Education purposed human - machine interaction and physiotherapy application of it

Human - Machine Interaction (HMI) could be defined as a general scientific topic that deals with understanding how people interact with computers, machines, robots and other technological environments. With HMI studies, it is aimed to make these environments into more effective ones for humanity. In this thesis study, both robot and holographic agent applications are developed to teach a task to human through HMI. Thanks to these applications, for the first time in the literature, these two agents were compared in terms of their success rates, advantages and disadvantages with a teaching aspect. Using the experience and the methods developed from these applications, teaching human with the hologram concept has been moved to the field of physical therapy. For the first time in the literature, a holographic treatment application has been developed which teaches patients the exercise movements needed for the treatment of neck pain and supervises them while they are practicing. In the first application of the thesis, experimental studies aiming to teach a task to humans were realized. First, an experimental environment based on intention reshaping was prepared for a robot agent and then a similar one was designed as Augmented Reality (AR) environment on a HoloLens device. The results obtained from the experiments, which were carried out with both agents and 50 individuals, were evaluated according to the metrics derived from educational studies in the literature. According to the results obtained, it was seen that robot agent was 48% and hologram agent was 24% successful in teaching a task to the human. Thus, it was concluded that the robot teacher is more successful. With this application, an algorithm that controls the hologram with Finite State Machines (FSM) method was developed for the first time in a HMI study. In addition to this, users' movements were modeled with Context - Free Grammar (CFG) and Push Down Automaton (PDA) methods so that holograms would be used to teach more complex tasks. The second application, which was carried out within the scope of this thesis, is teaching the physical therapy movements that are necessary for the treatment of neck pain with holograms. With this application, a system has been developed to be a solution for the problem of patients who are not loyal to the treatment or who applied the treatment incorrectly in the literature. With this system, patients' movements are checked if they were done with correct angle, number of repetitions and time period by using sensors on HoloLens and markers placed around. In addition, exercise movements are taught to patients with holographic videos, directive holograms and sounds. In order to measure the efficiency of this system, experiments were realized with 30 individuals; 15 of them were selected to the control group and 15 of them were selected to the test group. While, time period, number of repeat and angle error rates were 36.4%, 8% and 27.3% in the control group, the error rates in the test group were 0%, 0% and 9.1%, respectively. Also, images and video recordings collected during the experiments were built as a data set for future studies. With the studies in this thesis, people were guided with HMI and as a result of this, it was contributed to provide benefit to the people in need with technological devices. Keywords: Augmented Reality, Education Technology, Human – Robot Interaction, Human – Machine Interaction, Mixed Reality, Neck Pain Therapy, Physiotherapy