Fingers of a Hand Oscillate Together: Phase Syncronisation of Tremor in Hover Touch Sensing

When using non-contact finger tracking, fingers can be classified as to which hand they belong to by analysing the phase relation of physiological tremor. In this paper, we show how 3D capacitive sensors can pick up muscle tremor in fingers above a device. We develop a signal processing pipeline based on nonlinear phase synchronisation that can reliably group fingers to hands and experimentally validate our technique. This allows significant new gestural capabilities for 3D finger sensing without additional hardware

Modelling and correcting for the impact of the gait cycle on touch screen typing accuracy

Walking and typing on a smartphone is an extremely common interaction. Previous research has shown that error rates are higher when walking than when stationary. In this paper we analyse the acceleration data logged in an experiment in which users typed whilst walking, and extract the gait phase angle. We find statistically significant relationships between tapping time, error rate and gait phase angle. We then use the gait phase as an additional input to an offset model, and show that this allows more accurate touch interaction for walking users than a model which considers only the recorded tap position

Ways of walking: understanding walking's implications for the design of handheld technology via a humanistic ethnographic approach

It seems logical to argue that mobile computing technologies are intended for use “on-the-go.” However, on closer inspection, the use of mobile technologies pose a number of challenges for users who are mobile, particularly moving around on foot. In engaging with such mobile technologies and their envisaged development, we argue that interaction designers must increasingly consider a multitude of perspectives that relate to walking in order to frame design problems appropriately. In this paper, we consider a number of perspectives on walking, and we discuss how these may inspire the design of mobile technologies. Drawing on insights from non-representational theory, we develop a partial vocabulary with which to engage with qualities of pedestrian mobility, and we outline how taking more mindful approaches to walking may enrich and inform the design space of handheld technologies

Mobile navigation: a multimodal approach

The functionality and processing power of mobile devices has increased dramatically over the last few years. Location based services and rich interactions are feasible with the majority of smart phones available today. However, whilst the capabilities of current devices afford rich interaction tailored to the user in mobile situations, they are still linked with desktop style interactions. Spatially situated virtual objects are used to represent multiple forms of information. Ranging from nav- igation beacons to places of interest and gaming objects. This thesis gives an review of the current literature of the use of virtual objects and examines the role of vibrotactile feedback for egocentric heading detection for virtual objects. Experiment results are also reported showing users can utilise vibrotactile feedback for heading acquisition. Possible future steps include combining directions and distance information for mobile navigation systems

Variáveis percetivo-motoras na sincronização da marcha

Dissertação de mest., Neurociências Cognitivas e Neuropsicologia, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais, Univ. do Algarve, 2012A relação entre música e o movimento do corpo tem sido amplamente explorada. Várias atividades como aeróbica ou spinning são baseadas no uso da música. Também é comum pessoas baterem palmas em sincronia num concerto ao vivo. Apesar da frequência da passada estar intimamente relacionada com a velocidade durante a locomoção, existem evidências de que a frequência e amplitude da passada podem ser dissociadas da velocidade da passadeira rolante através da aplicação de pistas auditivas rítmicas. O objetivo deste trabalho foi estudar o efeito de diferentes pistas auditivas rítmicas na marcha em passadeira rolante Uma amostra de 10 alunos, voluntários, da Universidade do Minho realizou uma condição de marcha, considerada de controlo, sem pistas auditivas, para as velocidades de 1,0m/s, 1,2m/s, 1,4m/s e 1,6m/. Para a realização das condições com pista auditivas os participantes foram separados em dois grupos, o primeiro recebeu instrução para sincronizar a frequência da passada com as pistas auditivas apresentadas, enquanto o segundo foi instruído apenas para andar. Foram apresentadas pistas de som de passos e música a ambos os grupos. Os participantes realizaram cinco situações de teste em passadeira rolante, de forma aleatória, para cada tipo de pista. As pistas apresentavam frequência de som igual à frequência da passada (100%) bem como variações de 5 e 10% acima e abaixo desta frequência. As condições de marcha foram efetuadas para as quatro velocidades mencionadas acima. Foram analisados os dados antropométricos, bem como a velocidade, frequência e amplitude média da passada. Os resultados indicam que apesar do efeito geral da pista auditiva na frequência da passada, apenas o grupo com instrução sincronizou a frequência da passada com as pistas auditivas. Não se encontraram diferenças entre a frequência da passada com pista de som de passos e a frequência da passada com pista de música

