigues

CHI 2024 ‑ ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May, 2024

The Trick is to Stay Behind?: Defining and Exploring the Design Space of Player Balancing Mechanics

David Gonçalves, Daniel Barros, Pedro Pais, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, André Rodrigues

CHI 2024 ‑ ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May, 2024

Projects

A chat application with the keyboard open and the written sentences displayed: Collects anywhere the user writes, Password and number fields are ignored, calculates more than 20 metrics

A privacy-aware keyboard toolkit for data collection in-the-wild. With it you will be able to collect everyday typing data, enabling continuous and spontaneous assessments, without collecting any sensitive information.

A keyboard scheme with dots representing each of the collected touch points. Each key as dots from a different color. There is a concentration of dots on the most used keys (e.g. a, s and space)

Accessible Text-Entry

For over 10 years we have investigated nonvisual text input on touchscreens. We have characterized in dept users’ behaviors and contributed with novel interfaces and interaction techniques.

Hybrid-Brailler prototype (a) PCB components. (b) 3D-printed case attached to a mobile device with three rows of three buttons that are on the back of the device.

Haptics and mobile devices! In Braille I/O we have focused on bringing Braille back to the forefront of the digital era with novel techniques and a exploration of haptics to enable text input on mobile devices.

A screenshot of the assistive play donor application. On the top side it shows a screenshot of fruit ninja with two traces, of two different swipes. Below a list of options to annotate which actions those traces correspond to. Finally, in the last third of the image, a timeline is shown with the limits of each gestured identified by the app.

Inclusive Gaming

By acknowledging that players have different needs and preferences, we explore strategies to create gaming experiences that are more engaging and inclusive to everyone!

The robot Baxter with his arms extended and a blind person feeling its hands

HRI for Health & Accessibility

Robots have a very particular set of skills. Skills that have been acquired over a vast amount of reasearch. Skills that make them powerful tools to leverage for social inclusion, accessibility and interaction.

A blind person interacting with his smarptphone using over the ear headphones

Smartphone Accessibility

From newcomers to experts, we have characterized the challenges that blind people overcome. We explored how to provide effective self-contained smartphone assistance with the ultimate goal of promoting self-efficacy.

Storyboard demonstrating a shower attack.

Unauthorized Access to Smartphones

Unlike unlock authentication, which is an active defense against physical intrusion, passive defenses aim to primarily provide awareness, traceability, and recovery from intrusions; and to only secondarily engage counter-measures like blocking access. In sensitive computer systems, passive security is embodied in Intrusion Detection and Response (IDR) systems. To end-users, however, parallel capabilities remain unavailable, or lack security and usability validation, despite the severe privacy implications of intrusions. We thus envision a mobile IDR which is usable by individuals with no technical training; which can detect suspicious activity based on semantics of intrusion behavior; and which can respond to threats per their importance.