Mobile exergaming in adolescents’ everyday life—contextual design of where, when, with whom, and how: the SmartLife case

Exergames, more specifically console-based exergames, are generally enjoyed by adolescents and known to increase physical activity. Nevertheless, they have a reduced usage over time and demonstrate little effectiveness over the long term. In order to increase playing time, mobile exergames may increase potential playing time, but need to be engaging and integrated in everyday life. The goal of the present study was to examine the context of gameplay for mobile exergaming in adolescents’ everyday life to inform game design and the integration of gameplay into everyday life. Eight focus groups were conducted with 49 Flemish adolescents (11 to 17 years of age). The focus groups were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed by means of thematic analysis via Nvivo 11 software (QSR International Pty Ltd., Victoria, Australia). The adolescents indicated leisure time and travel time to and from school as suitable timeframes for playing a mobile exergame. Outdoor gameplay should be restricted to the personal living environment of adolescents. Besides outdoor locations, the game should also be adaptable to at-home activities. Activities could vary from running outside to fitness exercises inside. Furthermore, the social context of the game was important, e.g., playing in teams or meeting at (virtual) meeting points. Physical activity tracking via smart clothing was identified as a motivator for gameplay. By means of this study, game developers may be better equipped to develop mobile exergames that embed gameplay in adolescents’ everyday life

A Survey of Techniques for Improving Security of GPUs

Graphics processing unit (GPU), although a powerful performance-booster, also has many security vulnerabilities. Due to these, the GPU can act as a safe-haven for stealthy malware and the weakest `link' in the security `chain'. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for analyzing and improving GPU security. We classify the works on key attributes to highlight their similarities and differences. More than informing users and researchers about GPU security techniques, this survey aims to increase their awareness about GPU security vulnerabilities and potential countermeasures

A Study and Estimation a Lost Person Behavior in Crowded Areas Using Accelerometer Data from Smartphones

As smartphones become more popular, applications are being developed with new and innovative ways to solve problems in the day-to-day lives of users. One area of smartphone technology that has been developed in recent years is human activity recognition (HAR). This technology uses various sensors that are built into the smartphone to sense a person\u27s activity in real time. Applications that incorporate HAR can be used to track a person\u27s movements and are very useful in areas such as health care. We use this type of motion sensing technology, specifically, using data collected from the accelerometer sensor. The purpose of this study is to study and estimate the person who may become lost in a crowded area. The application is capable of estimating the movements of people in a crowded area, and whether or not the person is lost in a crowded area based on his/her movements as detected by the smartphone. This will be a great benefit to anyone interested in crowd management strategies. In this paper, we review related literature and research that has given us the basis for our own research. We also detail research on lost person behavior. We looked at the typical movements a person will likely make when he/she is lost and used these movements to indicate lost person behavior. We then evaluate and describe the creation of the application, all of its components, and the testing process

On the Benefit of Virtualization: Strategies for Flexible Server Allocation

Virtualization technology facilitates a dynamic, demand-driven allocation and migration of servers. This paper studies how the flexibility offered by network virtualization can be used to improve Quality-of-Service parameters such as latency, while taking into account allocation costs. A generic use case is considered where both the overall demand issued for a certain service (for example, an SAP application in the cloud, or a gaming application) as well as the origins of the requests change over time (e.g., due to time zone effects or due to user mobility), and we present online and optimal offline strategies to compute the number and location of the servers implementing this service. These algorithms also allow us to study the fundamental benefits of dynamic resource allocation compared to static systems. Our simulation results confirm our expectations that the gain of flexible server allocation is particularly high in scenarios with moderate dynamics

Pass the Ball: Enforced Turn-Taking in Activity Tracking

We have developed a mobile application called Pass The Ball that enables users to track, reflect on, and discuss physical activity with others. We followed an iterative design process, trialling a first version of the app with 20 people and a second version with 31. The trials were conducted in the wild, on users' own devices. The second version of the app enforced a turn-taking system that meant only one member of a group of users could track their activity at any one time. This constrained tracking at the individual level, but more successfully led users to communicate and interact with each other. We discuss the second trial with reference to two concepts: social-relatedness and individual-competence. We discuss six key lessons from the trial, and identify two high-level design implications: attend to "practices" of tracking; and look within and beyond "collaboration" and "competition" in the design of activity trackers

Wearable Computing for Health and Fitness: Exploring the Relationship between Data and Human Behaviour

Health and fitness wearable technology has recently advanced, making it easier for an individual to monitor their behaviours. Previously self generated data interacts with the user to motivate positive behaviour change, but issues arise when relating this to long term mention of wearable devices. Previous studies within this area are discussed. We also consider a new approach where data is used to support instead of motivate, through monitoring and logging to encourage reflection. Based on issues highlighted, we then make recommendations on the direction in which future work could be most beneficial