ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

An eco-friendly hybrid urban computing network combining community-based wireless LAN access and wireless sensor networking

Computer-enhanced smart environments, distributed environmental monitoring, wireless communication, energy conservation and sustainable technologies, ubiquitous access to Internet-located data and services, user mobility and innovation as a tool for service differentiation are all significant contemporary research subjects and societal developments. This position paper presents the design of a hybrid municipal network infrastructure that, to a lesser or greater degree, incorporates aspects from each of these topics by integrating a community-based Wi-Fi access network with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) functionality. The former component provides free wireless Internet connectivity by harvesting the Internet subscriptions of city inhabitants. To minimize session interruptions for mobile clients, this subsystem incorporates technology that achieves (near-)seamless handover between Wi-Fi access points. The WSN component on the other hand renders it feasible to sense physical properties and to realize the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This in turn scaffolds the development of value-added end-user applications that are consumable through the community-powered access network. The WSN subsystem invests substantially in ecological considerations by means of a green distributed reasoning framework and sensor middleware that collaboratively aim to minimize the network's global energy consumption. Via the discussion of two illustrative applications that are currently being developed as part of a concrete smart city deployment, we offer a taste of the myriad of innovative digital services in an extensive spectrum of application domains that is unlocked by the proposed platform

Performance Comparison of Contention- and Schedule-based MAC Protocols in Urban Parking Sensor Networks

Network traffic model is a critical problem for urban applications, mainly because of its diversity and node density. As wireless sensor network is highly concerned with the development of smart cities, careful consideration to traffic model helps choose appropriate protocols and adapt network parameters to reach best performances on energy-latency tradeoffs. In this paper, we compare the performance of two off-the-shelf medium access control protocols on two different kinds of traffic models, and then evaluate their application-end information delay and energy consumption while varying traffic parameters and network density. From the simulation results, we highlight some limits induced by network density and occurrence frequency of event-driven applications. When it comes to realtime urban services, a protocol selection shall be taken into account - even dynamically - with a special attention to energy-delay tradeoff. To this end, we provide several insights on parking sensor networks.Comment: ACM International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Smart Cities (WiMobCity) (2014

TCitySmartF: A comprehensive systematic framework for transforming cities into smart cities

A shared agreed-upon definition of "smart city" (SC) is not available and there is no "best formula" to follow in transforming each and every city into SC. In a broader inclusive definition, it can be described as an opportunistic concept that enhances harmony between the lives and the environment around those lives perpetually in a city by harnessing the smart technology enabling a comfortable and convenient living ecosystem paving the way towards smarter countries and the smarter planet. SCs are being implemented to combine governors, organisations, institutions, citizens, environment, and emerging technologies in a highly synergistic synchronised ecosystem in order to increase the quality of life (QoL) and enable a more sustainable future for urban life with increasing natural resource constraints. In this study, we analyse how to develop citizen- and resource-centric smarter cities based on the recent SC development initiatives with the successful use cases, future SC development plans, and many other particular SC development solutions. The main features of SC are presented in a framework fuelled by recent technological advancement, particular city requirements and dynamics. This framework - TCitySmartF 1) aims to aspire a platform that seamlessly forges engineering and technology solutions with social dynamics in a new philosophical city automation concept - socio-technical transitions, 2) incorporates many smart evolving components, best practices, and contemporary solutions into a coherent synergistic SC topology, 3) unfolds current and future opportunities in order to adopt smarter, safer and more sustainable urban environments, and 4) demonstrates a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for local governors and private sector about how to transform cities into smarter cities from the technological, social, economic and environmental point of view, particularly by both putting residents and urban dynamics at the forefront of the development with participatory planning and interaction for the robust community- and citizen-tailored services. The framework developed in this paper is aimed to be incorporated into the real-world SC development projects in Lancashire, UK

Revolutionising the quality of life: the role of real-time sensing in smart cities

