A Survey on Transit Map Layout – from Design, Machine, and Human Perspectives

Transit maps are designed to present information for using public transportation systems, such as urban railways. Creating a transit map is a time‐consuming process, which requires iterative information selection, layout design, and usability validation, and thus maps cannot easily be customised or updated frequently. To improve this, scientists investigate fully‐ or semi‐automatic techniques in order to produce high quality transit maps using computers and further examine their corresponding usability. Nonetheless, the quality gap between manually‐drawn maps and machine‐generated maps is still large. To elaborate the current research status, this state‐of‐the‐art report provides an overview of the transit map generation process, primarily from Design, Machine, and Human perspectives. A systematic categorisation is introduced to describe the design pipeline, and an extensive analysis of perspectives is conducted to support the proposed taxonomy. We conclude this survey with a discussion on the current research status, open challenges, and future directions

Quality of experience in affective pervasive environments

The confluence of miniaturised powerful devices, widespread communication networks and mass remote storage has caused a fundamental shift in the user interaction design paradigm. The distinction between system and user in pervasive environments is evolving into an increasingly integrated loop of interaction, raising a number of opportunities to provide enhanced and personalised experiences. We propose a platform, based on a smart architecture, to address the identified opportunities in pervasive computing. Smart systems aim at acting upon an environment for improving quality of experience: a subjective measure that has been defined as an emotional reaction to products or services. The inclusion of an emotional dimension allows us to measure individual user responses and deliver personalised services with the potential to influence experiences positively. The platform, Cloud2Bubble, leverages pervasive systems to aggregate user and environment data with the goal of addressing personal preferences and supra-functional requirements. This, combined with its societal implications, results in a set of design principles as a concrete fruition of design contractualism. In particular, this thesis describes: - a review of intelligent ubiquitous environments and relevant technologies, including a definition of user experience as a dynamic affective construct; - a specification of main components for personal data aggregation and service personalisation, without compromising privacy, security or usability; - the implementation of a software platform and a methodological procedure for its instantiation; - an evaluation of the developed platform and its benefits for urban mobility and public transport information systems; - a set of design principles for the design of ubiquitous systems, with an impact on individual experience and collective awareness. Cloud2Bubble contributes towards the development of affective intelligent ubiquitous systems with the potential to enhance user experience in pervasive environments. In addition, the platform aims at minimising the risk of user digital exposure while supporting collective action.Open Acces

Integrating Haptic Feedback into Mobile Location Based Services

Haptics is a feedback technology that takes advantage of the human sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to a haptic-enabled device such as a mobile phone. Historically, human-computer interaction has been visual - text and images on the screen. Haptic feedback can be an important additional method especially in Mobile Location Based Services such as knowledge discovery, pedestrian navigation and notification systems. A knowledge discovery system called the Haptic GeoWand is a low interaction system that allows users to query geo-tagged data around them by using a point-and-scan technique with their mobile device. Haptic Pedestrian is a navigation system for walkers. Four prototypes have been developed classified according to the user’s guidance requirements, the user type (based on spatial skills), and overall system complexity. Haptic Transit is a notification system that provides spatial information to the users of public transport. In all these systems, haptic feedback is used to convey information about location, orientation, density and distance by use of the vibration alarm with varying frequencies and patterns to help understand the physical environment. Trials elicited positive responses from the users who see benefit in being provided with a “heads up” approach to mobile navigation. Results from a memory recall test show that the users of haptic feedback for navigation had better memory recall of the region traversed than the users of landmark images. Haptics integrated into a multi-modal navigation system provides more usable, less distracting but more effective interaction than conventional systems. Enhancements to the current work could include integration of contextual information, detailed large-scale user trials and the exploration of using haptics within confined indoor spaces

Optimising the Loading Diversity of Rail Passenger Crowding using On-Board Occupancy Data

Crowded conditions on trains can lead to lower passenger satisfaction, discourage rail travel, result in negative economic impacts and are a factor in a number of health and safety hazards. In the UK there is an annual survey of rail passenger crowding, although the measures used do not reflect coach-by-coach variations, nor do they reflect variations across the peak period. In this MPhil thesis I investigated the application of weight-based automatic passenger counting data to deliver more even loadings on trains through the provision of new real-time and static solutions. In addition I investigated the potential benefits of such solutions in terms of reduced dwell times and reduced crowding. The overall concept proposed was to make the most of the existing available capacity; for example, so that no-one is standing when seats are available. Through analysing a large sample of air suspension data, I identified station-specific trends where some coaches were over capacity while others had spare capacity. I also conducted a critical review of academic research into on-train crowding and solutions that seek to optimise ‘loading diversity’. This study contributes to this emerging subject area in several ways: I propose two new metrics to describe inter-coach loading diversity that, unlike existing metrics, contain information relative to the capacity; I have revealed a link between the inter-coach loading diversity metrics and estimated boarding times, with trains classified as ‘very uneven’ on departure typically having dwell times of approximately five to ten seconds greater than services that were classified as being ‘even’ with a similar total number of passengers on board; and finally I have applied classification supervised learning techniques to predict the load factor for a given service and these predictors were an improvement over taking the historical average

Multi-sensor movement analysis for transport safety and health applications

Recent increases in the use of and applications for wearable technology has opened up many new avenues of research. In this paper, we consider the use of lifelogging and GPS data to extend fine-grained movement analysis for improving applications in health and safety. We first design a framework to solve the problem of indoor and outdoor movement detection from sensor readings associated with images captured by a lifelogging wearable device. Second we propose a set of measures related with hazard on the road network derived from the combination of GPS movement data, road network data and the sensor readings from a wearable device. Third, we identify the relationship between different socio-demographic groups and the patterns of indoor physical activity and sedentary behaviour routines as well as disturbance levels on different road settings