Pasquale Di Giovanni

Combining personal diaries with territorial intelligence to empower diabetic patients

Abstract Information is today recognized as a major source of benefit, for those who are able to properly create and manage it. With the advent of new computing, storing and networking technologies, transforming data into useful, ‘marketable’ information has become a major goal for companies, organizations and governments. The healthcare domain makes no exception. Governments and healthcare companies are paying increasing attention to patient-centered care and to its positive effects on business metrics, such as finances, quality, safety, satisfaction and market share. Appropriate information sharing and communication are then recognized to be one of the key factors for patient-centered care. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure for defining new processes to support a fruitful exchange of strategic information at the local level, which could encourage local dynamics and improve the relationships between ultimate users and the territory and vice versa. This is particularly relevant in the healthcare domain, so we have developed a mobile application to provide diabetic patients with personalized services based on a technology with a low level invasive impact, through the experimentation of new process models meant to share information and integrate software components. Such a special-purpose application is meant to improve care experience of diabetic patients while creating public value for services. This is achieved by a profitable combination of territorial knowledge with personal data and events available and processed on smartphones.

Building social life networks through mobile interfaces : the case study of Sri Lanka farmers

The development of mobile applications is paramount to support users living in developing countries to improve their lives. One of the major research challenges is to develop a user interface suitable for such users. In this chapter we present the design process we applied in order to develop a mobile application oriented to farmers living in Sri Lanka. The application prototype developed so far has been evaluated against usability requirements and a usability evaluation framework has been devised, which can be used to replicate the tests as the application iteratively reaches its final release. This work represents a pilot study within a wider international research project aiming to provide real-time information to support activities related to livelihood delivered using mobile phone applications targeted to meet the needs of people in developing countries.

Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Achieving Sustainable Agriculture Production: A Case Study from Sri Lanka

Crop production problems are common in Sri Lanka which severely effect rural farmers, agriculture sector and the countrys economy as a whole. A deeper analysis revealed that the root cause was farmers and other stakeholders in the domain not receiving right information at the right time in the right format. Inspired by the rapid growth of mobile phone usage among farmers a mobile-based solution is sought to overcome this information gap. Farmers needed published information (quasi static) about crops, pests, diseases, land preparation, growing and harvesting methods and real-time situational information (dynamic) such as current crop production and market prices. This situational information is also needed by agriculture department, agro-chemical companies, buyers and various government agencies to ensure food security through effective supply chain planning whilst minimising waste. We developed a notion of context specific actionable information which enables user to act with least amount of further processing. User centered agriculture ontology was developed to convert published quasi static information to actionable information. We adopted empowerment theory to create empowerment-oriented farming processes to motivate farmers to act on this information and aggregated the transaction data to generate situational information. This created a holistic information flow model for agriculture domain similar to energy flow in biological ecosystems. Consequently, the initial Mobile-based Information System evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem that can predict current production situation in near real enabling government agencies to dynamically adjust the incentives offered to farmers for growing different types of crops to achieve sustainable agriculture production through crop diversification.

Spatial data and mobile applications: general solutions for interface design

Nowadays, spatial data are totally widespread in mobile applications. They are present in games, map applications, web community applications and office automations. However this kind of spatial information potentially needs a large display area and the hardware constraint related to the limited screen dimensions creates many usability challenges. Our investigation in the last few years to find solutions to these challenges has led us to the discovery of general usability principles that a well-designed interface should adopt. In this paper we describe the mental path we have followed to derive those principles from the experience gained in developing mobile interfaces for different application domains. The principles are formalized in terms of two interaction design patterns, specific for mobile interfaces managing spatial data. They extend existing HCI patterns and are completed, as usual, with concrete examples of their applications.

Interplay of Requirements Engineering and Human Computer Interaction Approaches in the Evolution of a Mobile Agriculture Information System

Very high adoption of mobile phones in developing countries can be used to empower people engaged in various sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and healthcare by providing timely information in right context, thus facilitating them to make informed decisions. Having identified lack of such information is badly affecting farmers in Sri Lanka we embarked on a project to develop a mobile based agriculture information system. We had to combine different theories and methods both from Requirements Engineering (RE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on a need basis to successfully gather the requirements. When we retraced the process we saw a definitive systematic pattern as to how RE and HCI can be used to enrich such an artefact; highlighting the strong interplay between RE and HCI. Discovery of this pattern enabled us to generalise the process.

Standard-Based Integration of W3C and GeoSpatial Services: Quality Challenges

In recent years, Service Oriented Computing (SOC) has become one of the leading approaches for the design and implementation of distributed solutions. The key concepts are the notion of service and the possibility to seamlessly combine several modules to offer more sophisticated functionality. Such features were soon recognized by both W3C and OGC as relevant for their purposes, although their standards are incompatible and the seamless communication and exchange of information between these types of services are not directly achievable. The current most accepted solution to address this matter is represented by the development of a wrapper that manages technical issues that arise during the translation of requests and responses between them. However, the design of such a software module presents challenges in terms of infrastructure design and Quality of Service. In this paper we describe some issues to be faced when developing a service wrapper aimed at integrating existing geospatial services into a W3C service-based infrastructure.

Design science research based blended approach for usability driven requirements gathering and application development

Extracting user requirements in designing innovative ICT based solutions for emerging vague problems is a challenge. We successfully addressed this challenge by blending several techniques in Software Engineering (SE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) within a Design Science Research (DSR) framework. These techniques were traditional surveys and interviews, causal analysis, scenario creation and transformation, use of paper-based and functional prototypes for communicating with users and capturing their feedback, user centered design, and incremental development. This approach enabled us to better capture requirements based on usability aspects and guided us to design a successful solution. We present a framework derived from this research for wider applicability.

Usability issues for an aerospace digital library

To help the aerospace community (made by experimental, numerical, system engineers, scientists, managers, stakeholders, customers, authorities...) capitalize and share their outcomes, a digital library (DL) center will be set up, as a result of a national project called SIA (Sistema Informativo Aerospaziale). The objective of the digital library Centre is to demonstrate new ways in which, collections of documents, data and associated services, can facilitate collaboration within the aerospace community. This paper gives an overview of the key functions and how they map into the requirements of the target community. Attention is put on usability characteristics. Two forms of DL usability - interface and organizational - are tackled.

Practicing Mobile Interface Design Principles Through the Use of HCI Design Patterns—A Training Strategy

One of the main factors behind the rapid development and wide adoption of modern mobile devices is surely the enormous amount of third party applications available for the various mobile platforms. Nevertheless, due to the unique characteristics of the mobile world, designing usable user interfaces for such applications is still a challenging task. Design patterns were conceived to deal with design complexity providing well-recognized and reusable solutions. However, one of the main difficulties arising when design patterns are used by less experienced developers, is the choice of the appropriate patterns for a specific problem. To support novice developers in that choice, we propose MIDE, a tool that devises patterns in the form of ready to use application templates and interface snippets targeted at the Android platform.

Overcoming the digital divide in Europe : let’s learn from emerging countries!

During the last decades Europe has witnessed a societal progress supported by the adoption of information technology in daily activities. Yet, 30 % of Europeans have never used the Internet and lack digital skills to perform tasks which are expected to be carried out online. Bridging that gap is one of the key goals of the European Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020 (H2020).