M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Context-Awareness: Assistive android mobile application for Alzheimer Patient With Location-Awareness element

This project presents a new approach that uses the context aware standards to provide a location awareness support for early stage of Alzheimer patient. The proposed context model enables the development of a mobile application to assists the Alzheimer patient when they cannot remember where there are and on how the assistive device would be able to guide their way home by integrated some technology that is already out there. In particular, we describe in this paper the nature of the Alzheimer disease, about the framework and the definition of the context aware especially on location awareness and on how the application will assists the Alzheimer Disease patient in their daily life

Designing and evaluating a user interface for continous embedded lifelogging based on physical context

PhD ThesisAn increase in both personal information and storage capacity has encouraged people to store and archive their life experience in multimedia formats. The usefulness of such large amounts of data will remain inadequate without the development of both retrieval techniques and interfaces that help people access and navigate their personal collections. The research described in this thesis investigates lifelogging technology from the perspective of the psychology of memory and human-computer interaction. The research described seeks to increase my understanding of what data can trigger memories and how I might use this insight to retrieve past life experiences in interfaces to lifelogging technology. The review of memory and previous research on lifelogging technology allows and support me to establish a clear understanding of how memory works and design novel and effective memory cues; whilst at the same time I critiqued existing lifelogging systems and approaches to retrieving memories of past actions and activities. In the initial experiments I evaluated the design and implementation of a prototype which exposed numerous problems both in the visualisation of data and usability. These findings informed the design of novel lifelogging prototype to facilitate retrieval. I assessed the second prototype and determined how an improved system supported access and retrieval of users’ past life experiences, in particular, how users group their data into events, how they interact with their data, and the classes of memories that it supported. In this doctoral thesis I found that visualizing the movements of users’ hands and bodies facilitated grouping activities into events when combined with the photos and other data captured at the same time. In addition, the movements of the user's hand and body and the movements of some objects can promote an activity recognition or support user detection and grouping of them into events. Furthermore, the ability to search for specific movements significantly reduced the amount of time that it took to retrieve data related to specific events. I revealed three major strategies that users followed to understand the combined data: skimming sequences, cross sensor jumping and continued scanning

Using location-based services to improve mental health interventions

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe rapid developments in the functionalities of smartphones and technological innovations play a vital role in providing location-based services in healthcare. A mental health sensor-based software platform has been developed by the Geospatial Technologies research group (Geotec), consisting of an application generation framework that offers basic geospatial building blocks (location tracking, trajectory recording, geo-fencing), communication building blocks (notifications) and a basic visualization of collected data for therapists. The framework has been successfully tested for building an application to treat agoraphobia, addiction, and depression, using location-based notifications. However, defining the places of interest for a patient is addressed to a limited extent only. Thus, therapists have difficulties of identifying and defining multiple places of interest, and the generated apps were therefore mostly limited to single places of interest, which were manually defined. Hence, they are difficult to use in larger areas. This thesis aims to use a location-based service to support therapists in defining places of interest, based on location and place categories. The work is carried out as an extension of the SYMPTOMS platform, and it allows therapists to define multiple places of interest automatically and for larger areas. The added value of the approach (in terms of automation, ease of use, and universally usable of therapies) by the location-based services in improving mental health interventions is evaluated. As a result, the application was found to be usable with SUS score of 91.875 and useful for therapists to define multiple places of interest at the same time which simplifies the configuration process and makes therapies universally usable. Reproducibility self-assessment (https://osf.io/j97zp/): 2, 2, 1, 2, 2 (input data, pre-processing, methods, computational environment, results)

Positioning Commuters And Shoppers Through Sensing And Correlation

Positioning is a basic and important need in many scenarios of human daily activities. With position information, multifarious services could be vitalized to benefit all kinds of users, from individuals to organizations. Through positioning, people are able to obtain not only geo-location but also time related information. By aggregating position information from individuals, organizations could derive statistical knowledge about group behaviors, such as traffic, business, event, etc. Although enormous effort has been invested in positioning related academic and industrial work, there are still many holes to be filled. This dissertation proposes solutions to address the need of positioning in people’s daily life from two aspects: transportation and shopping. All the solutions are smart-device-based (e.g. smartphone, smartwatch), which could potentially benefit most users considering the prevalence of smart devices. In positioning relevant activities, the components and their movement information could be sensed by different entities from diverse perspectives. The mechanisms presented in this dissertation treat the information collected from one perspective as reference and match it against the data collected from other perspectives to acquire absolute or relative position, in spatial as well as temporal dimension. For transportation, both driver and passenger oriented solutions are proposed. To help drivers improve safety and ease the tension from driving, two correlated systems, OmniView [1] and DriverTalk [2], are provided. These systems infer the relative positions of the vehicles moving together by matching the appearance images of the vehicles seen by each other, which help drivers maintain safe distance from surrounding vehicles and also give them opportunities to precisely convey driving related messages to targeted peer drivers. To improve bus-riding experience for passengers of public transit systems, a system named RideSense [3] is developed. This system correlates the sensor traces collected by both passengers’ smart devices and reference devices in buses to position passengers’ bus-riding, spatially and temporally. With this system, passengers could be billed without any explicit interaction with conventional ticketing facilities in bus system, which makes the transportation system more efficient. For shopping activities, AutoLabel [4, 5] comes into play, which could position customers with regard to stores. AutoLabel constructs a mapping between WiFi vectors and semantic names of stores through correlating the text decorated inside stores with those on stores’ websites. Later, through WiFi scanning and a lookup in the mapping, customers’ smart devices could automatically recognize the semantic names of the stores they are in or nearby. Therefore, AutoLabel-enabled smart device serves as a bridge for the information flow between business owners and customers, which could benefit both sides

