Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers

We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open – enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design

Design Fiction Diegetic Prototyping: A Research Framework for Visualizing Service Innovations

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose: This paper presents a design fiction diegetic prototyping methodology and research framework for investigating service innovations that reflect future uses of new and emerging technologies. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on speculative fiction, we propose a methodology that positions service innovations within a six-stage research development framework. We begin by reviewing and critiquing designerly approaches that have traditionally been associated with service innovations and futures literature. In presenting our framework, we provide an example of its application to the Internet of Things (IoT), illustrating the central tenets proposed and key issues identified. Findings: The research framework advances a methodology for visualizing future experiential service innovations, considering how realism may be integrated into a designerly approach. Research limitations/implications: Design fiction diegetic prototyping enables researchers to express a range of ‘what if’ or ‘what can it be’ research questions within service innovation contexts. However, the process encompasses degrees of subjectivity and relies on knowledge, judgment and projection. Practical implications: The paper presents an approach to devising future service scenarios incorporating new and emergent technologies in service contexts. The proposed framework may be used as part of a range of research designs, including qualitative, quantitative and mixed method investigations. Originality: Operationalizing an approach that generates and visualizes service futures from an experiential perspective contributes to the advancement of techniques that enables the exploration of new possibilities for service innovation research

Developing medical device technologies from users' perspectives: A theoretical framework for involving users in the development process

Objectives: The aim of this study was to suggest an acceptable and generic theoretical framework for involving various types of users in the medical device technology (MDT) development process (MDTDP).Methods: The authors propose a theoretical framework suggesting different routes, methods and stages through which various types of medical device users can be involved in the MDTDP.Results: The suggested framework comprises two streams of users' involvement in MDT development, that is, what might be called the end users' stream and the professional users' stream for involving these two groups respectively in the process of developing both simple and more complex and innovative medical devices from conceptualization through to the market deployment. This framework suggests various methods that can be used for users' involvement at different stages of the MDT lifecycle. To illustrate the application of the framework, several MDT development scenarios and device exemplars are presented.Conclusions: Development of medical devices from users' perspectives requires not only the involvement of healthcare professionals but also that of the ultimate end users, that is, patients, people with disabilities and/or special needs, and their caregivers. The evidence shows that such end users quickly discard devices that do not fulfill their personal expectations, even though both manufacturers and healthcare professionals may consider those end users' requirements met. Developers and manufacturers need to recognize this potent potential discrepancy between the parties involved, and involve end users and professional healthcare staff directly in the MDTDP. The framework, the authors contend, is a step forward in helping medical device manufacturers plan and make decisions about users' involvement at different stages of the MDTDP

Report of the user requirements and web based access for eResearch workshops

The User Requirements and Web Based Access for eResearch Workshop, organized jointly by NeSC and NCeSS, was held on 19 May 2006. The aim was to identify lessons learned from e-Science projects that would contribute to our capacity to make Grid infrastructures and tools usable and accessible for diverse user communities. Its focus was on providing an opportunity for a pragmatic discussion between e-Science end users and tool builders in order to understand usability challenges, technological options, community-specific content and needs, and methodologies for design and development. We invited members of six UK e-Science projects and one US project, trying as far as possible to pair a user and developer from each project in order to discuss their contrasting perspectives and experiences. Three breakout group sessions covered the topics of user-developer relations, commodification, and functionality. There was also extensive post-meeting discussion, summarized here. Additional information on the workshop, including the agenda, participant list, and talk slides, can be found online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/685/ Reference: NeSC report UKeS-2006-07 available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2006-07.pd

Telescience testbedding: An implementation approach

Telescience is the term used to describe a concept being developed by NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications (OSSA) under the Science and Applications Information System (SAIS) Program. This concept focuses on the development of an ability for all OSSA users to be remotely interactive with all provided information system services for the Space Station era. This concept includes access to services provided by both flight and ground components of the system and emphasizes the accommodation of users from their home institutions. Key to the development of the telescience capability is an implementation approach called rapid-prototype testbedding. This testbedding is used to validate the concept and test the applicability of emerging technologies and operational methodologies. Testbedding will be used to first determine the feasibility of an idea and then the applicability to real science usage. Once a concept is deemed viable, it will be integrated into the operational system for real time support. It is believed that this approach will greatly decrease the expense of implementing the eventual system and will enhance the resultant capabilities of the delivered system

