Multimodal and ubiquitous computing systems: supporting independent-living older users

We document the rationale and design of a multimodal interface to a pervasive/ubiquitous computing system that supports independent living by older people in their own homes. The Millennium Home system involves fitting a resident’s home with sensors – these sensors can be used to trigger sequences of interaction with the resident to warn them about dangerous events, or to check if they need external help. We draw lessons from the design process and conclude the paper with implications for the design of multimodal interfaces to ubiquitous systems developed for the elderly and in healthcare, as well as for more general ubiquitous computing applications

Evolving water point mapping to strategic decision making in rural Malawi

There is a need to evolve from the simple mapping of water points, now often numerous, to effective decision making using these data. This paper outlines new developments of mWater as the preferred online Management Information System (MIS) tool to analyse significant volumes of water and sanitation data in Malawi. mWater exemplifies an evolving strategic decision-making tool used to formulate rural water supply investment strategies. A time series of 25,000 water points have been mapped since 2011 to build a complete asset register of water infrastructure to support government endeavours to reach Sustainable Development Goal 6. This comprehensive live database allows real-time analysis of over sixty variables, including linkage to concurrent mWater sanitation and waste data. This paper briefly illustrates several emergent uses of the facility to exemplify its potential in strategic decision making using Big Data. It is currently being rolled out across the entire country

Utilizing Bayesian Techniques for User Interface Intelligence

The purpose of this research is to study the injection of an intelligent agent into modern user interface technology. This agent is intended to manage the complex interactions between the software system and the user, thus making the complexities transparent to the user. The background study will show that while interesting and promising research exists in the domain of intelligent interface agents, very little research has been published that indicates true success in representing the uncertainty involved in predicting user intent. The interface agent architecture presented in this thesis will offer one solution for solving the problem using a newly developed Bayesian-based agent called the Intelligent Interface Agent (IIA). The proof of concept of this architecture has been implemented in an actual expert system, and this thesis presents the results of the implementation. The conclusions of this thesis will show the viability of this new agent architecture, as well as promising future research in examination of cognitive models, development of an intelligent interface agent interaction language, expansion of meta-level interface learning, and refinement of the PESKI user interface

Transparency in adaptive mobile user interfaces

User interfaces that enable us to use complicated systems have become omnipresent. Being it through desktop, tablet or mobile devices, a great deal of our interactions with interactive systems is perceived through graphical user interfaces. One of these user interfaces is the adaptive user interface, which adapts according to a user s interactions. This type of interactive system keeps track of a user s actions through a personalized user model. Users can experience great advantages from having personalized user interfaces: imagine different contexts being triggered depending on certain situations, all with great ease of access. Nevertheless, users will perceive these changes differently. In order to communicate these changes in an effective way, certain ways of transparently guiding the user have been proposed. In this thesis guidelines and principles to facilitate adaptive user interfaces are explored and applied to a novel mobile prototype, hence the title adaptive mobile user interfaces . This resulted in a transparent prototype, which effectively communicated change in the form of prompts and additional options to alter the changes. The second, non- transparent prototype, did not communicate these changes and was not alterable. In order to construct a viable evaluation of the prototype, physiological changes in the form of skin conductance data were tracked in order to measure participants stress levels. Additional user questionnaires were used to accompany this data. The prototypes were tested by two groups of participants in the form of a first usage and a second usage scenario. The first group perceived the transparent prototype to be highly likeable and effective, but the skin conductance data seemed to contradict this matter. Participants who tested the non-transparent prototype expressed less overall satisfaction towards the this type of prototype, results opposing the outcome of the skin conductance data. Therefore, the hypothesis that the non-transparent prototype would result in more perceived stress as opposed to the transparent prototype was only partially supported

Formal functional testing of graphical user interfaces.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX177960 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Investigation into standardising the graphical and operator input device modules for tactical command and control man-machine interfaces

Includes bibliographical references.The operating environment of a Tactical Command and Control system is a highly tense one in which the operator needs to perform certain complex tasks with minimum confusion, and be able to obtain an instant response from the system. Since many of the systems designed for these types of environments are similar in nature with regard to the user-interface, a need has arisen to try and standardise certain elements of the systems. This report looks specifically at standardising certain graphical display element and operator input device interfaces. It investigates the problem from a systems design level, identifying the elements required and their associated functions, discussing the results of work already undertaken in this field, and making recommendations on the use of the elements. The main objective to standardising the Man-Machine Interface (MMI) design elements is to make the code easily transferable between different hardware platforms. To transfer the code, one would ideally like to change only the interface code to the new platform, in particular, the interface to a different set of operator input devices and a different type of graphics card. Various topics related to the standardisation process are discussed, including a description of MMI design, some definitions of tactical command and control environment subjects, and a look at code reusability, rapid prototyping of systems, and object-oriented design