Eyes-Off Physically Grounded Mobile Interaction

This thesis explores the possibilities, challenges and future scope for eyes-off, physically grounded mobile interaction. We argue that for interactions with digital content in physical spaces, our focus should not be constantly and solely on the device we are using, but fused with an experience of the places themselves, and the people who inhabit them. Through the design, development and evaluation of a series ofnovel prototypes we show the benefits of a more eyes-off mobile interaction style.Consequently, we are able to outline several important design recommendations for future devices in this area.The four key contributing chapters of this thesis each investigate separate elements within this design space. We begin by evaluating the need for screen-primary feedback during content discovery, showing how a more exploratory experience can be supported via a less-visual interaction style. We then demonstrate how tactilefeedback can improve the experience and the accuracy of the approach. In our novel tactile hierarchy design we add a further layer of haptic interaction, and show how people can be supported in finding and filtering content types, eyes-off. We then turn to explore interactions that shape the ways people interact with aphysical space. Our novel group and solo navigation prototypes use haptic feedbackfor a new approach to pedestrian navigation. We demonstrate how variations inthis feedback can support exploration, giving users autonomy in their navigationbehaviour, but with an underlying reassurance that they will reach the goal.Our final contributing chapter turns to consider how these advanced interactionsmight be provided for people who do not have the expensive mobile devices that areusually required. We extend an existing telephone-based information service to support remote back-of-device inputs on low-end mobiles. We conclude by establishingthe current boundaries of these techniques, and suggesting where their usage couldlead in the future

Marks the Spot

This thesis is an investigation into the prtoblem of marketing for small businesses with little funds and means for advertisement. Past, present and predicted future methods of marketing prove there is room for improvement in affordability through existing advancements. Literature reviews and case studies explore the most lucrative ways forward. Research also indicates that large numbers of potential consumers are missed by small businesses due to their general lack of embracing newer communication technology such as store apps. This extra support measure provides users with notifications that highlight coupons and deals and has a proven record of success for larger companies with the resources to accommodate. Despite the hurdles of implementing the various forms of marketing, this thesis explores a solution by way of a mobile app to alleviate the burden of travelers finding smaller local businesses en route to a destination. This is due to the unrealistic nature of building and maintaining dedicated store apps, which is an undertaking that many small businesses are not built to maintain. To bridge the gap, it was deduced that an app for all businesses would be effective in reaching out to potential customers in an immediate area by way of GPS and geofencing. Additional research investigates driver safety in relation to mobile applications, which considers color, type, shapes and other aesthetics that can distract drivers from the road

Location-based Marketing: the academic framework

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Over the last several years one could observe revolution in location-based technologies and geospatial information. Location awareness of mobile devices resulted in development of Location-Based Services (LBS) that are realization of that revolution in the most personal and contextual way. The ability to reach consumers in the highly targeted manner based on spatio-temporal criteria, attracted marketers from the early beginning of LBS creating field called Location-Based Marketing. Today decreasing prices of smartphones and wireless internet, as well as integration of location-aware mobile solutions and social media is leading to new possibilities and opportunities. The academic and professional interests of the author made him noticed that although the industry has challenged a significant development, there is lack of publications that would put an academic framework on that progress. The research has fulfilled this gap by extensive investigation of the current state of the art of Location-Based Marketing and its foundations - Location Based Services. The dissertation provides academic framework by comprehensive analysis of the Location-Based Marketing from LBS and marketing perspective. Further the thesis is addressing the issue of significant discrepancy between theoretical concepts of measurable Location-Based Social Media data and the actual data than can be legally accessed and used for marketing analysis purposes by investigation a case study of Location-Based Social Network - Foursqaure and Location-Based Analytics platform VenueLabs