Matteo Ciman

Using gamification to discover cultural heritage locations from geo-tagged photos

Many enchanting cultural heritage locations are hidden from tourists, especially when considering countries full of historic attractions. Tourists tend to consider only mainstream monuments and towns, neglecting wonderful little jewels along their travel itinerary. However, this is generally not their fault, as travelers cannot be aware of all the surrounding beauties when visiting a new region. To this aim, we discuss and analyze here PhotoTrip, an interactive tool able to autonomously recommend charming, even if not mainstream, cultural heritage locations along travel itineraries. PhotoTrip is able to identify these points of interest by gathering pictures and related information from Flickr and Wikipedia and then provide the user with suggestions and recommendations. An important technical challenge for this kind of services is the ability to provide only the most relevant pictures among the many available for any considered itinerary. To this aim, we have exploited social networks, crowdsourcing and gamification to involve users in the process of improving the response quality of our system.

Cross-platform mobile development: a study on apps with animations

The paper presents a comparison between different frameworks for cross-platform mobile development, MoSync, Titanium, jQuery Mobile and Phonegap, with particular attention to development of applications with animations. We define a set of criteria for the evaluation and we develop the same game as case study app, with the aim to provide an unbias judgement. Our analysis recommends Titanium as the best framework to develop mobile applications with animations.

Serious Games for Early Identification of Developmental Dyslexia

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting reading acquisition. DD cannot be diagnosed before starting the primary school; thereby, one of the main challenges is to obtain an early DD identification even during preschool years. Achieving this goal could help children at risk for DD to limit the impact of this disorder. To this aim, we have created a digital system composed of various serious games designed for predicting the risk of DD in preschoolers and potentially training specific skills impaired in this learning disability. Our set of serious games are designed to be accessible from any device, a computer with mouse and keyboard, but also a tablet with touch interface for younger children.

The use of games to help children eyes testing

A doctor cannot perform a good diagnosis without the patient collaboration. One of the major problem for ophthalmologists with children is to capture and maintain their attention while performing their tests. Sometimes children give wrong answers, or not accurate, since they are no longer interested in the task. In this paper we use the serious game paradigm to help children eyes testing. We ask the children to perform a vision acuity and a daltonism test using our game PlayWithEyes. Children have to recognize symbols projected on a wall and point them in a touch interface which displays all the possible answers. Tests performed in a kindergarten with 65 children have shown that the use of our game helps to obtain children cooperation because they have fun, so their attention may last longer, thus improving the possibility to perform a correct diagnosis especially for very young children. This is particular important for some sight defects like amblyopia (lazy eye). Moreover, the system allows us to identify visual acuity reduction in two children. Tests also highlight some limitations of the tool which have been promptly fixed.

An empirical analysis of energy consumption of cross-platform frameworks for mobile development

Abstract The increasing fragmentation of mobile devices market has created the problem of supporting all the possible mobile platforms to reach the highest number of potential users. One possible solution is to use cross-platform frameworks, that let develop only one application that is then deployed to all the supported target platforms. Currently available cross-platform frameworks follow different approaches to deploy the final application, and all of them has pros and cons. In this paper, we evaluate and compare together the current frameworks for cross-platform mobile development considering one of the most important aspect when dealing with mobile devices: energy consumption. Our analysis shows and measure how the adoption of cross-platform frameworks impacts energy consumption with respect to the native mobile development, identifies which are the most consuming tasks, and tries to define a final rank among all the different approaches. Moreover, we highlight future development necessary to improve performances of cross-platform frameworks to reach native development performances.

Individuals’ Stress Assessment Using Human-Smartphone Interaction Analysis

The increasing presence of stress in people’ lives has motivated much research efforts focusing on continuous stress assessment methods of individuals, leveraging smartphones and wearable devices. These methods have several drawbacks, i.e., they use invasive external devices, thus increasing entry costs and reducing user acceptance, or they use some of privacy-related information. This paper presents an approach for stress assessment that leverages data extracted from smartphone sensors, and that is not invasive concerning privacy. Two different approaches are presented. One, based on smartphone gestures analysis, e.g., ‘tap’, ‘scroll’, ‘swipe’ and ‘text writing’, and evaluated in laboratory settings with 13 participants (F-measure 79-85 percent within-subject model, 70-80 percent global model); the second one based on smartphone usage analysis and tested in-the-wild with 25 participants (F-measure 77-88 percent within-subject model, 63-83 percent global model). Results show how these two methods enable an accurate stress assessment without being too intrusive, thus increasing ecological validity of the data and user acceptance.

Stairstep recognition and counting in a serious Game for increasing users' physical activity

The high diffusion of smartphones in the users’ pockets allows to sense their movements, thus monitoring the amount of physical activity they do during the day. But, it also gives the possibility to use these devices to persuade people to change their behaviors. In this paper, we present ClimbTheWorld, a serious game which uses a machine learning-based technique to recognize and count stairsteps and aims at persuading people to use stairs instead of elevators or escalators. We perform a fine-grained analysis by exploiting smartphone sensors to recognize single stairsteps. Energy consumption is widely investigated to avoid exhausting smartphone battery. Moreover, we present game appreciation and persuasive power results after a trial experiment with 13 participants.

Measuring Energy Consumption of Cross-Platform Frameworks for Mobile Applications

In this paper we analyze frameworks for mobile cross-platform development according to their influence on energy consumed by the developed applications. We consider the use of different smartphones sensors, e.g., GPS, accelerometer, etc., and features, e.g., acquiring video or audio from the environment. In particular, we have studied how the amount of required energy for the same operation changes according to the used framework. We use an hardware and software tool to measure energy consumed by the applications developed natively, as a web application or using two frameworks, Titanium and PhoneGap. Our experiments have shown that frameworks have a significant impact on energy consumption which greatly increases compared to an equal native application. Moreover, the amount of consumed energy is not the same for all frameworks.

PathS: Enhancing Geographical Maps with Environmental Sensed Data

The widespread adoption of mobile technology has opened the door to a new era for the public health sector. The ability to collect, share and access community health related data are key factors that have made mobile health an appealing addon to medicine practitioners and researchers. Mobile sensing and wireless communications can be exploited to create new information and services that could help prevent health risks, benefiting the community as a whole. As a proof of concept, we have developed an augmented reality application offering an enhanced pedestrian route navigation system, while at the same time gathering quality data through the devices. Thanks to this application we are able to enrich geographical maps on the web with historical data about brightness and noise levels, and to provide pedestrians with an improved navigation.

From a physical system to a pervasive solution to increase people physical activity: Is it possible?

In the last few decades our lifestyle has deeply changed thanks to the advances in science and engineering: public transportation, escalators, elevators etc., have deeply reduced the physical activity that people usually make during the day. This, combined with an incorrect diet, has increased the number of overweighted people and people with cardiac problems. In this paper we present our preliminary study which shows the feasibility of a pervasive system to incentivize people to prefer the usage of stairs instead of escalators or elevators, transforming this strain into a funny moment.