Walking and the Social Life of Solar Charging in Rural Africa

We illustrate links between walking, sociality and using resources in a case-study of community-based, solar, cellphone charging in two villages in Eastern Cape, South Africa. Like 360 million rural Sub-saharan Africans, inhabitants are poor and, like 25% and 92%, of the world respectively, do not have domestic electricity or own motor vehicles. We show that the ways we move through the world affect the meanings we embody; that certain representations obscure continuities in the practices we seek to understand and influence; and, some of the motivations of the billions of people who are marginalized in discussing sustainable HCI. Locally, about 65% of inhabitants over 14 years old own cell- phones and, over a year, we recorded 500 names of people using the Charging Stations that, we deployed within several technology probing endeavours, many on a regular basis. The detail of our longitudinal study contributes considerably to sustainable design for ‘developing’ regions. Walking is a noticeable part of charging, and all other subsistence rou- tines, and shapes inhabitants’ motivations when they use, re-purpose, store and share resources. Inhabitants are moti- vated by cost and comfort and, importantly, by performing collectivity in their tight-knit community; but, not by being green. Further, different ways of walking relate to social roles and other aspects of sociality and, we propose, shaped inhabitants’ and researchers’ perspectives on charging and using phones. We suggest this is significant for the methods and designs that we use to explore and support sustainable practices in rural Africa and, indeed, more generally

wContact: improving social communication

Contact management today is ubiquitous and multi‐channel: phone, IM, email, VOIP  to name but a few. However, the contact management technology commonly in use today has  not changed significantly in many years. It remains far from an ideal service, falling down on  issues  such  as  its  utility,  ease  of  interaction,  the  efforts  required  to  maintain  it  and  its  reliability.  Another important factor relies how mobile communication devices have become  more commonplace increasing the potential to be interrupted by them. Indeed, it has been  argued that technologies such as the mobile phone have “reconfigured time and space”. They  have also fundamentally altered notions of availability, promoting a vision in which users are  always‐on and continually connected. While this confers many advantages it also increases the  potential for disruption to users engaged in other activities or seeking rest  This  document  describes  wContact,  a  system  that  provides  a  unified  service  of  synchronized contact profiles (incorporating privacy controls) that contain all contact info. This  is  held  in  a  distributed  system  (a  cloud  computing  service)  and  broadcast  over  a  data  connection to address book clients. Ultimately this takes the form of a minimal social network  where adding or removing contacts is equivalent to adding or removing a friend in a more  conventional service such as Facebook.  The wContact is complemented with a system which automatically manages status on  a mobile device. Its contribution lies in the adoption of a number of recent technological  advances to create a realistic framework for a sophisticated mobile context‐sensitive tool to  capture activity and infer and share availability. It does so by proposing a context model based  on the integration of multiple sensor inputs (e.g. microphone and accelerometer) and internal  device state (e.g. battery level) which is broadcasted.  In summary, wContact represents a substantial improvement over today’s systems in  how contacts are treated and managed. It focuses on simplifying the way they are exchanged,  increasing the quantity and quality of contact details and providing awareness clues to better  mediate engagement with contacts. Finally, to ensure the durability of contacts the system  provides a seamless automatic update process.

User experience, performance, and social acceptability: usable multimodal mobile interaction

This thesis explores the social acceptability of multimodal interaction in public places with respect to acceptance, adoption and appropriation. Previous work in multimodal interaction has mainly focused on recognition and detection issues without thoroughly considering the willingness of users to adopt these kinds of interactions in their everyday lives. This thesis presents a novel approach to user experience that is theoretically motivated by phenomenology, practiced with mixed-methods, and analysed based on dramaturgical metaphors. In order to explore the acceptance of multimodal interfaces, this thesis presents three studies that look at users’ initial reactions to multimodal interaction techniques: a survey study focusing on gestures, an on-the-street user study, and a follow-up survey study looking at gesture and voice-based interaction. The investigation of multimodal interaction adoption is explored through two studies: an in situ user study of a performative interface and a focus group study using experience prototypes. This thesis explores the appropriation of multimodal interaction by demonstrating the complete design process of a multimodal interface using the performative approach to user experience presented in this thesis. Chapter 3 looks at users’ initial reactions to and acceptance of multimodal interactions. The results of the first survey explored location and audience as factors the influence how individuals behave in public places. Participants in the on-the-street study described the desirable visual aspects of the gestures as playful, cool, or embarrassing aspects of interaction and how gestures could be hidden as everyday actions. These results begin to explain why users accepted or rejected the gestures from the first survey. The second survey demonstrated that the presence of familiar spectators made interaction significantly more acceptable. This result indicates that performative interaction could be made more acceptable by interfaces that support collaborative or social interaction. Chapter 4 explores how users place interactions into a usability context for use in real world settings. In the first user study, participants took advantage of the wide variety of possible performances, and created a wide variety of input, from highly performative to hidden actions, based on location. The ability of this interface to support flexible interactions allowed users to demonstrate the the purposed of their actions differently based on the immediately co-located spectators. Participants in the focus group study discussed how they would go about placing multimodal interactions into real world contexts, using three approaches: relationship to the device, personal meaning, and relationship to functionality. These results demonstrate how users view interaction within a usability context and how that might affect social acceptability. Chapter 5 examines appropriation of multimodal interaction through the completion of an entire design process. The results of an initial survey were used as a baseline of comparison from which to design the following focus group study. Participants in the focus groups had similar motives for accepting multimodal interactions, although the ways in which these were expressed resulted in very different preferences. The desire to use technology in a comfortable and satisfying way meant different things in these different settings. During the ‘in the wild’ user study, participants adapted performance in order to make interaction acceptable in different contexts. In some cases, performance was hidden in public places or shared with familiar spectators in order to successfully incorporate interaction into public places