Using mobile RE tools to give end-users their own voice

Researchers highlight end-user involvement in system design as an important concept for developing useful and usable solutions. However, end-user involvement in software engineering is still an open-ended topic. Novel paradigms such as service-oriented computing strengthen the need for more active end-user involvement in order to provide systems that are tailored to individual end-user needs. Our work is based on the fact that the majority of end-users are familiar with mobile devices and use an increasing number of mobile applications. A mobile tool enabling end-user led requirements elicitation could be just one of many applications installed on end-users' mobile devices. In this paper, we present a framework of end-user involvement in requirements elicitation which motivates our research. The main contribution of our research is a tool-supported requirements elicitation approach allowing end-users to document needs in situ. Furthermore, we present first evaluation results to highlight the feasibility of on-site end-user led requirements elicitation

Optimization of stand-alone photovoltaic system by implementing fuzzy logic MPPT controller

A photovoltaic (PV) generator is a nonlinear device having insolation-dependent volt-ampere characteristics. Since the maximum-power point varies with solar insolation, it is difficult to achieve an optimum matching that is valid for all insolation levels. Thus, Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) plays an important roles in photovoltaic (PV) power systems because it maximize the power output from a PV system for a given set of condition, and therefore maximize their array efficiency. This project presents a maximum power point tracker (MPPT) using Fuzzy Logic theory for a PV system. The work is focused on a comparative study between most conventional controller namely Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm and is compared to a design fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The introduction of fuzzy controller has given very good performance on whatever the parametric variation of the system

Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients

Paper presented at 8th International conference on e-Health (EH 2016), 1-3 July 2016, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. ABSTRACT Mobile applications for health education are commonly utilized to support patients and health professionals. A critical evaluation framework is required to ensure the usability and reliability of mobile health education applications in order to facilitate the saving of time and effort for the various user groups; thus, the aim of this paper is to describe a framework for evaluating mobile applications for health education. The intended outcome of this framework is to meet the needs and requirements of the different user categories and to improve the development of mobile health education applications with software engineering approaches, by creating new and more effective techniques to evaluate such software. This paper first highlights the importance of mobile health education apps, then explains the need to establish an evaluation framework for these apps. The paper provides a description of the evaluation framework, along with some specific evaluation metrics: an efficient hybrid of selected heuristic evaluation (HE) and usability evaluation (UE) factors to enable the determination of the usefulness and usability of health education mobile apps. Finally, an explanation of the initial results for the framework was obtained using a Medscape mobile app. The proposed framework - An Evaluation Framework for Mobile Health Education Apps – is a hybrid of five metrics selected from a larger set in heuristic and usability evaluation, filtered based on interviews from patients and health professionals. These five metrics correspond to specific facets of usability identified through a requirements analysis of typical users of mobile health apps. These metrics were decomposed into 21 specific questionnaire questions, which are available on request from first author

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

BNCI systems as a potential assistive technology: ethical issues and participatory research in the BrainAble project

This paper highlights aspects related to current research and thinking about ethical issues in relation to Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and Brain-Neuronal Computer Interfaces (BNCI) research through the experience of one particular project, BrainAble, which is exploring and developing the potential of these technologies to enable people with complex disabilities to control computers. It describes how ethical practice has been developed both within the multidisciplinary research team and with participants. Results: The paper presents findings in which participants shared their views of the project prototypes, of the potential of BCI/BNCI systems as an assistive technology, and of their other possible applications. This draws attention to the importance of ethical practice in projects where high expectations of technologies, and representations of “ideal types” of disabled users may reinforce stereotypes or drown out participant “voices”. Conclusions: Ethical frameworks for research and development in emergent areas such as BCI/BNCI systems should be based on broad notions of a “duty of care” while being sufficiently flexible that researchers can adapt project procedures according to participant needs. They need to be frequently revisited, not only in the light of experience, but also to ensure they reflect new research findings and ever more complex and powerful technologies