Um ambiente de edição e simulação de estado-gramas

Orientador: Hans Kurt Edmund LiesenbergDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Matematica, Estatistica e Ciencia da ComputaçãoResumo: Este trabalho aprescnta um Editor Gráfico de Estadogramas. Estadogramas são uma extensão de diagramas de estados convencionais, acrescidos de conceitos de hierarquia, concorrência e comunicação. Apresentamos uma interface gráfica particular, que permite especificar sistemas reativos através da notação de estadogramas. No final de uma sessão de edição, fornecemos a opção de simulação de estadogramas. Nessa simulação são destacados os estados em que o sistema se encontra e são efetuadas as mudanças de estados que ocorrerem em decorrência de eventos. A cada estadograma editado, é gerada uma descrição textual passível de ser convertida em um programa em C que se comporta de forma funcionalmente equivalente ao estadograma. Paralelamente à execução deste programa, pode-se executar a simulação do estadograma original, onde através do mecanismo de sockets, o programa envia ao simulador os identificadores dos eventos ocorridos para serem realizadas as mudanças de estados decorrentes. Com este tipo de simulação fica disponível uma maneira de depurar programas a nível de estadogramas.Abstract: A Graphic Editor of Statecharts is presented. Statecharts are an extension of conventional state diagrams where the concepts of hierarchy, concurrency and communication have been added. We present a particular graphic interface which supports the specification of reactive systems by means of the statechart notation. At the end of an editting session we offer a statechart simulation option. During a simulation the states, which the system is at, are highlighted and the state swappings due to event occurrences are performed. A textual description of an edited statechart may as well be generated. This description is liable to be converted into an executable program which behaves in a functionally equivalent manner. It is possible to execute this program at the same time the simulation of the original statechart is running. The program sends to the simulator the events identifiers, by means of the sockets mechanism, as soon as they occur. The simulator then applies the state swapping operation. With this kind of simulation it is possible to provide some support to debug programs at the statechart level.MestradoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Integration of relational database metadata and XML technology to develop an abstract framework to generate automatic and dynamic web entry forms.

Developing interactive web application systems requires a large amount of effort on designing database, system logic and user interface. These tasks are expensive and error-prone. Web application systems are accessed and used by many different sets of people with different backgrounds and numerous demands. Meeting these demands requires frequent updating for Web application systems which results in a very high cost process. Thus, many attempts have been made to automate, to some degree, the construction of Web user interfaces. Three main directions have been cited for this purpose. The first direction suggested of generating user interfaces from the application¿s data model. This path was able to generate the static layout of user interfaces with dynamic behaviour specified programmatically. The second tendency suggested deployment of the domain model to generate both, the layout of a user interface and its dynamic behaviour. Web applications built based on this approach are most useful for domain-specific interfaces with a relatively fixed user dialogue. The last direction adopted the notion of deploying database metadata to developing dynamic user interfaces. Although the notion was quite valuable, its deployment did not present a generic solution for generating a variety of types of dynamic Web user interface targeting several platforms and electronic devices. This thesis has inherited the latter direction and presented significant improvements on the current deployment of this tendency. This thesis aims to contribute towards the development of an abstract framework to generate abstract and dynamic Web user interfaces not targeted to any particular domain or platform. To achieve this target, the thesis proposed and evaluates a general notion for implementing a prototype system that uses an internal model (i.e. database metadata) in conjunction with XML technology. Database metadata is richer than any external model and provides the information needed to build dynamic user interfaces. In addition, XML technology became the mainstream of presenting and storing data in an abstract structure. It is widely adopted in Web development society because of its ability to be transformed into many different formats with a little bit of effort. This thesis finds that only Java can provide us with a generalised database metadata based framework. Other programming languages apply some restrictions on accessing and extracting database metadata from numerous database management systems. Consequently, JavaServlets and relational database were used to implement the proposed framework. In addition, Java Data Base Connectivity was used to bridge the two mentioned technologies. The implementation of our proposed approach shows that it is possible and very straightforward to produce different automatic and dynamic Web entry forms that not targeted at any platform. In addition, this approach can be applied to a particular domain without affecting the main notion or framework architecture. The implemented approach demonstrates a number of advantages over the other approaches based on external or internal models

Interfaces gráficas em ambientes de E-learning: caso VIASK.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de ProduçãoO aumento da oferta de ambientes de e-learning no mercado tem levado a uma mudança de paradigmas no projeto de interfaces gráficas com o usuário e no projeto de ferramentas para apresentação do conteúdo digital. Dentro deste novo contexto, o maior desafio é criar interfaces gráficas interativas que apóiem a tarefa do usuário ao mesmo tempo que tenham estética agradável, sejam padronizadas de forma que todo o ambiente componha um conjunto coeso. Este trabalho aplicou uma metodologia de projeto de sistemas centrada no usuário para modelar as interfaces gráficas do ambiente de e-learning VIASK, esta metodologia foi escolhida por favorecer o desenvolvimento de interfaces com os requisitos desejados pelo mercado e indicados por pesquisas realizadas em outros ambientes de e-learning internacionais. Como resultado da pesquisa e do levantamento bibliográfico realizado obteve-se um manual de recomendações para o projeto de interfaces gráficas no desenvolvimento de ambientes de e-learning, que oferece subsídios para a construção de ambientes com qualidade