Analysing Crowd Behaviours using Mobile Sensing

PhDResearchers have examined crowd behaviour in the past by employing a variety of methods including ethnographic studies, computer vision techniques and manual annotation-based data analysis. However, because of the resources to collect, process and analyse data, it remains difficult to obtain large data sets for study. Mobile phones offer easier means for data collection that is easy to analyse and can preserve the user’s privacy. The aim of this thesis is to identify and model different qualities of social interactions inside crowds using mobile sensing technology. This Ph.D. research makes three main contributions centred around the mobile sensing and crowd sensing area. Firstly, an open-source licensed mobile sensing framework is developed, named SensingKit, that is capable of collecting mobile sensor data from iOS and Android devices, supporting most sensors available in modern smartphones. The framework has been evaluated in a case study that investigates the pedestrian gait synchronisation phenomenon. Secondly, a novel algorithm based on graph theory is proposed capable of detecting stationary social interactions within crowds. It uses sensor data available in a modern smartphone device, such as the Bluetooth Smart (BLE) sensor, as an indication of user proximity, and accelerometer sensor, as an indication of each user’s motion state. Finally, a machine learning model is introduced that uses multi-modal mobile sensor data extracted from Bluetooth Smart, accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. The validation was performed using a relatively large dataset with 24 participants, where they were asked to socialise with each other for 45 minutes. By using supervised machine learning based on gradient-boosted trees, a performance increase of 26.7% was achieved over a proximity-based approach. Such model can be beneficial to the design and implementation of in-the-wild crowd behavioural analysis, design of influence strategies, and algorithms for crowd reconfiguration.UK Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL

Internet on mobiles: evolution of usability and user experience

The mobile Internet is no longer a new phenomenon; the first mobile devices supporting web access were introduced over 10 years ago. During the past ten years technology and business infrastructure have evolved and the number of mobile Internet users has increased all over the world. Service user interface, technology and business infrastructure have built a framework for service adaptation: they can act as enablers or as barriers. Users evaluate how the new technology adds value to their life based on multiple factors. This dissertation has its focus in the area of human-computer interaction research and practices. The overall goal of my research has been to improve the usability and the user experience of mobile Internet services. My research has sought answers to questions relevant in service development process. Questions have varied during the years, the main question being: How to design and create mobile Internet services that people can use and want to use? I have sought answers mostly from a human factors perspective, but have also taken the elements form technology and business infrastructure into consideration. In order to answer the questions raised in service development projects, we have investigated the mobile Internet services in the laboratory and in the field. My research has been conducted in various countries in 3 continents: Asia, Europe and North America. These studies revealed differences in mobile Internet use in different countries and between user groups. Studies in this dissertation were conducted between years 1998 and 2007 and show how questions and research methods have evolved during the time. Good service creation requires that all three factors: technology, business infrastructure and users are taken in consideration. When using knowledge on users in decision making, it is important to understand that the different phases of the service development cycle require the different kind of information on users. It is not enough to know about the users, the knowledge about users has to be transferred into decisions. The service has to be easy to use so that people can use it. This is related to usability. Usability is a very important factor in service adoption, but it is not enough. The service has to have relevant content from user perspective. The content is the reason why people want to use the service. In addition to the content and the ease of use, people evaluate the goodness of the service based on many other aspects: the cost, the availability and the reliability of the system for example. A good service is worth trying and after the first experience, is it worth using. These aspects are considered to influence the 'user experience' of the system. In this work I use lexical analysis to evaluate how the words "usability" and "user experience" are used in mobile HCI conference papers during the past 10 years. The use of both words has increased during the period and reflects the evolution of research questions and methodology over time