Karin Coninx

A situation-aware mobile system to support fire brigades in emergency situations

In a firefighter emergency mission it is essential for the members of a fire brigade to get an intelligent and reliable overview of the complete situation, presented according to the role of each member In this paper we report on the design and development of a system to support a fire brigade on site with a set of mobile services that offers a role-based focus+context user interface It provides the required overview over the emergency situation according to the user task and context, while life-saving information is emphasized The implementation of a context-rule-based decision module enhances the visualization of required information Interaction with the user interface is designed for use in the wild; which in this case comes down to providing a “fat finger” interface that allows firemen to interact with the user interface on site with his gloves on.

Training social learning skills by collaborative mobile gaming in museums

The use of handheld computers as a tool to enrich the museum experience has found its way into many museums, opening up new possibilities to increase the attractiveness of museum visits, especially for youngsters. We developed a mobile guide framework that supports the creation of mobile guides and adheres to social-constructivist principles of learning. The mobile museum game we created with this framework aims at developing the social, cognitive and technical skills of the users. Large scale evaluations show the potential power of our approach to stimulate interaction between youngsters and to create a playful learning experience.

Geo-social interaction: context-aware help in large scale public spaces

We present an approach to exploit social and spatio-temporal context in order to improve information dissemination in dynamic large-scale public spaces. We illustrate it by applying a proposed measure of geo-social relevance of each individual in a simulated vehicular network and by comparing the performance of different network message passing techniques in an inter-vehicle help-me-best-and-do-it-fast communication scenario. We conclude that the use of social networking capabilities of an individual combined with knowledge about their spatio-temporal context information significantly improves purposeful interaction between individuals in terms of both the efficiency of the network data dissemination and the quality of the delivered information.

Social-aware Event Handling within the FallRisk Project

OBJECTIVESnWith the uprise of the Internet of Things, wearables and smartphones are moving to the foreground. Ambient Assisted Living solutions are, for example, created to facilitate ageing in place. One example of such systems are fall detection systems. Currently, there exists a wide variety of fall detection systems using different methodologies and technologies. However, these systems often do not take into account the fall handling process, which starts after a fall is identified or this process only consists of sending a notification. The FallRisk system delivers an accurate analysis of incidents occurring in the home of the older adults using several sensors and smart devices. Moreover, the input from these devices can be used to create a social-aware event handling process, which leads to assisting the older adult as soon as possible and in the best possible way.nnnMETHODSnThe FallRisk system consists of several components, located in different places. When an incident is identified by the FallRisk system, the event handling process will be followed to assess the fall incident and select the most appropriate caregiver, based on the input of the smartphones of the caregivers. In this process, availability and location are automatically taken into account.nnnRESULTSnThe event handling process was evaluated during a decision tree workshop to verify if the current day practices reflect the requirements of all the stakeholders. Other knowledge, which is uncovered during this workshop can be taken into account to further improve the process.nnnCONCLUSIONSnThe FallRisk offers a way to detect fall incidents in an accurate way and uses context information to assign the incident to the most appropriate caregiver. This way, the consequences of the fall are minimized and help is at location as fast as possible. It could be concluded that the current guidelines on fall handling reflect the needs of the stakeholders. However, current technology evolutions, such as the uptake of wearables and smartphones, enables the improvement of these guidelines, such as the automatic ordering of the caregivers based on their location and availability.

A Unified Scalable Model of User Localisation with Uncertainty Awareness for Large-scale Pervasive Environments

Localisation has become a standard feature in many mobile applications. Numerous techniques for both indoor and outdoor location tracking are available today, providing a diversity of ways positioning information can be delivered to a mobile application (e.g., a location-based service). Such factors as the variation of precision over time and covered areas or the difference in quality and reliability make the adoption of several techniques for one application cumbersome. This work presents an approach that models the capabilities of localisation systems and then uses this model to build a unified view on localisation, with special attention paid to uncertainty coming from different localisation conditions and its presentation to the user. We discuss technical considerations, challenges and issues of the approach and report about a user study on users acceptance of the suggested behaviour of an application based on the approach. The results of the study showed the feasibility of the approach and revealed users preference towards automatic but yet informed changes they experienced while using the application.