Juha Häikiö

Touch-based user interface for elderly users

This paper reports the results of a field experiment where a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled mobile phone was used as a user interface element so as to enable home-dwelling elderly people to choose their meals to be delivered by means of a home care service. The primary research focus was on examining the suitability of a touch-based user interface in the everyday life activities of elderly users. The eight-week experiment took place in the autumn of 2006. The results show that the touch-based user interface was easy to learn and adopt and the users were able to successfully use it regardless of their physical or cognitive weaknesses.

Experiences from Near-Field Communication (NFC) in a Meal Service System

In this paper we report the experiences from a pilot test in which users used an NFC-based catering service system. Primarily, the aim of this paper is to present the requirements for improving the functionality of the NFC-based systems. These requirements are based on the experiences from the catering service pilot described in this paper. The NFC-based catering service system was used by logistics service, meal producer, elderly care and elderly clients of the catering service. Meal service clients and drivers of the logistics service used NFC-enabled devices and other parties monitored the service process. The duration of the pilot test was approximately eight weeks. The NFC-based system is investigated from technical, organizational and user aspects in this paper. Overall, the interaction technique itself was intuitive and easy to adopt, but the unreliability of the system incurred problems during the pilot. We also suggest that continuous identification is an appropriate way to implement user/device identification. However, this requires NFC-enabled mobile devices to be user or environment-specific. Based on experiences from the pilot test, we suggest that integrating NFC with other technologies requires keeping the scheme simple and limiting non-controllable factors. Maintenance of tags should be taken into account when an organization is adopting the system. Furthermore, the importance of immediate feedback concerning touching emerged in the pilot test.

Experiences from a Touch-Based Interaction and Digitally Enhanced Meal-Delivery Service for the Elderly

This paper reports the results of a field experiment where home-dwelling elderly people used a mobile technology-based service to interact with a home care service to order meals to be delivered to their homes. The primary research focus was on examining the suitability of touch-based interaction in the everyday life activities of elderly users. The eight-week experiment took place in the autumn of 2006. The findings are based primarily on user experience and on the socioeconomic analysis done from the data collected before, during, and after the experiment. The results show that touch-based interaction was easy to learn and adopt, and that the users were able to successfully use it regardless of their physical or cognitive weaknesses. However, the socioeconomic value of the service was questionable. The paper also summarises methodological issues and findings related to user experience evaluation in an experimental setting.

Experiences from interaction design for NFC applications

Linking things in the physical world with related digital resources and content in the virtual world is one of the visions of ubiquitous computing. Radio frequency identification tags, more specifically NFC tags, attached to the things and places in the physical world and using personal mobile devices equipped with readers to access the services and information associated to the tags, is studied in this paper. Eight trials representing different applications are described and the results of user experiments are reported. The main design findings are as follows: the standard size of the tag may be too limiting, we should allow tags of different visual appearance, form and size; the spatial positioning of tags in the physical interaction space gives a designer a lot of freedom but may also pose the risk of inconsistent and haphazard designs; complexity of the interaction task may be divided between using menus and keys of the personal device or using multiple tags; consistent and prompt feedback is important, feedback should use suitable modalities, including haptic feedback; the service or information provided should ex-ploit location information, i.e. the place of the specific tag, and finally fallback plans for unoperational or broken tags should exist.

Digitally-enhanced services for the elderly

During the last decades, both the public and private sectors have started adopting ICT not only for back office service management, but also for end-user service access. ICT-supported digitally-enhanced services can provide benefits both for service providers in the form of more efficient service delivery and management and for the customers in the form of better service access and availability. The research presented in this paper explores issues related to bringing digital service access points into the everyday lives of elderly users and examines the effects of digitally-enhanced services. The paper analyses two case studies exploring digitally-enhanced services that aim to help elderly people in their everyday lives. The results indicate that the analysed services can improve the efficiency of the service processes. However, service efficiency does not directly translate into a better service experience for the user. For achieving significant improvements in the lives of the elderly, other value measures and better understanding of service value potential from the viewpoint of elderly users are needed.

n-Auth: Mobile Authentication Done Right

Weak security, excessive personal data collection for user profiling, and a poor user experience are just a few of the many problems that mobile authentication solutions suffer from. Despite being an interesting platform, mobile devices are still not being used to their full potential for authentication. n-Auth is a firm step in unlocking the full potential of mobile devices in authentication, by improving both security and usability whilst respecting the privacy of the user. Our focus is on the combined usage of several strong cryptographic techniques with secure HCI design principles to achieve a better user experience. We specified and built n-Auth, for which robust Android and iOS apps are openly available through the official stores.

Evaluation of user authentication methods in the gadget-free world

In an ideal gadget-free environment the user is interacting with the environment and the services through only natural means. This imposes restrictions on many aspects of the interaction. One key element in this is user authentication, because it assures the environment and related services of the legitimacy of users actions and empowers the user to carry out his tasks. We present five high-level categories of features of user authentication in the gadget-free world including security, privacy and usability aspects. These are adapted and extended from earlier research on web authentication methods. We survey existing authentication methods together with some emerging technologies and evaluate these according to the features in our categories. Our results show, that no single authentication method can realise all these requirements for authentication. In conclusion, we give future research directions and open problems that stem from our observations. Especially, finding combinations of authentication factors and methods that achieve all requirements is an interesting problem in the gadget-free scenario.

Digital Signage Effectiveness in Retail Stores

This paper presents results from a study on the effectiveness of digital signage in the retail environment. The goal of the study was to examine design parameters relevant to digital signage content design which could be used to create guidelines and templates for designing effective digital signage content. In this study, we focused on how video and animation affect the effectiveness of digital signage. When comparing still content with content enhanced with video or animation, no significant difference in effectiveness could be observed. This observation contradicts with earlier studies. Our study supports the views that the digital displays are currently most useful and effective to the younger generation, and that male customers consider digital displays in a store more useful than females do.