Managing obesity through mobile phone applications: a state-of-the-art review from a user-centred design perspective

Evidence has shown that the trend of increasing obesity rates has continued in the last decade. Mobile phone applications, benefiting from their ubiquity, have been increasingly used to address this issue. In order to increase the applications’ acceptance and success, a design and development process that focuses on users, such as User-Centred Design, is necessary. This paper reviews reported studies that concern the design and development of mobile phone applications to prevent obesity, and analyses them from a User-Centred Design perspective. Based on the review results, strengths and weaknesses of the existing studies were identified. Identified strengths included: evidence of the inclusion of multidisciplinary skills and perspectives; user involvement in studies; and the adoption of iterative design practices. Weaknesses included the lack of specificity in the selection of end-users and inconsistent evaluation protocols. The review was concluded by outlining issues and research areas that need to be addressed in the future, including: greater understanding of the effectiveness of sharing data between peers; privacy; and guidelines for designing for behavioural change through mobile phone applications

Privacy-preserved security-conscious framework to enhance web service composition

The emergence of loosely coupled and platform-independent Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has encouraged the development of large computing infrastructures like the Internet, thus enabling organizations to share information and offer valueadded services tailored to a wide range of user needs. Web Service Composition (WSC) has a pivotal role in realizing the vision of implementing just about any complex business processes. Although service composition assures cost-effective means of integrating applications over the Internet, it remains a significant challenge from various perspectives. Security and privacy are among the barriers preventing a more extensive application of WSC. First, users possess limited prior knowledge of security concepts. Second, WSC is hindered by having to identify the security required to protect critical user information. Therefore, the security available to users is usually not in accordance with their requirements. Moreover, the correlation between user input and orchestration architecture model is neglected in WSC with respect to selecting a high performance composition execution process. The proposed framework provides not only the opportunity to securely select services for use in the composition process but also handles service users’ privacy requirements. All possible user input states are modelled with respect to the extracted user privacy preferences and security requirements. The proposed approach supports the mathematical modelling of centralized and decentralized orchestration regarding service provider privacy and security policies. The output is then utilized to compare and screen the candidate composition routes and to select the most secure composition route based on user requests. The D-optimal design is employed to select the best subset of all possible experiments and optimize the security conscious of privacy-preserving service composition. A Choreography Index Table (CIT) is constructed for selecting a suitable orchestration model for each user input and to recommend the selected model to the choreographed level. Results are promising that indicate the proposed framework can enhance the choreographed level of the Web service composition process in making adequate decisions to respond to user requests in terms of higher security and privacy. Moreover, the results reflect a significant value compared to conventional WSC, and WSC optimality was increased by an average of 50% using the proposed CIT

Service-Oriented Middleware for the Future Internet: State of the Art and Research Directions

International audienceService-oriented computing is now acknowledged as a central paradigm for Internet computing, supported by tremendous research and technology development over the last ten years. However, the evolution of the Internet, and in particular, the latest Future Internet vision, challenges the paradigm. Indeed, service-oriented computing has to face the ultra large scale and heterogeneity of the Future Internet, which are orders of magnitude higher than those of today's service-oriented systems. This article aims at contributing to this objective by identifying the key research directions to be followed in light of the latest state of the art. This article more specifically focuses on research challenges for service-oriented middleware design, therefore investigating service description, discovery, access and composition in the Future Internet of services

Panorama of Recommender Systems to Support Learning

This chapter presents an analysis of recommender systems in TechnologyEnhanced Learning along their 15 years existence (2000-2014). All recommender systems considered for the review aim to support educational stakeholders by personalising the learning process. In this meta-review 82 recommender systems from 35 different countries have been investigated and categorised according to a given classification framework. The reviewed systems have been classified into 7 clusters according to their characteristics and analysed for their contribution to the evolution of the RecSysTEL research field. Current challenges have been identified to lead the work of the forthcoming years.Hendrik Drachsler has been partly supported by the FP7 EU Project LACE (619424). Katrien Verbert is a post-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Olga C. Santos would like to acknowledge that her contributions to this work have been carried out within the project Multimodal approaches for Affective Modelling in Inclusive Personalized Educational scenarios in intelligent Contexts (MAMIPEC -TIN2011-29221-C03-01). Nikos Manouselis has been partially supported with funding CIP-PSP Open Discovery Space (297229

Principles for Designing Context-Aware Applications for Physical Activity Promotion

