Using Information Retrieval for Interaction with Mobile Devices

Future's environments will be sensitive and responsive to the presence of people to support them carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals, in an easy and natural way. Such interactive spaces will use the information and communication technologies to bring the computation into the physical world in order to enhance ordinary activities of their users. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR) fields have both developed innovative techniques to address the challenge of navigating complex information spaces, but their insights have often failed to cross-disciplinary borders. Human-computer information retrieval (HCIR) has emerged in academic research and industry practice to bring together research in the fields of IR and HCI, in order to create new kinds of search systems that depend on continuous human control of the search process. HCIR is the study of information retrieval techniques that bring human intelligence into the search process. This chapter will describe search-based interaction techniques using two human-computer interaction information retrieval systems: (1) a speech-based spoken multimedia retrieval system that can be used to present relevant video-podcast (vodcast) footage in response to spontaneous speech and conversations during daily life activities, and (2) a novel shape retrieval technique that allows 3D modeling of indoor/outdoor environments using multi-view sketch input from a mobile device.

Mobile Accessibility in Touchscreen Devices

Mobile technology is a new frontier for accessibility. Although mobile developers need solid guidelines to provide accessible experiences, there is a limited number of empirical research on mobile accessibility of different mobile platforms that work through various assistive technologies. In this context, more information is needed to understand both usage patterns and hardware/software platforms to guide decisions to meet the needs of people with disabilities who use mobile devices. This study, which is a pilot study of a long-term research, evaluates the accessibility of selected built-in and third party iOS applications in the iPhone and iPad through an extensive accessibility test with two blind users who are novice users of touchscreen mobile devices. This qualitative study is based on a multi-method approach, which consists of a background questionnaire, task observation, and a structured debriefing interview. The study also employs observation methods of data collection in order to gain better insight in mobile accessibility. The participants are demanded to execute three different tasks on each platform by using VoiceOver, which is the built-in screen reader in iOS. The participants are observed during the task executions and the “think aloud” procedure and video recording of the participants collected additional data. A short debriefing interview was also made to gain a detailed insight into the user experience. The findings reveal significant accessibility problems caused specifically by design of the graphical user interface features of the applications and limitations of the screen reader. Finally, as part of future research directions, preliminary guidelines are proposed to improve accessibility for iOS applications in both platforms.

The Travel Machine

Travel and tourism is a booming sector of the 21st century world economy. Despite numerous positive trends, numerous critics deplore some developments in this industry. In an era of increasing leisure tourism or “part-time leisure tourism” tacked on to business trips, coming into contact with other cultures risks fading into the background. Therefore, the Travel Machine project of 2012 researched, analyzed, designed, and evaluated effective ways to foster a shift from leisure to cultural tourism by changing people’s travel behavior in the short- and in the long-term. The main objective is to persuade and motivate people, especially travelers aged up to 50 years, those from higher to average economic and educational demographics, to open themselves up more intensely towards the local population and culture of a destination, and to make out of their trip a deeper, personally enriching, and educational experience. For this objective, a well-designed mobile phone application prototype, the Travel Machine, was conceived by the author’s firm, combining information design/visualization and persuasion design. This chapter explains the development of the Travel Machine’s user interface, information design, information visualization, and persuasion design.

ConChi

Mobile context-aware systems focus on adapting mobile service provisions to the actual user needs. They offer personalized services based on the context in which mobile users’ requests have been submitted. Since contextual information changes over time, the application of established itemset change mining algorithms to context-aware data is an appealing research issue. Change itemset discovery focuses on discovering patterns which represent the temporal evolution of frequent itemsets in consecutive time periods. However, the sparseness of the analyzed data may bias the extraction process, because itemsets are likely to become infrequent at certain time periods. This chapter presents ConChI, a novel context-aware system that performs change itemset mining from context-aware data with the aim at supporting mobile expert decisions. To counteract data sparseness itemset change mining is driven by an analyst-provided taxonomy which allows analyzing data correlation changes at different abstraction levels. In particular, taxonomy is exploited to represent the knowledge that becomes infrequent in certain time periods by means of high level (generalized) itemsets. Experiments performed on real contextual data coming from a mobile application show the effectiveness of the proposed system in supporting mobile user and service profiling.

