Nasim Mahmud

Dazed and confused considered normal: an approach to create interactive systems for people with dementia

In Western society, the elderly represent a rapidly growing demographic group. For this group, dementia has become an important cause of dependencies on others and causes difficulties with independent living. Typical symptoms of the dementia syndrome are decreased location awareness and difficulties in situating ones activities in time, thus hindering long term plans and activities. We present our approach in creating an interactive system tailored for the needs of the early phases of the dementia syndrome. Given the increasing literacy with mobile technologies in this group, we propose an approach that exploits mobile technology in combination with the physical and social context to support prolonged independent living. Our system strengthens the involvement of caregivers through the patients social network. We show that applications for people suffering from dementia can be created by explicitly taking into account context in the design process. Context dependencies that are defined in an early stage in the development process are propagated as part of the runtime behavior of the interactive system.

Where people and cars meet: social interactions to improve information sharing in large scale vehicular networks

Efficient delivery of information in vehicular networks is crucial for the creation of useful and usable applications that need to cope with nomadic large-scale environments. Context-awareness is often key to improve efficiency of a vehicle network since it allows to make informed decisions on the data routing, data locality and data necessity for different moving objects. In this paper we show how the social network of vehicle residents, as part of the overall context, allows us to improve the information sharing in the vehicular network significantly. We demonstrate this by deploying a social ubiquitous-help-system (UHS) on top of a vehicular network. We analyze how UHS operates in a vehicular network using a network simulation of realistic large scale vehicular movement data and show that the social interactions increases the efficiency, relevance and quality of information in data delivery.

Context Aware Help and Guidance for Large-Scale Public Spaces

Human activity is highly influenced by the context and environment of the user. Presence of other users in the vicinity can also influence the context of use and thus activity. In ubiquitous computing environments, people are surrounded by numerous computing devices helping them to carry out various tasks. However, users seek precise and fine-grained information that is not provided by the computing environment but required to carry out their tasks. Especially nomadic users have little choice than to call upon help from other people present in their vicinity. There are social issues (e.g. availability and interruptibility) along with issues of relevance and reliability to find the most appropriate person to ask for information. Identifying this person is still a challenge today. We have developed software prototype U-Help-System (UHS) to demonstrate how using a social network in combination with the user profile and preferences, can help nomadic person to approximate in selecting people that can support the user in a large scale ubiquitous computing environment.

Towards an SMS-based social network for health workers in rural areas in Myanmar

Seventy percent of the population in Myanmar lives in rural areas. Although health workers are adequately trained, they are overburdened due to understaffing and insufficient supplies. Literature confirms that information and communication technologies can extend the reach of healthcare. In this paper, we present an SMS-based social network that aims to help health workers to interact with other medical professionals through topic-based message delivery. Topics describe interests of users and the content of message. A message is delivered by matching message content with user interests. Users describe topics as ICD-10 codes, a comprehensive medical taxonomy. In this ICD-10 coded SMS, a set of prearranged codes provides a common language for users to send structured information that fits inside an SMS.

Mixed-Initiative Context Filtering and Group Selection for Improving Ubiquitous Help Systems

When people need help they often turn to their social peers for reliable information, recommendation or guidance. It is often difficult to find someone in the vicinity for help or communicate with someone from a distant place who can provide reliable help. Conveying the actual context of the question during remote communication is a cumbersome task, especially when avoiding speech communication. Our approach selects and prioritizes the contextual data for a question, based on the question content.We have developed a prototype for mobile users - the Ubiquitous Help System (UHS) - that implements a mixed-initiative approach for capturing, selecting and prioritizing contextual information as well as for selecting a group of users to send the question. UHS processes the user questions for clues on what context to include and presents its suggestions to the user. Contextual data that can be retrieved using the available sensors on the mobile device is automatically included for sending to the receiving parties alongside the question.

Just in Time: A Social Computing Approach for Finding Reliable Answers in Large Public Spaces

While people are away from their regular social terrain, they are usually exposed to newer situations, where they often need to seek for information or help. Nowadays people can find information from the Internet by using smartphones even when they are traveling. However, for many real–life questions, the Internet is not a suitable source of a ‘reliable answer,’ especially when the information–need or the question is too context–sensitive. Furthermore, it is also difficult to compose a context–sensitive real–life question effectively to find suitable answers. Therefore, along with other reasons, such as, individual’s ability or experience, people seek for help or assistance from other people. And most of the cases, they need personalized support which is tailored for a particular context.

“With a Little Help from My Friends”: Context Aware Help and Guidance Using the Social Network

People are more mobile than ever before. People predominantly need information or help that they can not anticipate and plan for before they begin their journey. There is an abundance of information around us. But the users seek precise and fine–grained information that is not provided by the computing environment but required to carry out their tasks. Especially nomadic users have little choice than to call upon help from other people present in their vicinity. There are social issues (e.g. availability and interruptibility) along with the issues of relevance and reliability to find the most appropriate person to ask for any information or help. Identifying this person is still a challenge today. In this chapter we provide a thorough and grounded discussion of the state of the art of help systems that glean answers from human.We also present the software prototype Ubiquitous–Help–System (UHS) that has been developed to demonstrate how using a social network in combination with the user profile and preferences, can assist a nomadic user. The system assists the nomadic user to find people who can support him in a large scale ubiquitous computing environment.