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

Achieving Usability: Looking for Connections between User-Centred Design Practices and Resultant Usability Metrics in Agile Software Development

This article searches for correlations between the practices of usability professionals from software development teams and the resulting usability of the system they are working on. After reviewing the literature of the past decade, we can conclude that most researchers try to achieve better usability with process proposals, but measurements focus on perceived usability. The level of involvement of users in the requirements capture phase is unclear. There is a trend to reduce costs of usability engineering, either by choosing more lightweight and informal methods or by trying to substitute user involvement. Looking at decade's worth of 452 articles about "agile AND usability" in Scopus, we selected 133 which deal with the integration of usability, UX and User Centred Design practices and Agile development

Linking an integrated framework with appropriate methods for measuring QoE

Quality of Experience (QoE) has recently gained recognition for being an important determinant of the success of new technologies. Despite the growing interest in QoE, research into this area is still fragmented. Similar - but separate - efforts are being carried out in technical as well as user oriented research domains, which are rarely communicating with each other. In this paper, we take a multidisciplinary approach and review both user oriented and technical definitions on Quality of Experience (including the related concept of User Experience). We propose a detailed and comprehensive framework that integrates both perspectives. Finally, we take a first step at linking methods for measuring QoE with this framework

Taking real-life seriously : an approach to decomposing context beyond 'environment' in living labs

The maturity of Living Labs has grown and several researchers have tried to create a uniform definition of what Living Labs are by emphasizing the multi-method and real-life, contextual approach. Although researchers thus recognize the importance of context in Living Labs, they do not provide insights into how context can be taken into account. The real-life context predominantly focuses on the in-situ use of a product during field trials where users are observed in their everyday life. The contribution of this paper will be twofold. By means of a case study we will show how context can be evaluated in the front end of design, so Living Lab researchers are no longer dependent on the readiness level of a product, and we will show how field trials can be evaluated in a more structured way to cover all components of context. By using a framework to evaluate the impact of context on product use, Living Lab researchers can improve the overall effectiveness of data gathering and analysis methods in a Living Lab project