Jutta Fortmann

WaterJewel: design and evaluation of a bracelet to promote a better drinking behaviour

A recent study revealed that every fourth German adult drinks less than 1.5 litres a day. Insufficient fluid intake can cause headache, lack of energy and lightheadedness. Signals can be used to be reminded of drinking. However, these are often missed or even deactivated because they are too obvious. On the basis of a participatory design study, we designed the fashionable light bracelet WaterJewel as an awareness display and an unobtrusive reminder for a regular fluid intake. In a four-week 12-participant study, we explored the use of WaterJewel in daily life and how it compared to a prevalent mobile drinking reminder application. Our results show that with WaterJewel participants drank more in total, more often accomplished the daily drinking goal of 2 litres, drank more regularly, and drank more often prior to the reminder event than with the mobile application. Participants rated WaterJewel as very usable and appreciated its practical and discreet design.

Deriving design guidelines for ambient light systems

Recent interest in the development of ambient light systems has initialized a new research area, where the number of ambient light systems is expected to increase in the next years. To support the development of future ambient light systems, we need clear, explicit, and structured design guidelines. In this paper we present an evaluation of light patterns in a controlled laboratory study with two complementary parts. In the first part, our aim was to reveal and analyze light patterns that encode different types of everyday information. In the second part, we verified the results from the first part by asking another group of participants about their understanding of information encoded with light. Together, our results allowed us to establish light patterns and guidelines for building new ambient light systems and applications in the future.

Illumee: aesthetic light bracelet as a wearable information display for everyday life

We present our vision of a wearable light display integrated into a piece of jewellery -- an aesthetic bracelet. As a piece of jewellery, the display is discreetly integrated into some accessoire that is worn anyway and therefore integrates excellently into everyday life. The bracelet can be used for various daily reminder tasks like intake of medication. It can also be used to present feedback on a persons health behaviour, e.g. their daily physical activity. We briefly describe our concept and present a number of research questions that need to be investigated.

Making Lifelogging Usable: Design Guidelines for Activity Trackers

Of all lifelogging tools, activity trackers are probably among the most widely used ones receiving most public attention. However, when used on a long-term basis e.g. for prevention and wellbeing, the devices’ acceptance by the user and its usability become critical issues. In a user study we explored how activity trackers are used and experienced in daily life. We identified critical issues with regard not just to the HCI topics wearability, appearance of the device, and display and interaction, but also to aspects of modeling and describing the measured and presented data. We suggest four guidelines for the design of future activity trackers. Ideally, activity tracking would be fulfilled by a modular concept of building blocks for sensing, interaction and feedback that the user can freely combine, distribute and wear according to personal preferences and situations.

User requirements for digital jewellery

In recent years, wearable devices have been an emerging trend on the market. Though, recent studies show that people abandon their wearable devices after a couple of months. One of the main reasons supposed is the technical look and feel of the gadgety devices and thus, an insufficient suitability for daily use. Digital jewellery, the concept of concealing technology behind fashionable jewellery, is a promising approach to address this problem. However, little research has been done to clearly define the requirements for digital jewellery. In this work we present the design and results of an online survey, in which we investigated, which requirements are important for digital jewellery, and how important specific requirements are perceived by potential users. Overall, participants considered functionality, form factor, and interaction and display design as very important, whereas they found body location, context awareness and customisability less important. We also found differences in the importance ratings, that are related to gender and age. Our results will help designers of digital jewellery to focus not only on the right, but also on the more important requirements first.

Tangible Apps Bracelet: Designing Modular Wrist-Worn Digital Jewellery for Multiple Purposes

Most of todays wearable devices mainly focus on functionality and show large deficits in aesthetics and comfort. However, researchers and market analysts emphasise the importance of aesthetics for wearable technology to be successful. Smart Digital Jewellery has been proposed as an approach to seamlessly integrate technology into appealing, body-worn objects. In this work, we investigated how a smart digital multi-purpose bracelet should be designed in order to be attractive, functional, easily comprehensible, and easy to manage. We built the Tangible Apps Bracelet and evaluated it in a lab study. The Tangible Apps Bracelet integrates multiple applications in form of single elements that are threaded on a string. Participants experienced it very positively, easy to interact with, and rated its usability and user experience as very good. They particularly appreciated its simple interaction and display concept and the seamless integration of applications and digital components into an aesthetic piece of jewellery.

How to present information on wrist-worn point-light displays

In the last years there has been an emerging trend towards wearable devices, such as wristwatches, and wristbands. Common wrist-worn devices often present information visually and in an abstract way. However, little research has been done on the question of how these displays should present information in daily life. In this work we built a point-light bracelet to explore this question. In a user study participants designed light patterns for a hands-on scenario: physical activity feedback. Afterwards, we investigated how the participants experienced the light patterns in their daily life. From the study results we derive implications for the design of light patterns on a wrist-worn display, e.g. how and when to use the light parameters colour and brightness.

PaceGuard: improving running cadence by real-time auditory feedback

This paper presents PaceGuard, a mobile phone-based system which supports runners in keeping their cadence by auditory feedback. Experts have reported that maintaining the cadence is a prominent challenge for many running beginners and less experienced runners. However, this is important to make the exercise healthy and effort-saving, and to avoid discomfort like side stitches. PaceGuard automatically determines a suitable target cadence on the basis of the measured accelerometer data of the first 150 seconds of a run. Then this cadence as the guideline is constantly signaled to the runner via rhythmic pulse beats, defined as beats per minute. On the basis of previous studies [5], we assume runners will adapt their cadence to the presented pulse beats and thus will run more consistently compared to running without the auditory feedback of PaceGuard. Our pilot study results encourage this assumption.

IllumiMug: revealing imperceptible characteristics of drinks

Drinking is vital, but certain drinks can also harm human health and well-being. In this paper, we present IllumiMug, a concept for a content-aware, interactive cup. The IllumiMug concept is able to measure the temperature and the level of a liquid in a cup and can represent helpful information through ambient light. We discuss some initial design thoughts and illustrate the potential benefits of IllumiMug in two scenarios, i.e., the preparation of proper alcoholic drinks, where the alcohol concentration is measured and shown, and the brewing of safe tea, where the drinks temperature is indicated.

LightWatch: A Wearable Light Display for Personal Exertion

Wearable devices need to seamlessly integrate into everyday life and meet a user’s aesthetic needs. In this paper, we present LightWatch, a wearable light display integrated into a common analogue wristwatch without interfering with the functionality of the watch itself. Input is enabled through a pressure-sensitive bezel mounted beneath the light display. LightWatch shall raise body awareness by enabling sensor-based measurement, adjustment and display of a user’s personal exertion level. We see LightWatch as a promising approach for an unobtrusive everyday companion that can be used for various applications.