Mobile devices with embedded sensors have become commonplace, carried by billions of people worldwide. Their potential to influence positive health behaviors such as physical activity in people is just starting to be realized. Two critical ingredients, an accurate understanding of human behavior and use of that knowledge for building computational models, underpin all emerging behavior change applications. Early research prototypes suggest that such applications would facilitate people to make difficult decisions to manage their complex behaviors. However, the progress towards building real-world systems that support behavior change has been much slower than expected. The extreme diversity in real-world contextual conditions and user characteristics has prevented the conception of systems that scale and support end-users’ goals. We believe that solutions to the many challenges of designing context-aware systems for behavior change exist in three areas: building behavior models amenable to computational reasoning, designing better tools to improve our understanding of human behavior, and developing new applications that scale existing ways of achieving behavior change. With physical activity as its focus, this thesis addresses some crucial challenges that can move the field forward. Specifically, this thesis provides the notion of sweet spots, a phenomenological account of how people make and execute their physical activity plans. The key contribution of this concept is in its potential to improve the predictability of computational models supporting physical activity planning. To further improve our understanding of the dynamic nature of human behavior, we designed and built Heed, a low-cost, distributed and situated self-reporting device. Heed’s single-purpose and situated nature proved its use as the preferred device for self-reporting in many contexts. We finally present a crowdsourcing system that leverages expert knowledge to write personalized behavior change messages for large-scale context-aware applications.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144089/1/gparuthi_1.pd

An Effective End-User Development Approach Through Domain-Specific Mashups for Research Impact Evaluation

Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in the assessment of the performance of researchers, research groups, universities and even countries. The assessment of productivity is an instrument to select and promote personnel, assign research grants and measure the results of research projects. One particular assessment approach is bibliometrics i.e., the quantitative analysis of scientific publications through citation and content analysis. However, there is little consensus today on how research evaluation should be performed, and it is commonly acknowledged that the quantitative metrics available today are largely unsatisfactory. A number of different scientific data sources available on the Web (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar) that are used for such analysis purposes. Taking data from these diverse sources, performing the analysis and visualizing results in different ways is not a trivial and straight forward task. Moreover, people involved in such evaluation processes are not always IT experts and hence not capable to crawl data sources, merge them and compute the needed evaluation procedures. The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end-user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to produce their own applications. We believe that the heart of the problem is that it is impractical to design tools that are generic enough to cover a wide range of application domains, powerful enough to enable the specification of non-trivial logic, and simple enough to be actually accessible to non-programmers. This thesis presents a novel approach for an effective end-user development, specifically for non-programmers. That is, we introduce a domain-specific approach to mashups that "speaks the language of users"., i.e., that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with.Comment: This PhD dissertation consists of 206 page

An integrated personalization framework for SaaS-based cloud services

Software as a Service (SaaS) has recently emerged as one the most popular service delivery models in cloud computing. The number of SaaS services and their users is continuously increasing and new SaaS service providers emerge on a regular basis. As users are exposed to a wide range of SaaS services, they may soon become more demanding when receiving/consuming such services. Similar to the web and/or mobile applications, personalization can play a critical role in modern SaaS-based cloud services. This paper introduces a fully designed, cloud-enabled personalization framework to facilitate the collection of preferences and the delivery of corresponding SaaS services. The approach we adapt in the design and development of the proposed framework is to synthesize various models and techniques in a novel way. The objective is to provide an integrated and structured environment wherein SaaS services can be provisioned with enhanced personalization quality and performance

