Scott Sherwood

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.

Into the wild: challenges and opportunities for field trial methods

Field trials of experimental systems in the wild have developed into a standard method within HCI - testing new systems with groups of users in relatively unconstrained settings outside of the laboratory. In this paper we discuss methodological challenges in running user trials. Using a trial of trials we examined the practices of investigators and participants - documenting demand characteristics, where users adjust their behaviour to fit the expectations of those running the trial, the interdependence of how trials are run and the result they produce, and how trial results can be dependent on the insights of a subset of trial participants. We develop three strategies that researchers can use to leverage these challenges to run better trials.

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

Five design challenges for human computation

Human computation systems, which draw upon human competencies in order to solve hard computational problems, represent a growing interest within HCI. Despite the numerous technical demonstrations of human computation systems, however, there are few design guidelines or frameworks for researchers or practitioners to draw upon when constructing such a system. Based upon findings from our own human computation system, and drawing upon those published within HCI, and from other scientific and engineering literatures, as well as systems deployed commercially, we offer a framework of five challenging issues of relevance to designers of systems with human computation elements: designing the motivation of participants in the human computation system and sustaining their engagement; orienting participants, framing and orienting participants; using situatedness as a driver for content generation; considering the organisation of human and machine roles in human computation systems; and reconsidering the way in which computational analogies are applied to the design space of human computation.