Dana Pavel

User-centered design of a mobile application for sharing life memories

People have an inherent need to capture and collect life memories such as moments with children or special events with friends. Capturing life memories is either spontaneous or planned. Memories are stored and frequently shared with other people. New internet services allow online sharing of photographs but they bypass the mobile aspect in capturing and sharing multimedia. In this paper, we present a concept mobile application for capturing and sharing memories while mobile and the user research studies that supported its design. Our aim was to design a prototype application that would enable mobile users to capture and share precious moments. Various categorizations of user behaviors related to personal media management emerged out of our user needs studies. We then followed a user-centered design process according to Contextual Design. The user evaluation of the resulted paper prototype showed that users appreciate the event based, instant sharing within particular groups of people.

Context Service Framework for the Mobile Internet

Many context aware systems have been developed especially for mobile devices, where proximity to users allows for collecting more reliable context data. However, many solutions suffer from lack of interoperability, complexity and adoption difficulties. We describe a complete framework for context provision for mobile Web applications that is based on technologies that have already been deployed as well as endorsed by standardization bodies. Our framework includes as the main parts a context representation model that is an extension of an ongoing standardization activity within World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) called delivery context interfaces (DCI) targeted to consumer Web applications, and a SIP-event based framework for context data provisioning. We further provide a proof-of-concept implementation of individual components along with application scenarios utilizing our proposed framework and our ongoing integration efforts for combining the two main framework parts

Service discovery & availability subscriptions using the SIP event framework

Discovery of available and suitable services is an essential piece within a service provisioning architecture. Numerous approaches have been proposed, standardized and deployed in the past. However, many of them either lack deployment (i.e., adoption beyond certain research labs or communities) or features (in particular in the area of visiting domain support, availability notifications, and disclosure authorization). The session initiation protocol (SIP) and its event delivery extensions promise a wide adoption in the Internet due to its fundamental importance for future session-based communication. Further, its adoption in the next generation of mobile devices will lay ground for a large-scale deployment of this protocol. This paper discusses the suitability of SIP events for service discovery by presenting a solution that provides many of the currently unsupported features. Deployments are proposed that would enable endpoint-based but also repository-based discovery, the latter aiming at integrating legacy systems into the solution.

Context Provisioning for Future Service Environments

Adapting services and applications to context bears the promise for increased user experience. Hence, context aware computing has been recognized as crucial for future, in particular mobile, services. The main focus of our work is on context aware systems, where context sources are distributed and span various domains. While a lot of work has been done already, many solutions fall short when it comes to the actual deployment, either due to complexity reasons or lack of widespread acceptance of the used technologies. The solution we developed aims for a platform that is highly extensible, achieves interoperability across devices and networks but is also grounded in available standards, making its widespread deployment possible almost immediately. The solution is rooted in two major design principles as well as in the usage of the event framework for the session initiation protocol (SIP) to ensure this aim. In order to ground our platform to a specific use case, we also developed a proof of concept prototype within a mobile environment

A User-Centric Approach to Building Experience Platforms for Capturing Lifestyle and Wellbeing Information

Lifestyle management solutions are of increasing interests due to the proliferation of mobile devices as well as wearables. The personalized nature of the recordings through such solutions, however, increasingly raises privacy concerns, particularly when relying on cloud-based storage. This paper presents our work on building a lifestyle management solution that not only addresses various privacy and control concerns at the design level but also incorporates key findings of user evaluations into the development of a refined mobile-based system.