Frank Bentley

Health Mashups: Presenting Statistical Patterns between Wellbeing Data and Context in Natural Language to Promote Behavior Change

People now have access to many sources of data about their health and wellbeing. Yet, most people cannot wade through all of this data to answer basic questions about their long-term wellbeing: Do I gain weight when I have busy days? Do I walk more when I work in the city? Do I sleep better on nights after I work out? We built the Health Mashups system to identify connections that are significant over time between weight, sleep, step count, calendar data, location, weather, pain, food intake, and mood. These significant observations are displayed in a mobile application using natural language, for example, “You are happier on days when you sleep more.” We performed a pilot study, made improvements to the system, and then conducted a 90-day trial with 60 diverse participants, learning that interactions between wellbeing and context are highly individual and that our system supported an increased self-understanding that lead to focused behavior changes.

Personal vs. commercial content: the similarities between consumer use of photos and music

We describe the results of two ethnographic-style studies that investigated consumer use of photos and music respectively. Although the studies were designed, executed, and analyzed separately, in our findings we discovered striking similarities between the ways in which our participants used personally captured photos and commercially purchased music. These findings have implications for the design of future systems with respect to handling and sharing content in photo or music form. We discuss making allowances for satisficing behavior, sharing media as a way to reminisce or to communicate an experience (tell a story), getting sidetracked while browsing, and similarities in organizing behaviors.

The power of mobile notifications to increase wellbeing logging behavior

Self-logging is a critical component to many wellbeing systems. However, self-logging often is difficult to sustain at regular intervals over many weeks. We demonstrate the power of passive mobile notifications to increase logging of wellbeing data, particularly food intake, in a mobile health service. Adding notifications increased the frequency of logging from 12% in a one-month, ten-user pilot study without reminders to 63% in the full 60-user study with reminders included. We will discuss the benefits of passive notifications over existing interruptive methods.

Research in the large. using app stores, markets, and other wide distribution channels in Ubicomp research

The mobile phones that people use in their daily lives now run advanced applications and come equipped with sensors once only available in custom hardware in UbiComp research. At the same time application distribution has become increasingly simple due to the proliferation of app stores and the like. Evaluation and research methods have to be adapted to this new context to get the best data and feedback from wide audiences. However, an overview of successful strategies to overcome research challenges inherent to wide deployment is not yet available. App store platform characteristics, devices, reaching target users, new types of evaluation data and dynamic, heterogeneous usage contexts have to be dealt with. This workshop provides a forum for researchers and developers to exchange experiences and strategies for wide distribution of applications. We aim at building an understanding of the opportunities of various distribution channels and obstacles involved in a research context.

TuVista: meeting the multimedia needs of mobile sports fans

We describe the TuVista system, a service for viewing near-live sports content consisting of a multimedia editing/bundling station, a cloud-hosted metadata server, and a set of mobile clients. We begin by introducing TuVista I, a proof of concept experience prototype implemented quickly as a probe to understand multimedia needs at a live sporting event. After discussing the results of an initial field trial at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, we describe the improvements in TuVista II to address the issues identified. These include rapid editing of multiple live video streams, push notifications of new content over XMPP, and an optimized metadata workflow for the content producer that reduced content publication time from fifteen minutes to less than 30 seconds. We conclude with a discussion of rapid prototyping and field deployments as a way to quickly identify user needs.

The Use of Mobile Social Presence

Two studies on the current practice of mobile context sharing and three field studies on the use of mobile context and media-sharing applications explore how people share experiences using a mobile phone and how automated context sharing in mobile environments affects communication, creating rich, new experiences and increasing feelings of social presence.

Location and activity sharing in everyday mobile communication

We present a study on current, real-world communication of location and activity information based on analyzing context-sharing practices in recorded mobile phone calls. In 176 conversations, we found that over 70 percent contain disclosures of location or activity for one of eight main purposes. Based on our observations, we provide implications for the design of new systems for mobile social software.

It's kind of like an extra screen for my phone: Understanding Everyday Uses of Consumer Smart Watches

The CHI, Ubicomp, and UIST communities have been studying watch-based interactions for many years. While much of this work has been technical or focused on interaction techniques in the lab, now smart watch devices are available directly to consumers from a variety of manufacturers. However, little has been studied as to why people adopt these devices and the real-world problems that they are solving in their lives. We set out to explore current smart watch use in an interview-based study of five diverse participants. We will use data from this study to help design and develop new smart watch applications.

Drawing the city: differing perceptions of the urban environment

In building location-based services, it is important to present information in ways that fit with how individuals view and navigate the city. We conducted an adaptation of the 1970s Mental Maps study by Stanley Milgram in order to better understand differences in peoples views of the city based on their backgrounds and technology use. We correlated data from a demographic questionnaire with the map data from our participants to perform a first-of-its-kind statistical analysis on differences in hand-drawn city maps. We describe our study, findings, and design implications for location-based services.

Face-Responsive Interfaces: From Direct Manipulation to Perceptive Presence

Systems for tracking faces using computer vision have recently become practical for human-computer interface applications. We are developing prototype systems for face-responsive interaction, exploring three different interface paradigms: direct manipulation, gazemediated agent dialog, and perceptually-driven remote presence. We consider the characteristics of these types of interactions, and assess the performance of our system on each application. We have found that face pose tracking is a potentially accurate means of cursor control and selection, is seen by users as a natural way to guide agent dialog interaction, and can be used to create perceptually-driven presence artefacts which convey real-time awareness of a remote space.