Remarkable Objects: Supporting Collaboration in a Creative Environment

In this paper, we report the results of a field trial of a Ubicomp system called CAM that is aimed at supporting and enhancing collaboration in a design studio environment. CAM uses a mobile-tagging application which allows designers to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design objects in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. The purpose of our field trial was to explore the role of augmented objects in supporting and enhancing creative work. Our results show that CAM was used not only used to support participants’ mutual awareness and coordination but also to facilitate designers in appropriating their augmented design objects to be explorative, extendable and playful supporting creative aspects of design work. In general, our results show how CAM transformed static design objects into ‘remarkable’ objects that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible

Inferring Person-to-person Proximity Using WiFi Signals

Today's societies are enveloped in an ever-growing telecommunication infrastructure. This infrastructure offers important opportunities for sensing and recording a multitude of human behaviors. Human mobility patterns are a prominent example of such a behavior which has been studied based on cell phone towers, Bluetooth beacons, and WiFi networks as proxies for location. However, while mobility is an important aspect of human behavior, understanding complex social systems requires studying not only the movement of individuals, but also their interactions. Sensing social interactions on a large scale is a technical challenge and many commonly used approaches---including RFID badges or Bluetooth scanning---offer only limited scalability. Here we show that it is possible, in a scalable and robust way, to accurately infer person-to-person physical proximity from the lists of WiFi access points measured by smartphones carried by the two individuals. Based on a longitudinal dataset of approximately 800 participants with ground-truth interactions collected over a year, we show that our model performs better than the current state-of-the-art. Our results demonstrate the value of WiFi signals in social sensing as well as potential threats to privacy that they imply

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

"The Heart Game": using gamification as part of a telerehabilitation programme for heart patients

Objective: The aim of this article is to describe the development and testing of a prototype application (“The Heart Game”) using gamification principles to assist heart patients in their telerehabilitation process in the Teledialog project. Materials and Methods: A prototype game was developed via user-driven innovation and tested on 10 patients 48–89 years of age and their relatives for a period of 2 weeks. The application consisted of a series of daily challenges given to the patients and relatives and was based on several gamification principles. A triangulation of data collection techniques (interviews, participant observations, focus group interviews, and workshop) was used. Interviews with three healthcare professionals and 10 patients were carried out over a period of 2 weeks in order to evaluate the use of the prototype. Results: The heart patients reported the application to be a useful tool as a part of their telerehabilitation process in everyday life. Gamification and gameful design principles such as leaderboards, relationships, and achievements engaged the patients and relatives. The inclusion of a close relative in the game motivated the patients to perform rehabilitation activities. Conclusions: “The Heart Game” concept presents a new way to motivate heart patients by using technology as a social and active approach to telerehabilitation. The findings show the potential of using gamification for heart patients as part of a telerehabilitation program. The evaluation indicated that the inclusion of the patient's spouse in the rehabilitation activities could be an effective strategy. A major challenge in using gamification for heart patients is avoiding a sense of defeat while still adjusting the level of difficulty to the individual patient

Who needs a doctor anymore?:risks and promise of mobile health Apps

Personal health monitoring is a hot topic. With bracelets and other wearables, we keep track of our heart rate, exercising, sleep, and more. We are becoming our own doctors and coaches. Improving citizens' health brings the society significant savings, besides healthier citizens. Health data also has important value beyond healthcare, e.g. in insurance and advertising. However, risks on privacy, data management, information interpretation and incorrect health diagnosis and treatments exist. This panel discusses the promise and risks related to mobile health apps, highlighting both research and industrial aspects related to the current trends

QR code awareness in Stockholm, Sweden

This tech report describes the findings of a street survey on awareness of QR codes (2D barcodes) of the general public in Stockholm, Sweden. 108 passers-by were surveyed. Of these participants, a large majority (77%) did not recognize a QR code, and 8% reported seeing such a code before, but did not know it could be scanned using a mobile phone app. Only 15% knew what the shown QR code was, and that it could be read using a QR code reader on a mobile phone. The awareness of QR codes by the general public could be considered rather low, and their utility in Swedish public settings is currently debatable

Mobile awareness: Design for connectedness

This article describes our ongoing research project about design for behavior change, which is facilitated by Ubiquitous Computing technologies. In particular in this paper we discuss the potentiality of mobile devices to facilitate the mobility behavior change among people who are currently living at Turin, Italy. To this aim we illustrate our conceptual design of a mobile game, which is designed to facilitate mobility behavior change

On preventive blood pressure self-monitoring at home

Self-monitoring activities are increasingly becoming part of people’s everyday lives. Some of these measurements are taken voluntarily rather than being referred by a physician and conducted because of either a preventive health interest or to better understand the body and its functions (the so-called Quantified Self). In this article, we explore socio-technical complexities that may occur when introducing preventive health-measurement technologies into older adults’ daily routines and everyday lives. In particular, the original study investigated blood pressure (BP) measurement in non-clinical settings, to understand existing challenges, and uncover opportunities for self-monitoring technologies to support preventive healthcare activities among older adults. From our study, several important aspects emerged to consider when designing preventive self-monitoring technology, such as the complexity of guidelines for self-measuring, the importance of interpretation, understanding and health awareness, sharing self-monitoring information for prevention, various motivational factors, the role of the doctor in prevention, and the home as a distributed information space. An awareness of these aspects can help designers to develop better tools to support people’s preventive self-monitoring needs, compared to existing solutions. Supporting the active and informed individual can help improve people’s self-care, awareness, and implementation of preventive care. Based on our study, we also reflect on the findings to illustrate how these aspects can both inform people engaged in Quantified Self activities and designers alike, and the tools and approaches that have sprung from the so-called Quantified Self movement