Mobile HCI

"Target selection is a task carried out by many wearable computer users. Conventional desktop pointing devices such as mice are not appropriate for the wearable user as they are designed for use within the conventional desktop paradigm. Although many pointing systems have been devised for use with wearable computers, little empirical research has been carried out. This research investigates two different target selection systems: a touch screen stylus and an off-table mouse. This research takes a novel approach and evaluates users while moving and stationary. Twenty participants wore a wearable computer and selected targets while stationary and while mobile, input times and the participants' task load were recorded.
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Even with the rise of the World Wide Web, TV has remained the most pervasive entertainment medium and is nowadays often used together with other media, which allow for active participation. The idea of connecting non-collocated TV viewers via telecommunication technologies, referred to as Social TV, has recently received considerable attention. Such systems typically include set-top boxes for supporting collaboration. In this research we investigate if real-time opinion sharing about TV shows through a nonverbal (non-textual) iconic UI on mobile phones is reasonable. For this purpose we developed a mobile app, made it available to a large number of users through the Android Market, and conducted an uncontrolled user study in the wild during the soccer world cup 2010. The results of the study indicate that TV viewers who used the app had more fun and felt more connected to other viewers. We also show that by monitoring this channel it is possible to collect sentiments relevant to the broadcasted content in real-time. The collected data exemplify that the aggregated sentiments correspond to important moments, and hence can be used to generate a summary of the event.

Mobile phones enable us to be reachable by phone calls anywhere and anytime. However, it is not always appropriate to answer a phone call. Even a ringing or vibrating phone can be inappropriate in some situations. The information required to assess if a call is appropriate is split between the caller and the callee. Only the caller knows the importance of the call and only the callee knows her context. Sharing parts of this context with the potential caller would enable the caller to make a better decision. Based on previous work we conducted a survey to learn about the contextual information that users believe to be important for this decision. We derive context information that users will to share and consider relevant and helpful. Further, we present a mobile application that augments users' address book with contextual information that we aim to study in the large.

We monitor sleep duration by measuring users’ explicit interaction with a mobile app.Using the app, we successfully monitor users' sleep duration without on-body sensing.Tracking sleep behavior empowers users to engage in healthier sleep habits.Sharing sleep information with social networks impacts awareness and connectedness.Users intend to share their sleep data with individuals who value that informationUsers share a lot of personal information with friends, family members, and colleagues via social networks. Surprisingly, some users choose to share their sleeping patterns, perhaps both for awareness as well as a sense of connection to others. Indeed, sharing basic sleep data, whether a person has gone to bed or waking up, informs others about not just one's sleeping routines but also indicates physical state, and reflects a sense of wellness. We present Somnometer, a social alarm clock for mobile phones that helps users to capture and share their sleep patterns. While the sleep rating is obtained from explicit user input, the sleep duration is estimated based on monitoring a user's interactions with the app. Observing that many individuals currently utilize their mobile phone as an alarm clock revealed behavioral patterns that we were able to leverage when designing the app. We assess whether it is possible to reliably monitor one's sleep duration using such apps. We further investigate whether providing users with the ability to track their sleep behavior over a long time period can empower them to engage in healthier sleep habits. We hypothesize that sharing sleep information with social networks impacts awareness and connectedness among friends. The result from a controlled study reveals that it is feasible to monitor a user's sleep duration based just on her interactions with an alarm clock app on the mobile phone. The results from both an in-the-wild study and a controlled experiment suggest that providing a way for users to track their sleep behaviors increased user awareness of sleep patterns and induced healthier habits. However, we also found that, given the current broadcast nature of existing social networks, users were concerned with sharing their sleep patterns indiscriminately.

Falling hardware prices and ever more displays being connected to the Internet will lead to large public display networks, potentially forming a novel communication medium. We envision that such networks are not restricted to display owners and advertisers anymore, but allow also passersby (e.g., customers) to exchange content, similar to traditional public notice areas, such as bulletin boards. In this context it is crucial to understand emerging practices and provide easy and straight forward interaction techniques to be used for creating and exchanging content. In this paper, we present Digifieds, a digital public notice area we built to investigate and compare possible interaction techniques. Based on a lab study we show that using direct touch at the display as well as using the mobile phone as a complementing interaction technology are most suitable. Direct touch at the display closely resembles the interaction known from classic bulletin boards and provides the highest usability. Mobile phones preserve the users' privacy as they exchange (sensitive) data with the display and at the same time allow content to be created on-the-go or to be retrieved.

Abstract Digital games have the potential for changing attitudes towards social issues such as climate change and sustainability. This paper presents the experience of developing a prototype locative game with an augmented reality interface that is designed to fit in with the fractured nature of travel time on public transport. We discuss the technical challenges, usability issues and game design approaches used to work within these constraints.

