Assistive technologies

Prof. Hourcade is currently conducting research on ways of helping young children and people with motor impairments use pointing devices. This involves the development and evaluation of PointAssist, a tool that detects difficulty in pointing tasks based on an analysis of sub-movement characteristics and adjusts cursor location accordingly. Research studies suggest PointAssist can help young children and older adults conduct pointing tasks.

Technologies for children with autism spectrum disorders

Prof. Hourcade is researching technologies to support communication, collaboration, creativity and self-expression for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as part of the Open Autism Software initiative. Our research involves using multi-touch displays to support face-to-face activities, as well as, the development of design methodologies to partner with children with ASD, their teachers, and special education staff.

Health information and communication technologies

Prof. Hourcade is working with an interdisciplinary group of researchers in designing and evaluating technologies to help older adults manage their health. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funds this research.

Human-computer interaction for peace

Prof. Hourcade has started an initiative, called HCI for Peace, to study the role human-computer interaction can play in promoting peace and preventing conflict. This has involved organizing meetings and panels at conferences, developing a research agenda, and disseminating research already conducted to this end.

Multi-touch displays

Prof. Hourcade has researched several aspects related to multi-touch displays. This includes the development of PyMT, an open source, post-WIMP, platform-independent, multi-touch user interface toolkit.

Software to support children's creativity, collaboration, and learning

Prof. Hourcade is currently researching communication technologies to support children with Autism Spectrum Disorders that include the use of multi-touch displays and augmented reality. During his graduate studies, Prof. Hourcade was the main developer of KidPad, a collaborative storytelling tool for children. He has also studied children's use of information visualization technologies, online search and presentation tools to support inquiry of digitized information.

Pointing tasks

Prof. Hourcade has conducted studies on children's performance with mice. His research has illustrated the need for young children to have interactions designed for their needs and abilities. He has studied how the way children use mice differs greatly from the way young adults use mice. He has also researched the impact of mouse size on children's performance. In addition, Prof. Hourcade conducted a study on the performance of older adults when conducting simple pen-based interactions with handheld computers. An additional study, provided guidelines for one-handed thumb tapping on touchscreen handheld devices.

Interaction and experience design for security software

Prof. Hourcade collaborated with Prof. Eunjin (EJ) Jung in the development of BayeShield, a tool to identify malicious websites, warn people effectively about these threats, communicate with users to reduce detection uncertainty, and educate them so they will be able to identify the threats on their own.

Information dissemination and digital libraries

As large amounts of digital content become available online there are many challenges in designing user interfaces that can enable a variety of users to find what they are looking for and understand what they find. Prof. Hourcade has worked on these research issues, designing user interfaces for children's digital libraries (e.g. the International Children's Digital Library), and consulting on websites that provide access to statistical data.