Eiman Kanjo

MobGeoSen: facilitating personal geosensor data collection and visualization using mobile phones

Mobile sensing and mapping applications are becoming more prevalent because sensing hardware is becoming more portable and more affordable. However, most of the hardware uses small numbers of fixed sensors that report and share multiple sets of environmental data which raises privacy concerns. Instead, these systems can be decentralized and managed by individuals in their public and private spaces. This paper describes a robust system called MobGeoSens which enables individuals to monitor their local environment (e.g. pollution and temperature) and their private spaces (e.g. activities and health) by using mobile phones in their day to day life. The MobGeoSen is a combination of software components that facilitates the phone’s internal sensing devices (e.g. microphone and camera) and external wireless sensors (e.g. data loggers and GPS receivers) for data collection. It also adds a new dimension of spatial localization to the data collection process and provides the user with both textual and spatial cartographic displays. While collecting the data, individuals can interactively add annotations and photos which are automatically added and integrated in the visualization file/log. This makes it easy to visualize the data, photos and annotations on a spatial and temporal visualization tool. In addition, the paper will present ways in which mobile phones can be used as noise sensors using an on-device microphone. Finally, we present our experiences with school children using the above mentioned system to measure their exposure to environmental pollution.

MobSens: Making Smart Phones Smarter

In this article, we discuss experiences and lessons learned from deploying four mobile sensing applications on off-the-shelf mobile phones within a recreational framework called MobSens that contains elements of health, social, and environmental sensing at both individual and community levels. We describe the main components of our applications, which facilitate logging and external communications. We also outline the challenges faced when building and testing these applications and describe our strategies for overcoming them.

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Abstract Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely “sensing,” “analysis,” and “application.” Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing.

NFC based applications for visually impaired people - A review

Recent technological developments provide technical assistance that enables supporting people with visual disabilities in their everyday tasks and improve their quality of life. Considering that about 90% of the world visually impaired people live in developing countries, particularly in the local context, in Saudi Arabia, there is a lack of assistive tools and adapted environment supporting people with visual disabilities. To overcome this problem, a wide variety of relatively inexpensive applications adapt Near Field Communications (NFC) tagging technology in the development of assistive tools for people with visual disabilities. In this article, we will systematically review the current adaptation of NFC technology for visually disabled people and introduce NFC practical applications to help them overcome challenging tasks that they may encounter every day.

NeuroPlace: making sense of a place

The ability to detect mental states, whether relaxation or stressed, would be useful in categorizing places according to their impact on our brains and many other domains. Newly available, affordable and dry-electrode devices make electroencephalography headsets (EEG) feasible to use outside the lab, for example in open spaces and shopping malls. The purpose of this pervasive experimental manipulation is to analyze brain signals in order to label outdoor places according to how users perceive them with a focus on ---relaxing and ---stressful mental states. That is, when the user is experiencing tranquil brain waves or not when visiting a particular place. This paper demonstrates the potential of exploiting the temporal structure of EEG signals in making sense of outdoor places. The EEG signals induced by the place stimuli are analyzed and exploited to distinguish what we refer to as a place signature.

Sense of space: mapping physiological emotion response in urban space

Urban spaces have a great impact on how people feel and behave. There are number of factors that impact our emotional responses to a space. In this paper, we propose an objective way to measure peoples emotional reactions in places by monitoring their physiological signals that are related to emotion. By integrating wearable biosensors with mobile phones, we can obtain geo-annotated data relating to emotional states in relation to our spatial surroundings. We are the able to visualize the emotional response data by creating an emotional layer over a geographical map. This can then help us to understand how individuals emotionally perceive urban spaces and help us to illustrate the interdependency between emotions and environmental surroundings.

The roles of emojis in mobile phone notifications

The texts in mobile messages are not always easy to decipher since tone and body language is removed from the context. Emojis offer an attractive way to express emotions to avoid misunderstandings of message tone. In this paper we shed the light on the roles of Emojis in phone notification, we conducted an in-situ study to gather phone notification data. We outline the relationship between Emojis and various social network applications including WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Early results allow us to draw several conclusions in relation to number, position, type and sentimental value of Emojis. It turns out that most popular Emojis in one social app is not as popular in the others. Emojis sentimental polarity in Twitter is high and overall number of Emojis is less than Facebook. The sentimental value of Emojis is more meaningful when there are multiple Emoji in one notification.

Mbreath: Asthma monitoring system on the go

Prevalence of asthma, especially in air polluted areas, has dramatically increased. As a result, the demand for a system that is able to predict asthma attacks and monitor a patients condition is becoming increasingly important. This paper presents a prototype system that allow asthmas patients to self-monitor their symptoms condition and manage their conditions accurately, as well as informing the medics in the case of emergency.

Understanding mass participatory pervasive computing systems for environmental campaigns

Abstract Participate was a 3-year collaboration between industry and academia to explore how mobile, Web and broadcast technologies could combine to deliver environmental campaigns. In a series of pilot projects, schools used mobile sensors to enhance science learning; visitors to an ecological attraction employed mobile phones to access and generate locative media; and the public played a mobile phone game that challenged their environmental behaviours. Key elements of these were carried forward into an integrated trial in which participants were assigned a series of environmental missions as part of an overarching narrative that was delivered across mobile, broadcast and Web platforms. These experiences use a three-layered structure for campaigns that draw on experts, local groups and the general public, who engage through a combination of playful characterisation and social networking.

Urban Computing and Mobile Devices

Learn about projects on participant-environment interaction, the leveraging of information from mobile sensors, user authentication, and urban computing navigation.