Today’s mobile multimedia phones with broadband connectivity have brought novel ways for journalists to live out their hectic profession. We interviewed six forerunners in Finnish news organizations on mobile phone usage in news production. Here, we present our results on how and why they use mobile phones in news production and provide implications for design and development. Our results show that users are delighted to use mobile phones in journalistic work if they can gain personal benefits from it, like more efficient use of time. Participants were not satisfied with the audio quality of mobile phones or mobile text editors. However, they considered mobile phones suitable for capturing short Internet videos. One reason constricting mobile production is editorial processes that are not designed for receiving material produced with a mobile phone. This causes extra work both in the newsroom and in the field.

In this paper we attempt to bridge the fields of mobile learning and user-adaptive systems research by means of affective computing. In a field experiment we investigated how different environments and ways to present content on mobile devices influence users' emotions during and their recognition after learning information. Our aim was to find out how learning content should be presented and adapted so that equal learning success across different situations can be achieved by learners. The results show that learners' emotional stress, as indexed by heart rate and skin conductivity, was significantly higher in a noisy and crowded shopping mall than in a quiet café. Learners' emotions strongly affected their learning abilities as reflected by measurements of recognition, which was significantly higher for information learned in the café than in the shopping mall. The results show also that participants recalled textual content better if it was presented in chunks via one or more (web-) pages as opposed to a continuous text that required manual scrolling. Based on the results we present initial recommendations for how affective mobile learning services may adapt the presentation of learning content in order to counterbalance environmental effects on learning and thus to assist a learner. While this study confirms earlier results in environmental psychology and emotion research we conclude that it provides an initial empirical base for the design and development of innovative mobile learning applications and services that adapt learning content on the basis of learners' emotions. This method could counterbalance impeding environmental, cognitive, and emotional influences on learners, shape their learning experiences and thus assist and support mobile learning.

ABSTRACT Mobile devices are increasingly being used in a variety of new contexts, including situations at home or work where one might previously have used a computer. One area in which this is increasingly occurring is mobile shopping termed mCommerce. To understand this space better, we conducted a diary and interview study with mCommerce shoppers who have already adopted the technology and shop on their mobile devices regularly.

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In this paper, we present a low-cost placement-aware technique, called VibroTactor, which allows mobile devices to determine where they are placed (e.g., in a pocket, on a phone holder, on the bed, or on the desk). This is achieved by filtering and analyzing the acoustic signal generated when the mobile device vibrates. The advantage of this technique is that it is inexpensive and easy to deploy because it uses a microphone, which already embedded in standard mobile devices. To verify this idea, we implemented a prototype and conducted a preliminary test. The results show that this system achieves an average success rate of 91% in 12 different real-world placement sets."

""In isiXhosa, the home language in Eastern Cape, South Africa, “Sihamba sobabini” means, literally, “We are walking together,” but figuratively, “Are we still on the same page?” Such translations juxtapose ways in which we make meaning by interacting with representations of the world, on paper or screens, or, as Tim Ingold writes, by “going along” through it. In this article, I aim to inspire new paths to design, develop, and deploy technologies for those inhabiting the periphery of technology production. To do so I tell of how walking in rural southern Africa helped me to consider incompatibilities between the point-based representations that dominate technology, and local knowledge and communication practices. Along the way I claim that neglecting these mismatches reinforces infrastructures that already marginalize many inhabitants of the world.

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"""The emergence of pervasive technologies has led to an increased interest in both the design and the development of pervasive games. This paper presents “Them and Us”, an indoor pervasive game which uses theatrical processes to encourage social interaction within the confines of the game. The “Them and Us” game play places a group of people together in a single space to interact with one another, whilst location-based technology informs us about the locative-nature (who, where and when) of the social interactions formed while in that space, in order to score points based on this interaction. “Them and Us” adopts a narrative-based approach in which a script informs the way that participants play the game and the way their social behaviour, in regard to this becomes part of the game mechanism. This new genre of interactive game-based artwork intertwines the physical and virtual contexts of the players in order to create new and exciting player experiences. The design of “Them and Us” emphasizes the use of tracking the audience and performers as a way to encourage interaction within the game-space.

Keywords
Location/tracking technology, entertainment applications, computer-augmented environments, pervasive gaming."""

This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user's environmental footprint. It discusses the design challenges, development and evaluation of the prototype game in order to identify the key strategies and mechanisms that relate to the production of pervasive systems for mass participation. Designing the user experience for such systems is particularly difficult, as the game had to educate and entertain without patronizing or preaching to the user. A prototype system was developed and trialed in order to identify and understand how users related to the experience and how the game may be further developed. We found that character-led tailored physical activities were generally found to be the most enjoyable, while players wanted more interaction with each other and more score-based content. Creating interdependent question sets and orchestrating the game arduous process. In the future a fully automated system will be key to its use.