Malcolm Hall

Shakra: tracking and sharing daily activity levels with unaugmented mobile phones

This paper explores the potential for use of an unaugmented commodity technology—the mobile phone—as a health promotion tool. We describe a prototype application that tracks the daily exercise activities of people, using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to analyse GSM cell signal strength and visibility to estimate a user’s movement. In a short-term study of the prototype that shared activity information amongst groups of friends, we found that awareness encouraged reflection on, and increased motivation for, daily activity. The study raised concerns regarding the reliability of ANN-facilitated activity detection in the ‘real world’. We describe some of the details of the pilot study and introduce a promising new approach to activity detection that has been developed in response to some of the issues raised by the pilot study, involving Hidden Markov Models (HMM), task modelling and unsupervised calibration. We conclude with our intended plans to develop the system further in order to carry out a longer-term clinical trial.

Increasing the Awareness of Daily Activity Levels with Pervasive Computing

Public health promotion technology should be accessible to the general public at which it is aimed. This paper explores the potential for use of an unaugmented commodity technology - the mobile phone - as a health promotion tool. We describe a prototype application that tracks the daily exercise activities of people carrying phones, using fluctuation in signal strength to estimate a users movement. In a short-term study of the prototype that shared activity information amongst groups of friends, we found that awareness encouraged reflection on, and increased motivation for, daily activity. We describe some of the details of the pilot study, and conclude with our intended plans to develop the system further in order to carry out a longer-term clinical trial

Sharing the square: collaborative leisure in the city streets

Sharing events with others is an important part of many enjoyable experiences. While most existing co-presence systems focus on work tasks, in this paper we describe a lightweight mobile system designed for sharing leisure. This system allows city visitors to share their experiences with others both far and near, through tablet computers that share photographs, voice and location. A collaborative filtering algorithm uses historical data of previous visits to recommend photos, web pages and places to visitors, bringing together online media with the citys streets. In an extensive user trial we explored how these resources were used to collaborate around physical places. The trial demonstrates the value of technological support for sociability - enjoyable shared social interaction. Lastly, the paper discusses support for collaborative photography, and the role history can play to integrate online media with physical places.

Further into the wild: running worldwide trials of mobile systems

Many studies of ubiquitous computing systems involve deploying a system to a group of users who will be studied through direct observation, interviews and the gathering of system log data. However, such studies are often limited in the number of participants and duration of the trial, particularly if the researchers are providing the participants with hardware. Apples App Store and similar application repositories have become popular with smartphone users, yet few ubiquitous computing studies have yet utilised these distribution mechanisms. We describe our experiences of running a very large scale trial where such a distribution model is used to recruit thousands of users for a mobile system trial that can be run continuously with no constrained end date. We explain how we conducted such a trial, covering issues such as data logging and interviewing users based in several different continents. Benefits and potential shortcomings of running a trial in this way are discussed and we offer guidance on ways to help manage a large and disparate user-base using in-application feedback measures and web-based social networking applications. We describe how, through these methods, we were able to further the development of a piece of ubiquitous computing software through user-informed design on a mass scale.

Domino: exploring mobile collaborative software adaptation

Social Proximity Applications (SPAs) are a promising new area for ubicomp software that exploits the everyday changes in the proximity of mobile users. While a number of applications facilitate simple file sharing between co–present users, this paper explores opportunities for recommending and sharing software between users. We describe an architecture that allows the recommendation of new system components from systems with similar histories of use. Software components and usage histories are exchanged between mobile users who are in proximity with each other. We apply this architecture in a mobile strategy game in which players adapt and upgrade their game using components from other players, progressing through the game through sharing tools and history. More broadly, we discuss the general application of this technique as well as the security and privacy challenges to such an approach.

Mobile Support for Team-Based Field Surveys

This paper describes a study of the use of multimedia networked location-aware mobile computers to support team-based survey-oriented fieldwork. Existing systems do not provide fully integrated support for collaborative data capture and review, or access to distributed real time information on survey progress and status, all of which are crucial for the conduct and management of surveys often carried out under inflexible time constraints. We developed a mobile system to address these shortcomings and performed an evaluation in an archaeological field survey, supporting over two-hundred data collection incidents over five days, and providing further insight into the field work data collection process.