Privacy and Curiosity in Mobile Interactions with Public Displays.

Personal multimedia devices like mobile phones create new needs for larger displays distributed at specific points in the environment to look up information about the current place, playing games or exchanging multimedia data. The technical prerequisites are covered; however, using public displays always exposing information. In this paper we look at these issues from the privacy as well as from the curiosity perspective with several studies showing and confirming users’ reservations against public interactions. Interactive advertisements can exploit this best using specific types of interaction techniques

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach

Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?

Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany

Exploring Bluetooth based Mobile Phone Interaction with the Hermes Photo Display

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in today’s mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area - despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study nvolving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Físchlár on a PDA: handheld user interface design to a video indexing, browsing and playback system

The Físchlár digital video system is a web-based system for recording, analysis, browsing and playback of TV programmes which currently has about 350 users. Although the user interface to the system is designed for desktop PCs with a large screen and a mouse, we are developing versions to allow the use of mobile devices to access the system to record and browse the video content. In this paper, the design of a PDA user interface to video content browsing is considered. We use a design framework we have developed previously to be able to specify various video browsing interface styles thus making it possible to design for all potential users and their various environments. We can then apply this to the particulars of the PDA's small, touch-sensitive screen and the mobile environment where it will be used. The resultant video browsing interfaces have highly interactive interfaces yet are simple, which requires relatively less visual attention and focusing, and can be comfortably used in a mobile situation to browse the available video contents. To date we have developed and tested such interfaces on a Revo PDA, and are in the process of developing others