Pertti Huuskonen

Let's all get up and walk to the North Pole: design and evaluation of a mobile wellness application

Mobile wellness applications can motivate people to exercise more because of their ubiquitous presence and suitable technological possibilities. Wellness applications utilize several factors that can increase physical activity levels of users, e.g., data tracking, social sharing and playfulness. We describe the design and evaluation of a mobile-phone based wellness application addressing social sharing and playfulness. In our user study with 37 participants we focus on presentation of physical activity data as a virtual trip on a map-based game world. The findings reveal design implications that support users to be motivated in doing the physical exercise, including setting departure and destination places and viewing up-to-date progress between them. The virtual trip was considered an understandable, concrete and interesting analogy. The familiarity of the map of the home country as the game world was liked because it added concreteness and understandability to the achievements.

Understanding privacy regulation in ubicomp interactions

Ubiquitous computing contains a huge promise for more intelligent services that are available anywhere and are able to dynamically adapt to the users’ current context. However, what necessarily follows such an environment is the compromising of the users’ privacy. We aim at analyzing this complex issue by applying and extending Altman’s theoretical privacy framework, well known in social sciences, to privacy in ubicomp. Altman understands privacy as a two-way interactive process, which makes the approach promising in analyzing ubicomp where people, devices and the environment interact with each other. We point out similarities between the existing model and the features of ubicomp environment, and verify the results by applying and analyzing the resulting extended framework to typical ubicomp use cases. Based on the analysis, we argue that privacy in ubicomp can be modeled similarly to privacy in general by extending the model to cover such factors as mediation and non-human actors.

Context Awareness Perspectives for Mobile Personal Media

Abstract This article reviews the ongoing evolution of context awareness technologies in mobile devices using personal media as an illustrative application domain. Augmented with metadata, files containing personal media can include significant information about the contexts they describe. the article discusses personal media applications from two different perspectives:

Primary and secondary context in mobile video communication

The new video capabilities of mobile phones are starting to change the field of mobile communication. It is now dramatically easier to publish video in quasi-real time. We discuss how this change will affect the way people perceive video-recording, in terms of privacy, transparency, and the notion of context. We use a model of primary and secondary contexts to analyze usage situations, highlighting newly relevant research issues.

Sketching with strangers: in the wild study of ad hoc social communication by drawing

We describe an in-the-wild experiment with non-verbal ad-hoc communication between strangers. We connected two night clubs via two interactive tables that allowed people at each end interact via shared drawings, pre-made symbols and actions. We interviewed 50 and observed approximately 200 participants. In local interaction, collaboration was the preferred mode of use, whereas with remote interaction, communication prevailed. This study demonstrated that people have such a strong desire to communicate that they are willing to forgive many imperfections in the channel. It was also evident that people resorted to stereotypical information to ease the rapid flow of conversation, when they had only limited knowledge of the other party (just the place). This paper describes our system design, the user study, and discusses implications on designing for ad hoc communication and context sharing in urban everyday environment.

Mobile video recording in context

: / 28 “CAMERAS NOT ALLOWED,” warns a sign at the door of a Helsinki venue, where we are queuing up for a rock concert. That is a reasonable order, but one that is almost impossible to control. While many of us carry digital cameras, even more people carry mobile phones with integrated cameras. Such phonecams usually double as video cameras, too. Asking thousands of concertgoers to leave their phones at home is unthinkable today, so the concert will inevitably be recorded—albeit with the (currently) low quality that prevents major exploitation of the material. While commercial events are likely to be affected by video recording, our everyday lives are also getting recorded. Phonecams are becoming ubiquitous; multimedia messages can be sent anywhere in a matter of seconds. New 3G networks are finally making video calls a reality. Video blogs abound; Google offers a search mechanism for interesting videos; Bittorrent users download TV episodes by the dozen. Video in general has become a practical data type with networked personal computers and even with mobile devices.

Meta-searches in peer-to-peer networks

We propose a method for carrying out enhanced collaborative searches, called meta-searches, in peer-to-peer networks. In addition to performing regular searches, our method supports searches based on other network users’ previous searches on the same or similar topic. In essence, when a user performs a search, s/he will receive not only the usual result set, but also information on other users’ previous results, as well as relevancy information (such as how many times a resource that appeared in the result set was successfully downloaded). The core components of meta-search are query relevancy calculation, query matching algorithms, and relevancy file format. In this paper we discuss the underlying concepts and principles, and describe the component design in detail. Meta-search provides a way of benefiting from other users’ successful searches without any additional effort, thus potentially improving the efficiency and experience of a search.

Personal chart: health data logging made easy with a mobile device

Many devices are still unconnected. We apply mobile imaging to log measurements from personal health devices. Such devices sometimes offer wired and wireless links, but they suffer from many problems (setup, breaking connections, non-mobility). We propose to use instead ubiquitous mobile phone cameras to capture the measurements and store them for further viewing and follow-up. In this paper we discuss the principle, the prototype, the user study and initial conclusions of this approach.

Collaborative Context Recognition for Mobile Devices

The next wave of mobile applications is at hand. Mobile phones, PDAs, cameras, music players, and gaming gadgets are creating a connected mobile ecosystem where it is possible to implement systems with significant embedded intelligence. Such advances will make it possible to move many functions of the current PC-centric applications to the mobile domain. Since the inherent difficulties that come with mobility—limited UIs, short attention spans, power dependency, intermittent connectivity, to name but a few—are still not going away, new solutions are needed to make mobile computing satisfactory. We are facing the paradox of cramming ever more functions into our ever more portable devices, while seeking to achieve radically better usablility and semi-usable automated intelligence.

Explaining Plant Design Knowledge Through Means-End Modelling

Abstract We apply the multilevel means-end model of Rasmussen to explain the intentions behind design choices of industrial systems. We have extended a design tool, the Design++ environment, to capture higher level knowledge about the artefact under design and to explain this knowledge to the users. Means-end knowledge is encoded through relations added on top of the existing part-of and subclass hierarchies in the tool. Explanations are encoded as structured text in the objects and design rules. We have tested the explanations with a power plant application. Although still very primitive, this research prototype has confirmed that meansend information can be effectively used both to capture and explain design knowledge. We adopt a simplified view to design processes and decisions, placing our main emphasis in artefact modelling and explanation techniques.