Ken Takaki (D3), Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, received the 2023 ACM SIGCHI Honorable Mention Award

In April 2023, Ken Takaki (D3), who belongs to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, received the 2023 ACM SIGCHI Honorable Mention Award.

2023 ACM SIGCHI Honorable Mention Award
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023), the most prestigious international conference in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, took place from April 23rd to 28th, 2023, in a hybrid format both online and in Hamburg, Germany. The Honorable Mention Award is a prize awarded to the top 5% of the papers submitted to CHI 2023.

About awarded research
Ken Takaki, Etsushi Nozaki, Tomomi Kanai, Ari Hautasaari, Akinori Kashio, Daisuke Sato, Teru Kamogashira, Tsukasa Uranaka, Shinji Urata, Hajime Koyama, Tatsuya Yamasoba, and Yoshihiro Kawahara. 2023.

asEars: Designing and Evaluating the User Experience of Wearable Assistive Devices for Single-Sided Deafness.

In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23).

Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 44, 1–17.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580840

Individuals with single-sided deafness face challenges in everyday life especially in social situations. This study focused on the development of asEars, a glasses-style device designed to assist those with single-sided deafness. The team, including Ken Takaki, who himself is affected by the condition, conducted the research.
In the study, ten participants with single-sided deafness used both asEars and conventional hearing aids for four weeks. The research demonstrated higher satisfaction rates with asEars and identified factors influencing the acceptance of this new device.

Your impression & future plan
The entire team of authors is greatly honored to receive this award. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to our collaborators who embarked on this large-scale experiment with us, and to everyone who has supported our research activities. We plan to further improve the asEars device and make it available globally, with the aim of enhancing the quality of life for individuals with hearing impairments, especially with single-sided deafness.