A Mobile Money Solution for Illiterate Users

Existing mobile money platforms have text based interfaces and target literate people. Illiterate people, without the assistance of literate individuals, cannot use such platforms. Applying user-centered requirements gathered in an Ethiopian context, this paper presents the design and development of a mobile money solution that targets illiterate people. Particular emphasis is given to how illiterate users deal with cash money in their everyday life and how such practices can be mapped into financial technology design. Given the ubiquity of mobile telephony in Africa, our solution is based on the widely available, relatively inexpensive and open source Android mobile web platform. The proposed system enables illiterate individuals to count money bills, while providing the facility to accept and make payments. In so doing, we provide an example of how a pervasive technology such as smartphones can empower a hitherto often neglected user category of illiterate users

Meeting quality standards for mobile application development in businesses: A framework for cross-platform testing

How do you test the same application developed for multiple mobile platforms in an effective way? Companies offering apps have to develop the same features across several platforms in order to reach the majority of potential users. However, verifying that these apps work, as intended across a set of heterogeneous devices and operating systems is not trivial. Manual testing can be performed, but this is time consuming, repetitive and error-prone. Automated tools exist through frameworks, such as Frank and Robotium, however they lack the possibility to run repeated tests across multiple heterogeneous devices. This article presents an extensible architecture and conceptual prototype that showcase and combines parallel cross-platform test execution with performance measurements. In so doing, this work contributes to a quality-assurance process by automating parts of a regression test for mobile cross-platform applications

Situational-Context for Virtually Modeling the Elderly

The generalized aging of the population is incrementing the pressure over, frequently overextended, healthcare systems. This situations is even worse in underdeveloped, sparsely populated regions like Extremadura in Spain or Alentejo in Portugal. In this paper we propose an initial approach to use the Situational-Context, a technique to seamlessly adapt Internet of Things systems to the needs and preferences of their users, for virtually modeling the elderly. These models could be used to enhance the elderly experience when using those kind of systems without raising the need for technical skills. The proposed virtual models will also be the basis for further eldercare innovations in sparsely populated regions

Usability of composing REST services on smartphones

REST services are generally more appropriate for smartphones than their counterpart, SOAP. However, the flexibility, scalability and performance gained through REST services are never enough to meet the goal of addressing the complex and mobile relationships among people. That is, usability of the REST service must be enhanced for involving none-programmers to compose services on their smartphones thereby address the complex and mobile relationships among people. In this paper, we explored the factors influencing usability of the REST web service on the smartphone environment. Accordingly, the breadth and depth of URIs namespace, number of request parameters and response fields, and the naming of URIs, parameters and response fields are found to be the factors that influence the usability of composing REST services on smartphones

InLoc: Location-aware emergency evacuation assistant

Healthcare services and research centre reports estimate that by 2050, Americans aged 65 or older will reach the 89 million mark, this is more than double the number of older adults in the United States in 2010. In an aging society, it is important to home care elderly and maintain their daily needs and provide safe evacuation alternatives in the case emergency. Hence, this paper aims to implement and evaluate a smart and location-aware indoor emergency evacuation system for elderly users. The prototype system employs multiple Bluetooth Low Energy and iBeacon sensors and a smartphone. The smartphone utilizes the beacon signals to estimate its location within the building and uses the sensor data transmitted by the iBeacons to identify the level of threat (if any) to the elderly user and guide him/her to a safe zone in the case of fire, earthquake etc. Our prototype was tested in three different locations utilizing two different types of sensors. The results show that our system can detect a threat and guide the elderly user with minimum 85.47 centimeters and maximum 239.8 centimeters distance error

A multi platform pain assessment tool using bespoke gaming sensors

The use of commercial game devices for the purpose of developing novel interactive solutions in order to support the provision of care has attracted considerable interest over the last years. However, the development of such solutions to use with the clinical assessment of the notoriously challenging experience of pain has fallen behind in recent years. In this paper, we present a proposed conceptual design and one example tool for pain assessment using Microsoft Kinect as the interaction method. Past research demonstrated the usefulness of Virtual Reality, and especially Kinect, in the management and reduction of. It is anticipated that our tool will provide a more natural user experience that enables pain sufferers to also assess their pain experience either in a clinical setting or in the comfort of a home environment