A framework for mobile evaluation

We present the extensions to a software framework which supports the construction and evaluation of mixed-fidelity prototypes for mobile devices. The framework is available for desktop and mobile devices and allows designers and users to test the prototypes on actual devices. Additionally, the extensions aim at allowing designers to gather usage information, both passively and actively, tailoring the used techniques to users or project's goals. It supports contextual and ubiquitous evaluation also including in-situ prototyping and participatory design on-the-go. We address the evaluation's features and their contribution to the field of mobile interaction design, presenting real-life case studies and achieved results.

In this paper we present a software framework which supports the construction of mixed-fidelity (from sketch-based to software) prototypes for mobile devices. The framework is available for desktop computers and mobile devices (e.g., PDAs, Smartphones). It operates with low-fidelity sketch based prototypes or mid to high-fidelity prototypes with some range of functionality, providing several dimensions of customization (e.g., visual components, audio/video files, navigation, behavior) and targeting specific usability concerns. Furthermore, it allows designers and users to test the prototypes on actual devices, gathering usage information, both passively (e.g., logging) and actively (e.g., questionnaires/Experience Sampling). Overall, it conveys common prototyping procedures with effective data gathering methods that can be used on ubiquitous scenarios supporting in-situ prototyping and participatory design on-the-go. We address the framework's features and its contributions to the design and evaluation of applications for mobile devices and the field of mobile interaction design, presenting real-life case studies and results.

The recent globalization of mobile technology and its overwhelming presence on everyday life through various societal groups and activities has raised its importance to unprecedented levels. Mobile devices’ diverse shapes, small size and distinctive characteristics impel their use in diverse and ubiquitous scenarios, cementing their presence within our work, social and entertainment activities. Accordingly, as they assume a greater meaning and a wider role of functionalities, a corresponding amount of new usage paradigms is also emerging. Consequentially, designers are increasingly faced with new design challenges, needing to cope with added difficulties of creating solutions for multiple contexts, users, purposes and new ubiquitous usage behaviours. Simultaneously, they need to cope with and leverage the small size factor and the peculiar or mixed interaction modalities (e.g., touch screen in concert with keyboard or voice) that define the trends of emerging mobile devices. Contrastingly, design problems for mobile devices, and corresponding solutions, have only recently begun to be partially and superficially addressed. Difficulties and challenges are spread through various stages of design. Three phases are particularly interesting: (1) requirements and data gathering on mobile contexts; (2) prototyping for small devices and (3) evaluation on real-world settings. Currently used approaches and existing methodologies still lack specific techniques to support design on such demanding conditions, hindering the design process and resulting in poor software regarding usability. Even recent approaches generally rely on simulations, lab experiences or derive directly from non-mobile techniques, colliding with studies that have clearly demonstrated the need to take the design process out of the lab when it comes to mobile devices. This book chapter focuses on these problems and discusses recent advances on mobile interaction design, reviewing existing attempts to overcome the added challenges brought by mobility, pervasiveness and mobile devices’ characteristics. As its main contribution, it identifies key concerns and issues brought by mobility, also presenting ways to complement current efforts and proposing new approaches that aim at overcoming existing challenges and problems. It introduces findings and work developed thus far, offering improvements and solutions that tackle out-of-the-lab design procedures and support in-situ participatory design and evaluation. These approaches are compiled within a User Centred Design (UCD) methodology that emphasizes initial stages of design and identifies techniques and

Affective computing is an imperative topic for Human-Computer Interaction, where user emotions and emotional communication can be utilized to improve the usability of a system. Several strategies are available to detect user emotions but it is questionable when identifying the most suitable and compatible strategy which can be used to detect emotions when using mobile devices. Multimodal emotion recognition paves the path to detect emotions by combining two or more strategies in order to identify the most meaningful emotion. Emotion identification through facial expressions and text analytics has given high accuracies but combining them and practically applying them in the context of a mobile environment should be done. Three prototypes were developed using evolutionary prototyping which can detect emotions from facial expressions and text data, using state of the art APIs and SDKs where the base of the prototypes was a keyboard known as Emotional Keyboard which is compatible with Android devices. Evaluations of Prototype 1 and 2 have been performed based on participatory design and reviewed the compatibility of emotion identification through facial expressions and text data in the mobile context. Evaluation of Prototype 3 should be done in the future and a confusion matrix should be built to verify the accuracies by cross-checking with training and validation accuracies that have been obtained when developing the neural network.