Designing for empowerment

Technology bears the potential to empower people - to help them tackle challenges they would otherwise give up on or not even try, to make experiences possible they did not have access to before. One type of such technologies - the application area of this thesis - is health and wellbeing technology (HWT), such as digital health records, physical activity trackers, or digital fitness coach applications. HWTs often claim to empower people to live healthier and happier lives. However, there is reason to challenge and critically reflect on these claims and underlying assumptions as more and more researchers are finding that technologies aiming or claiming to be empowering often turn out to be disempowering. This critical reflection is the starting point of this thesis: Can HWTs really empower people in their everyday lives? If so, how should we go about designing them to foster empowerment and avoid disempowerment? To this aim, this thesis makes three main contributions: First, it presents a framework of empowering technologies that aims to introduce conceptual and terminological clarity of empowerment in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As a literature review conducted for this thesis reveals, the understandings of empowerment in HCI diverge substantially, rendering the term a subsumption of diverse research endeavors. The presented framework is informed by the results of the literature review as well as prior work on empowerment in social sciences, psychology, and philosophy. It aims to help other researchers to analyze conceptual differences between their own work and others’ and to position their research projects. In the same way, this thesis uses the proposed framework to analyze and reflect on the conducted case studies. Second, this thesis explores how HWT can empower people in a number of studies. Technologies that are investigated in these studies are divided into three interaction paradigms (derived from Beaudouin-Lafon’s interaction paradigms): Technologies that follow the computer-as-tool paradigm include patient-controlled electronic health records, and physical activity trackers; technologies in the computer-as-partner paradigm include personalized digital fitness coaches; and technologies in the computer-as-intelligent-tool paradigm includes transparently designed digital coaching technology. For each of these paradigms, I discuss benefits and shortcomings, as well as recommendations for future work. Third, I explore methods for designing and evaluating empowering technology. Therefore, I analyze and discuss methods that have been used in the different case studies to inform the design of empowering technologies such as interviews, observations, personality tests, experience sampling, or the Theory of Planned Behavior. Further, I present the design and evaluation of two tools that aimed to help researchers and designers evaluate empowering technologies by eliciting rich, contextualized feedback from users and fostering an empathic relationship between users and designers. I hope that my framework, design explorations, and evaluation tools will serve research on empowering technologies in HCI to develop a more grounded understanding, a clear research agenda, and inspire the development of a new class of empowering HWTs.Technologie für Empowerment — im Deutschen am besten mit Befähigung oder Ermächtigung übersetzt: diese Vision ist sowohl in medizinischen und technischen Fachkreisen als auch in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur im Feld Mensch-Maschine Interaktion (MMI) weit verbreitet. Technologie kann — laut dieser Vision — Menschen helfen Herausforderungen zu meistern, die sie sonst nicht schaffen oder nicht mal versuchen würden, oder Ihnen komplett neue Erfahrungen ermöglichen. Eine Art von “empowernden”, also befähigenden Technologien sind Technologien für Gesundheit und Wohlbefinden (health and wellbeing technologies, HWT), wie beispielsweise digitale Krankenakten, Schrittzähler, oder digitale Fitnesstrainer. Sowohl Werbung als auch Forschung über HWTs preist diese häufig als Schlüssel zu einem gesünderen und glücklicheren Leben an. Es gibt aber durchaus Gründe diesen Behauptungen kritisch gegenüberzustehen. So haben bereits einige Forschungsprojekte über vermeintlich “empowernde” Technologien ergeben, dass diese eher entmächtigen — also Ihre Nutzer mehr einschränken als Ihnen mehr Möglichkeiten zu verschaffen. Eine kritische Reflexion der Annahme, dass HWTs ihre Nutzer empowern stellt den Ausgangspunkt dieser Dissertation dar: Können HWTs ihre Nutzer wirklich empowern? Falls dem so ist, wie sollten sie am besten gestaltet werden? Der Beitrag meiner Dissertation zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen wird in drei Teilen präsentiert: Im ersten Teil stelle ich ein konzeptuelles Framework vor, mit dem Ziel terminologische Klarheit im Bereich Empowerment in MMI zu fördern. Eine Literaturanalyse im Rahmen dieser Dissertation hat ergeben, dass die Verwendungen des Begriffs “Empowerment” in der MMI Literatur sehr stark voneinander abweichen. Beispielsweise wird der Begriff in Literatur über Technologien für Barrierefreiheit anders verstanden als in Literatur über Technologien für bürgerliches Engagement. Folglich schert das Schlagwort “Technologien für Empowermen”, das in Präsentationen und Denkschriften weit verbreitet ist, komplett unterschiedliche Ansätze über einen Kamm. Das Framework, das in dieser Dissertation vorgestellt wird, zeigt die Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten bei der Verwendung des Empowermentbegriffs auf. Es entstand als Resultat der Literaturanalyse und integriert gleichzeitig Erkenntnisse von Empowermenttheorien die in Sozialwissenschaften, Psychologie und Philosophie diskutiert wurden. In dieser Dissertation wird das vorgestellte Framework verwendet, um die präsentierten Studien über HWTs einzuordnen und zu diskutieren. Im zweiten Teil präsentiere ich verschiedene empirische und technische Studien mit dem Ziel zu verstehen wie HWTs Menschen empowern können. Die Technologien, die dabei untersucht werden teile ich in drei Interaktionsparadigmen ein (die von den Interaktionsparadigmen von Beaudouin-Lafon abgeleitet sind): Technologien im Paradigma Computerals- Werkzeug sind beispielsweise digitale Krankenakten und Schrittzähler; Technologien im Paradigma Computer-als-Partner sind beispielsweise digitale personalisierte Fitnesstrainer und Technologien im Paradigma Computer-als-intelligentes-Werkzeug sind beispielsweise transparent gestaltete digitale personalisierte Gesundheitsberater oder Fitnesstrainer. Vorund Nachteile von Technologien in diesen drei Paradigmen werden diskutiert und Empfehlungen für zukünftige Forschung in diesen Bereichen abgeleitet. Im dritten Teil, untersuche ich, welche Methoden für die Gestaltung und Evaluierung von empowernden Technologien geeignet sind. Einerseits diskutiere ich die Vor- und Nachteile der Methoden, die in den einzelnen Untersuchungen von HWTs (im zweiten Teil) verwendet wurden, wie zum Beispiel Interviews, Observationen, die Experience Sampling Methode oder Fragebögen basierend auf der Theorie des geplanten Verhaltens. Andererseits berichte ich über die Gestaltung und Entwicklung von zwei Applikationen mit dem Ziel Forschern und Designern die Evaluation von empowernden Technologien zu erleichtern. Konkret hat die erste Applikation das Ziel es Testnutzern zu ermöglichen immer und überall für sie wichtige Aspekte des Nutzererlebnisses an das Entwicklungsteam weiterzugeben. Bei der Entwicklung der zweiten Applikation stand dagegen die Förderung von Empathie zwischen Nutzern und Designern im Vordergrund. Ich hoffe, dass das vorgestellte Framework, die Studien über HWTs und Evaluationswerkezeuge die Forschung über empowernde Technologien voranbringen, zu einer klaren Forschungsagenda beitragen, und die Entwicklung von neuartigen HWTs anregen werden