Enhancing quality of life: Human-centered design of mobile and smartwatch applications for assisted ambient living

Background: Assisted ambient living interfaces are technologies designed to improve the quality of life for people who require assistance with daily activities. They are crucial for individuals to maintain their independence for as long as possible. To this end, these interfaces have to be user-friendly, intuitive, and accessible, even for those who are not techsavvy. Research in recent years indicates that people find it uncomfortable to wear invasive or large intrusive devices to monitor health status, and poor user interface design implies a lack of user engagement. Methods: This paper presents the design and implementation of non-intrusive mobile and smartwatch applications for detecting older adults when executing their routines. The solution uses an intuitive mobile application to set up beacons and incorporates biometric data acquired from the smartwatch to measure bio-signals correlated to the user’s location. User testing and interface evaluation are carried out using the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). Results: Six older adults participated in the evaluation of the interfaces. Results show that users found the interaction to be excellent in all the parameters of the UEQ in the evaluation of the mobile interface. For the smartwatch application, results vary from above average to excellent. Conclusions: The applications are intuitive and easy to use, and data obtained from integrating systems is essential to link information and provide feedback to the user.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Identifying the BLE Advertising Channel for Reliable Distance Estimation on Smartphones

Estimating the distance between two smartphones plays an important role in a host of applications. For this purpose, smartphones emit and scan for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals. When a device is detected, the distance is estimated by evaluating the received strength of these signals. The main insight that is exploited for distance estimation is that the attenuation of a signal increases with the distance along which it has traveled. However, besides distance, there are multiple additional factors that impact the attenuation and hence disturb the distance estimation procedure. Among them, frequency-selective hardware and signal propagation belong to the most significant ones. For example, a BLE device transmits packets on three different frequencies (channels), while the transmit power and the receiver sensitivity depend on the frequency. As a result, the received signal strength varies for each channel, even when the distance remains constant. However, the information on which wireless channel a packet has been received is not made available to a smartphone. Hence, this error cannot be compensated, e.g. by calibration. In this paper, we for the first time provide a solution to detect the wireless channel on which a packet has been received by a smartphone application. We experimentally evaluate our proposed technique on multiple different smartphone models. Our results help to make distance estimation on smartphones more robust and accurate

Building Information Modelling : Indoor Localization

This thesis presents an integrated system where BIM software is used together with IoT devices to visualize data generated in real-time. Two different IoT devices are modelled as case study that collect environmental and localization data. These devices were installed inside a Test room of an area approx. 22 m2 in UiT Narvik premises . The collected data were, filtered & transferred to database server which were then retrieved and visualized by BIM software in real time. The report presents tools and technologies that are implemented to develop such system and provides details on basic blocks required for such integrations. The combined platform visualize information about the things as it happens in real-time. This makes such systems capable for digitalization of physical process and have various application domains. In the report it is applied as monitoring platform for temperature and illumination data and can be used for facility management applications. Similarly, indoor localization is monitored making it applicable for localization and safety management purpose. The performance of the system is also discussed based on test, observations, and calculation