To further evolve urban quality of life, this paper explores the potential of crowdsensing and crowdsourcing in the context of smart cities. To aid urban planners and residents in understanding the nuances of day-to-day urban dynamics, we actively pursue the improvement of data visualisation tools that can adapt to changing conditions. An architecture was created and implemented that ensures secure and easy connectivity between various sources, such as a network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to merge with crowdsensing data and use them efficiently. In addition, we expanded the scope of our study to include the development of mobile and online applications, emphasizing the integration of autonomous and geo-surveillance. The main findings highlight the importance of sensor data in urban knowledge. Their incorporation via Tepresentational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (APIs) improves data access and informed decision-making, and dynamic data visualisation provides better insights. The geofencing of the application encourages community participation in urban planning and resource allocation, supporting sustainable urban innovation.This work was supported by FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020 and the project “Integrated and Innovative Solutions for the well-being of people in complex urban centers” within the Project Scope NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000086. Rui Miranda was supported by grant no. UMINHO/BID/2021/137; Carlos Alves was supported by grant nos. 2022.12629.BD and UMINHO/BID/2021/134; Regina Sousa was supported by grant no. UMINHO/BID/2021/136; António Chaves was supported by grant no. UMINHO/BID/2021/135; Larissa Montenegro was supported by grant no. UMINHO/BID/2022/53

Crowdsourcing for smart engagement apps in an urban context : an explorative study

This paper elaborates on the first results of an ongoing living lab project on ‘smart’ city engagement and offers a theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution to the field of user-driven innovation by describing a crowdsourcing experiment conducted in collaboration with the city of Ghent (Flanders). Our presented living lab approach has a double goal. First, it wants to empower citizens by systematically transforming the relationship(s) between citizens and between citizens (as service users) and local city-related governmental institutes (as service providers) by offering smart city applications. Second, it has the ambition to go beyond reactively studying information systems as change agents and wants to pro-actively improve engineering systems that can contribute to the desired changes in city engagement. Supporting citizens as self-actuating sensors to open up more innovative ways of collecting data is an important boundary of the research within a living lab context. We aim for user-driven innovation by involving citizens in the co-production of new electronic public services. Therefore we choose to go through a co-design process (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) with citizens defining the smart engagement applications that most probably will be developed and implemented in a living lab setting. Today, various innovation companies and organizations envision a central role for the user when looking for innovations. The attention for participation of the user is growing since the 80’s, although that the meaning of the concept ‘participation’ is not stable. Different people have used ‘participation’ in a wide variety of different situations and the widespread use of the term has tended to mean that ‘participation’ is used to refer to a wide variety of different situations by different people (Pateman, 1972). Therefore some point to participation as an empty signifier (Carpentier, 2007). The history and origin (and radicalism) of the concept as related to power issues is fading away under the diversity of its different meanings. Recently different participative methods were developed and are used to learn about users and their needs. Some known user-centered methods within industry are working with living labs (Niitamo, Kulkki, Eriksson, & Hribernik, 2006) and crowdsourcing (Hudson-Smith, Batty, Crooks, & Milton, 2009). Although participative methods were initially mainly focused on handing over the power to the user, currently much more attention is given to usability of applications and market forecasting when in the context of user involvement or co-creation. The analysis of power relations is fading slowly away. In our research the notion of participation is used in two ways: as a political phrase, referring to users who are gaining more power and impact on societal changes, and as a practical phrase referring to the forecasting of the success of urban smart engagement apps. This paper is structured in four parts. The first part of the paper introduces the concepts of engagement and ‘smartness’. The second part of the paper introduces crowdsourcing and also elaborates on the related concepts of ‘Web 2.0”, ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘wisdom of crowds’. The third part of the paper describes our methodology, introduces the online crowdsourcing enabler ‘mijndigitaalideevoorgent’, and presents the first, preliminary results of our crowdscourcing experiment. The fourth and last part of the paper formulates a conclusion and discussion of the results