Organization profile

Introduction / mission

The Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) group analyzes people’s interaction with technology with the aim to better understand and improve the match between technology and its users.

Highlighted phrase

Exploring the connection between humans and technology

Organisational profile

Research of the Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) focuses on social and cognitive psychology and persuasion, analyzing how humans interact with technology in ways that work best for them and for society at at large.

Behavioral sciences can deliver value to a society suffused with technology, based on solid theory and a methodological approach. By studying technology and how it relates to humans and human well-being, the group develops and contributes to new scientific niches at the crossroads between humans and technology, whilst contributing to its core disciplinary domains. In this way, HTI and TU/e help new technologies deliver the greatest possible benefits without losing sight of the human factor.

Technological development can contribute significantly to making people's daily lives healthier, safer, more independent, enjoyable, and comfortable. New technologies may also provide us with new means of communication and entertainment and contribute to solving a wide range of challenges, such as saving energy or promoting health and well-being. For such technologies to be successful, people need to trust, accept, and adopt them and use them correctly in a natural way.

HTI combines expertise from areas of social sciences (mainly cognitive and social psychology and perception) with engineering. The group’s lab facilities offer opportunities to study virtual reality, auditory perception, gaming, lighting, and general psychological lab resources. HTI hosts its own panel of participants and a dedicated system (‘ARCHIE’) that facilitates experiments to be run with HTI’s experiment committee and can safely store experimental results.

The group’s research centers around five main areas:

Human-computer interaction and affective computing
Decision-making and human-data interaction
Social psychology and persuasion
Contextual environmental psychology
Human perception and cognition

The HTI group takes part in multiple collaborations. These collaborations form an important part of our multidisciplinary field of research. These include:

Center for Humans and Technology:The research Center for Humans & Technology (Center H&T) at TU/e focusses on the relationship between people and technology, and how one transforms the other.
Eindhoven School of Innovation Studies (ECIS): A good part of our research is focussed on the acceptance of innovative technologies. Placing the human in the middle our research encompasses many different aspects that can make or break the acceptance of a novel technology. These include, but are not limited to research focussing on human factors, public acceptance, and ambient intelligence for instance. HTI is one of the 3 research groups that together shape the ECIS school of innovation studies.
Intelligent Lighting Institute: The Intelligent Lighting Institute (ILI) clusters the strengths of six TU/e departments in the field of intelligent lighting. ILI develops new applications and provides the scientific proof that these applications will do what they promise to do. This encompasses fundamental research on lighting systems, interaction with those systems, and psychological effects of such systems. ILI's counterpart association (ILIA) is an organisation and network where long-term strategic cooperation enables companies and knowledge institutions to facilitate innovations in intelligent lighting through an open innovation network and physical testbeds. HTI forms one of the core research competencies within ILI, and participates in several of its program lines.
The 4TU research centre Humans & Technology (H&T): This center brings together the social sciences and technical sciences. Its goal is excellent research on innovative forms of human-technology interaction for smart social systems and spaces. The centre organises events such as symposia on Machine Smarts and Human Values and Empathic Technologies, as well as thematic workshops geared towards collaborative research. Current collaborations include multi-modal research on moral conflicts in virtual reality and speech processing of affect and stress, among other projects.