Designing Browser-Style Augmented Reality Applications

Handheld Augmented reality (AR) is the ability of smartphones to overlay digital information on a real view (video stream) of the world using built-in sensors such as, GPS, Compass and Accelerometer. With the use of geo-tagging and location based services, information is automatically filtered whenever users point their devices to places or objects of interest around them allowing them to browse the world. Current world browsers compromise the augmented reality experience due to poor support of contextual content, flow and interaction. This chapter discusses the principles underpinning the design of a solution for an indoor-outdoor world browser platform. The chapter presents the results of qualitative evaluations that were conducted on existing commercial world browsers and the design ideas of the proposed solutions. The main elements of a successful world browsing experience are highlighted as a guide for augmented reality designers.

Mobile Internet in Portugal

In contemporary society, Internet services and phones are blending into a mobile device frequently called smartphone. As a consequence, mobile Internet is having an exponential growth and new practices of mobile social networking and mobile communication are emerging, as these devices make it easier to maintain networks of relationships. Resulting from this convergence, contemporary mobile user experience also contributes to the blending of local and global through the permanent dynamic articulation of communication and coordination. This chapter deals with the emerging adoption drivers of mobile Internet and the behaviors of use that characterized it, highlighting the importance of mobility for online activities and the industry’s and user’s perspective of this technology adoption, patterns of use, motivating factors, and type of activities performed online. The authors’ main hypotheses argue that the nature of social interactions allowed by m-Internet is a key adoption driver and that, as consequence, social activities are integrative and relevant parts of m-Internet service. Moreover, The authors discuss that the type of access has an influence on the type of activities undertaken online, arguing that mobile access facilitates interaction and participation and supports more collective-based activities.

Gestural Interaction with Mobile Devices Based on Magnetic Field

The theory of around device interaction (ADI) has recently gained a lot of attention in the field of human computer interaction (HCI). As an alternative to the classic data entry methods, such as keypads and touch screens, ADI founds a 3D user interface that extends to the peripheral area of a device. In this chapter, the authors introduce a revolutionary interaction framework that is based on the idea of ADI. The proposed method constitutes a touchless data entry system that is based on the interaction between the magnetic fields around a device and a properly shaped magnet. The magnetic field that surrounds the device is generated by a magnetic sensor (compass) that is embedded in the new generation of mobile phones such as Apple’s iPhone 3GS and 4G, and Google’s Nexus one. The user movements of the properly shaped magnet in front of the device, then, deforms the sensor’s original magnetic field pattern whereby we can constitute a new means of communication between the user and the device. Thus, the magnetic field encompassing the device plays the role of a communication channel and encodes the hand-movement patterns of the user into temporal changes of the sensor’s magnetic field. In the back-end of the communication, an engine samples the momentary status of the field during a trial and recognizes the user’s pattern by matching it against some pre-recorded templates. The proposed method has been tested in a variety of applications such as handwriting recognition, user authentication, gesture recognition, and some entertainment applications. The experimental results show that the proposed interface not only elevates the convenience of user-device interactions, but also shows very promising accuracies in a wide range of applications requiring user interactions.

Collaborative Participation in Personalized Health through Mobile Diaries

Mobile and social media tools offer new opportunities for a more user centered, socially connected, and economically sustainable healthcare systems. A major focus of this chapter is to understand how to bring users to involve in their own everyday health management through mobile narratives, and new media as social platforms to incite social interaction in promoting healthier lifestyles. More in detail, the study discusses the utility of geo-located video diaries and social network, where the social interaction on the web and user-recorded video diaries create awareness and help subjects to self-reflect on their activities and aim to think for a health behavior change. The chapter experiences a focus project Locast Health Diary aims to provide a helpful set of tools for teen’s risk at obesity to record their socio- psychological environment and everyday health routines through participatory workshops and evaluate the use of health diary tools for confronting obesity problems.

Determinants of Behavioral Intention to Mobile Banking in Arab Culture

Nowadays, new tools and technologies are emerging rapidly. They are often used cross-culturally before being tested for suitability and validity. However, they would be validated to ensure that they work with all users, not just part of them. Mobile banking (as a new technology tool) has been introduced assuming that it performs well concerning authentication among all members of the society. We aim to validate mobile banking intention to use, through Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), focused on security, in Arabic countries, namely Yemen. The results confirm the previous studies that have shown the importance of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness.

Public Use of Mobile Media on College Campuses1

Mobile media users are found to make public spaces their own private territories. They use mobile media to bridge their personal relationships and isolate the unwanted interactions or sounds in the public. A triangulation research method is used to understand how mobile media has been used in public between 2005 and 2009 on American college campuses. Results show that mobile media users change public spaces into their private spaces by the use of their mobile media. The heavier mobile media dependency students have, the more uses their mobile media in public space. This is more true for females than males in this study.