Embodied Head Gesture and Distance Education

Traditional distance education settings are usually based on video teleconferencing scenarios where human emotions and social presence are only expressed by the facial and vocal expressions which are not enough for complete presence; our bodily gestures and actions play a vital role in understanding exact meaning of communication patterns; especially in teaching-learning scenarios. The bodily gestures especially head movements offer cues to understand contextual knowledge during conversational dialogue. In this work, we have considered the tutor's head gesture embodiment for educational assistive robot and compared the results with the standard audio-video tele-conferencing scenarios used in online education. We have used Embodied Telepresence System (ETS) to investigate the distance communication for online education setting. Our ETS emulates the head gestures of the human tutor for distance education scenario. Our experimental study includes ten able-bodied subjects (5 male and 5 female) from various countries. These participants were asked to participate in online education scenario through i) a traditional video conferencing tool, i.e. Skype and ii) an extended setup based on ETS. The statistical analysis is done on the results which indicates the effectiveness of our novel embodied head gesture based approach in distance education setting. Our experimental studies show that the proposed design of embodied head gesture based ETS is able to improve the user engagement in distance education.