Numerous efforts have been taken by restaurants to adopt information and communication technologies such as touch screen, PDA, wireless LAN etc. to enhance dining experience. This paper highlights some of the limitations of the PDA-based food ordering system and proposed the Multi-touchable E-restaurant Management System as a solution. The system consists of the multi-touchable interactive dining menu that allows customers to make order conveniently on the developed multi-touchable dining table during the busy hours using their fingers. Orders made by the customers will be updated instantly to a centralized database and subsequently reach the cashier and the kitchen module respectively. Management staff could use the system to manage the restaurant operations digitally, starting from the creation of food items for the multi-touchable interactive dining menu to deleting it or to manage orders from customers all the way to billing it. The system was built using Adobe Flash ActionScript 3, PHP scripting and MySQL database on top of Zend Framework.

Recognising the rise of an aging population and independent living among older adults, many governments and organisations have developed and promoted new technologies in the form of gerontechnologies to support the needs and enhance the well-being of older adults. However, the adoption of products using such technology remains modest among the aging population. This study introduces the notion of power in the form of power posing and examines its impact on new technology adoption, particularly gerontechnology, among older adults. Using an experimental approach on a sample of older adults exposed to an in-house near-field communication-enabled light system, the study finds that high-power poses have a greater and more positive impact on older adults’ perceived ease of use of, perceived usefulness of, and intentions to use gerontechnology than low-power poses. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

Numerous research works have been put forward over the years to advance the field of facial expression recognition which until today, is still considered a challenging task. The selection of image color space and the use of facial alignment as preprocessing steps may collectively pose a significant impact on the accuracy and computational cost of facial emotion recognition, which is crucial to optimize the speed-accuracy trade-off. This paper proposed a deep learning-based facial emotion recognition pipeline that can be used to predict the emotion of detected face regions in video sequences. Five well-known state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures are used for training the emotion classifier to identify the network architecture which gives the best speed-accuracy trade-off. Two distinct facial emotion training datasets are prepared to investigate the effect of image color space and facial alignment on the performance of facial emotion recognition. Experimental results show that training a facial expression recognition model with grayscale-aligned facial images is preferable as it offers better recognition rates with lower detection latency. The lightweight MobileNet_v1 is identified as the best-performing model with WM=0.75 and RM=160 as its hyper-parameters, achieving an overall accuracy of 86.42% on the testing video dataset.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced museums to rethink their approach to exhibitions and visitor engagement, with many turning to digital technologies to offer alternative experiences. This paper presents a design and development process for an immersive Virtual Reality Museum application aimed at springboard museum experience to be more attractive, informative, engaging, and safe. The application showcases the evolution of telecommunication devices used in Malaysia in the 1960s within a futuristic museum environment. The study aims to investigate the acceptance and usability of the immersive VR Museum from the perspective of young adults in Malaysia. Specifically: to what extent do young adults in Malaysia accept and use immersive VR Museum? To evaluate the immersive VR Museum, a pilot study was conducted with 30 participants aged 18–24 who voluntarily participated in the evaluation activities and provided feedback using the System Usability Scale. Results show that the immersive VR Museum was well-received, with positive feedback on usability and learnability. The study contributes to the field of museum exhibition design by providing a new approach for museums to enhance the user experience through the adoption of immersive VR technology. The proposed VR Museum not only allows visitors to remotely explore artefacts but also offers an interactive, educational, and immersive experience that traditional museums cannot provide. The research offers insights into the potential of immersive VR museums to engage and educate young audiences and guides future developments in the field.