Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

NoiseSPY: a real-time mobile phone platform for urban noise monitoring and mapping

In this paper we present the design, implementation, evaluation, and user experiences of the NoiseSpy application, our sound sensing system that turns the mobile phone into a low-cost data logger for monitoring environmental noise. It allows users to explore a city area while collaboratively visualizing noise levels in real-time. The software combines the sound levels with GPS data in order to generate a map of sound levels that were encountered during a journey. We report early findings from the trials which have been carried out by cycling couriers who were given Nokia mobile phones equipped with the NoiseSpy software to collect noise data around Cambridge city. Indications are that, not only is the functionality of this personal environmental sensing tool engaging for users, but aspects such as personalization of data, contextual information, and reflection upon both the data and its collection, are important factors in obtaining and retaining their interest

Single Value Devices

We live in a world of continuous information overflow, but the quality of information and communication is suffering. Single value devices contribute to the information and communication quality by fo- cussing on one explicit, relevant piece of information. The information is decoupled from a computer and represented in an object, integrates into daily life. However, most existing single value devices come from conceptual experiments or art and exist only as prototypes. In order to get to mature products and to design meaningful, effective and work- ing objects, an integral perspective on the design choices is necessary. Our contribution is a critical exploration of the design space of single value devices. In a survey we give an overview of existing examples. The characterizing design criteria for single value devices are elaborated in a taxonomy. Finally, we discuss several design choices that are specifically important for moving from prototypes to commercializable products

Spatial audio in small display screen devices

Our work addresses the problem of (visual) clutter in mobile device interfaces. The solution we propose involves the translation of technique-from the graphical to the audio domain-for expliting space in information representation. This article presents an illustrative example in the form of a spatialisedaudio progress bar. In usability tests, participants performed background monitoring tasks significantly more accurately using this spatialised audio (a compared with a conventional visual) progress bar. Moreover, their performance in a simultaneously running, visually demanding foreground task was significantly improved in the eye-free monitoring condition. These results have important implications for the design of multi-tasking interfaces for mobile devices

Asynchronous Ultrasonic Trilateration for Indoor Positioning of Mobile Phones

Spatial awareness is fast becoming the key feature on today‟s mobile devices. While accurate outdoor navigation has been widely available for some time through Global Positioning Systems (GPS), accurate indoor positioning is still largely an unsolved problem. One major reason for this is that GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) systems offer accuracy of a scale far different to that required for effective indoor navigation. Indoor positioning is also hindered by poor GPS signal quality, a major issue when developing dedicated indoor locationing systems. In addition, many indoor systems use specialized hardware to calculate accurate device position, as readily available wireless protocols have so far not delivered sufficient levels of accuracy. This research aims to investigate how the mobile phone‟s innate ability to produce sound (notably ultrasound) can be utilised to deliver more accurate indoor positioning than current methods. Experimental work covers limitations of mobile phone speakers in regard to generation of high frequencies, propagation patternsof ultrasound and their impact on maximum range, and asynchronous trilateration. This is followed by accuracy and reliability tests of an ultrasound positioning system prototype.This thesis proposes a new method of positioning a mobile phone indoors with accuracy substantially better than other contemporary positioning systems available on off-theshelf mobile devices. Given that smartphones can be programmed to correctly estimate direction, this research outlines a potentially significant advance towards a practical platform for indoor Location Based Services. Also a novel asynchronous trilateration algorithm is proposed that eliminates the need for synchronisation between the mobile device and the positioning infrastructure