Tuula Nousiainen

A mobile application concept to encourage independent mobility for blind and visually impaired students

This paper presents a user-centric application development process for mobile application to blind and visually impaired students. The development process connects the assistive technology experts, teachers and students from the school for visually impaired together to participate to the design of the mobile application. The data for the analysis is gathered from interviews and workshops with the target group. The main goal of the project is to examine how mobile application can be used to encourage and motivate visually impaired students to move independently indoors and outdoors. The application allows the students to interact with their environment through use of sensor technology now standard on most smart and feature phones. We present a user-centric application development process, report on findings from the initial user trials, and propose a framework for future phases of the project.

To sit or to stand, that is the question: examining the effects of work posture change on the well-being at work of software professionals

Despite the central role of human resources in determining the success of software companies, relatively little academic research has been conducted on the well-being at work aspect of software professionals. This study aims to address the aforementioned gap by examining the effects of using standing instead of sitting workstations on the well-being at work of software professionals in terms of their physical activity, mental alertness, stress, and musculoskeletal strain. An intervention study consisting of two measurements was conducted for 29 employees of a large Finnish software company by using questionnaires and the Firstbeat Lifestyle Assessment service. The findings of the study suggest that the usage of standing instead of sitting workstations results in only modest promotions of physical activity, does not have an effect on mental alertness, actually tilts the stress-recovery balance towards stress, but decreases musculoskeletal strain in the neck and shoulders, although increasing it in the legs and feet.