Investigating context-aware clues to assist navigation for visually impaired people

It is estimated that 7.4 million people in Europe are visually impaired [1]. Limitations of traditional mobility aids (i.e. white canes and guide dogs) coupled with a proliferation of context-aware technologies (e.g. Electronic Travel Aids, Global Positioning Systems and Geographical Information Systems), have stimulated research and development into navigational systems for the visually impaired. However, current research appears very technology focused, which has led to an insufficient appreciation of Human Computer Interaction, in particular task/requirements analysis and notions of contextual interactions. The study reported here involved a smallscale investigation into how visually impaired people interact with their environmental context during micro-navigation (through immediate environment) and/or macro-navigation (through distant environment) on foot. The purpose was to demonstrate the heterogeneous nature of visually impaired people in interaction with their environmental context. Results from a previous study involving sighted participants were used for comparison. Results revealed that when describing a route, visually impaired people vary in their use of different types of navigation clues - both as a group, when compared with sighted participants, and as individuals. Usability implications and areas for further work are identified and discussed

Improving transport timetables usability for mobile devices: a case study

The increasing number of passengers using mobile devices like smartphones or tablets in last few years have motivated transport companies to develop mobile websites and apps for their customers. However, the transition from desktop to mobile versions is challenging and many websites are still not optimised for user experience on such devices. In this paper we present a usability study carried out with the timetables of Nottingham City Transport website. A number of design changes have improved the overall user experience as confirmed by the results

Developing Adaptive and Personalized Mobile Applications: A Framework and Design Issues

The rapid growth of mobile technology has expedited ubiquitous information access via handheld devices. However, the fundamental natures of mobile information systems are different from those of desktop applications in terms of purpose of use, device features, communication networks, and working environments. This poses various challenges to mobile information systems on how to deliver and present multimedia content in an effective and adaptive manner. One of the major challenges is to deliver personalized information to the right person in a preferred format based on the changing environment. This paper proposes an innovative framework for developing mobile applications that deliver personalized, context-aware, and adaptive content to mobile users. The framework consists of four major components: information selection, content analysis, media transcoding, and customized presentation. It can be applied to a variety of mobile applications such as mobile web, news alert services, and mobile commerce

Supporting Work Activities in Healthcare by Mobile Electronic Patient Records

Abstract. Supporting work activities in healthcare is highly complex and chal-lenging. This paper outlines the findings from a usability study of a commercial PC based electronic patient record (EPR) system at a large Danish hospital and presents our experiences with the design of a mobile counterpart. First, a num-ber of challenges in relation to the use of traditional desktop-based EPR sys-tems in healthcare were identified. Secondly, a mobile context-aware prototype was designed and implemented, which automatically keeps track of contextual factors such as the physical location of patients and staff, upcoming appoint-ments etc. The usability of the mobile EPR prototype was evaluated in a labora-tory as well as in relation to carrying out real work activities at the hospital. Our results indicate that mobile EPR systems can support work activities in healthcare, but that interaction design of such systems must be carefully thought out and evaluated. Specifically, our findings challenge the view of con-text-awareness being a universally useful paradigm for mobile HCI.

The role of spatial contextual factors in mobile personalization at large sports events

This paper presents three field studies undertaken at large sports events in the UK and China, with aim of improving the user experience at these types of events through the design of personally-relevant mobile services. These field studies investigated: which aspects of spatial context were relevant within the confines of a large sporting event, how their relevance differed according to sports event and language/culture, and how they could be used to prescribe the behaviour of a personalizable/adaptive mobile device. Spatial aspects of context were found to be highly significant within the large sports arena. They can be used to maximize the relevance of information and communication services delivered to a spectator over a mobile device. A range of design implications are discussed

Le système KeyGlass

International audienceThis paper presents the KeyGlass system : a text entry system with dynamic addition of characters based on those previously entered. The prediction system that we use to optimize our system is based on the joint use of a lexicographic tree and a system using bigrams. We present in this article the different steps that led us to this prediction system. Finally we study, through two experiments (one theoretical and the other one with users), the usefulness and effectiveness of our system during a task of text copy. The results show a significant reduction in the distance covered by the pointer on the soft keyboard. However, users are slower to enter text