Mobile cloud computing combines wireless access service and cloud computing to improve the performance of mobile applications. Mobile cloud computing can balance the application distribution between the mobile device and the cloud, in order to achieve faster interactions, battery savings and better resource utilization. To support mobile cloud computing, the paper proposes a phased scheduling model of mobile cloud such that mobile device's users experience lower interaction times and extended battery life. The phased scheduling optimization is solved by two subproblems: mobile device's batch application optimization and mobile device's job level optimization. At the first stage, the mobile cloud global scheduling optimization implements the allocation of the cloud resources to the mobile device's batch applications. At the second stage, mobile device's job level optimization adjusts the cloud resource usages to optimize the utility of single mobile device's application. In the simulations, compared with other algorithm, our proposed mobile cloud phased scheduling algorithms achieve the better performance with acceptable overhead.

Today, the development in the wireless and mobile communications systems including mobile devices (e.g., cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), PDA/cellular phone combinations, pagers, and other wearable devices) and wireless technologies (e.g., cellular systems: GPRS, UMTS, HSPA and UMTS LTE, Wi-Fi, WiMAX and others) leads to use a variety of applications. The number and variety of such devices keeps growing at a fast pace as new processing, display, battery and wireless technologies are invented and as new applications for these devices are envisioned. Thus, as the need for integrating mobile devices and wireless technologies matures there will be great emphasis on developing appropriate services and applications. In this tutorial, we explain how to develop applications for current and emerging mobile devices, and performing tasks at all stages of the software development life-cycle from inception through to implementation and testing.

Because of their specific aging-related needs, older users should be involved when it comes to designing and evaluating devices that target them. While emphasis is usually put only on the accessibility of the final interface to this population, the participatory design and evaluation methods should also be adapted to their needs. This paper aims to contribute to the literature of human-computer interaction for older users by showing---in the context of the development and evaluation of an actual prototype, an interactive television (ITV) for senior citizens within the SeniorChannel project---how design and evaluation methods can be adapted to older users. The paper first describes the strategies that have been reported in human--computer interaction literature to involve older adults in design (i.e., visual prompts, warm-ups, experiencing, hands-on, and natural tasks). It then illustrates the way in which such strategies were implemented in the design and evaluation of SeniorChannel applications (i.e., illustrated material, video clips, tutorials, peer sessions, cards, natural tasks). Finally, the results of the final users' evaluation of the prototypes are reported.

We present a design and an implementation of a security policy specification language based on metric linear-time temporal logic (MTL). MTL features temporal operators that are indexed by time intervals, allowing one to specify timing-dependent security policies. The design of the language is driven by the problem of runtime monitoring of applications in mobile devices. A main case of the study is the privilege escalation attack in the Android operating system, where an app gains access to certain resource or functionalities that are not explicitly granted to it by the user, through indirect control flow. To capture these attacks, we extend MTL with recursive definitions, that are used to express call chains betwen apps. We then show how the metric operators of MTL, in combination with recursive definitions, can be used to specify policies to detect privilege escalation, under various fine grained constraints. We present a new algorithm, extending that of linear time temporal logic, for monitoring safety policies written in our specification language. The monitor does not need to store the entire history of events generated by the apps, something that is crucial for practical implementations. We modified the Android OS kernel to allow us to insert our generated monitors modularly. We have tested the modified OS on an actual device, and show that it is effective in detecting policy violations.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) can now be measured using mobile devices. Mobile ECG devices, which are defined as devices capable of recording and transmitting non-standard ECGs, offer numerous advantages such as cost-effectiveness and being user-friendly. Mobile ECG can also extend recording lengths (e.g., 2days, 14days), which is necessary to capture important intermittent events (e.g., cardiac arrhythmias) and evaluate prognostic risk markers (e.g., prolonged corrected QT (QTc) interval). Some mobile ECG devices can even connect to broadband networks allowing patients to remotely transmit their ECG to a clinician. This article systematically examines different mobile ECG devices used in prior studies and provides a detailed assessment of five diverse yet commonly used mobile ECG devices: AliveCor KardiaMobile; AliveCor KardiaMobile 6L; iRhythm ZioPatch; Apple Smartwatch ECG; and CardioSecur System. These mobile ECG devices are diverse in the number of leads measured and the duration of monitoring. Similar to their diversity, there has been a wide range of clinical applications of mobile ECG devices. Despite significant progress, questions regarding data quality, and clinican and patient acceptance and compliance persist.

Recent advances in the hardware capabilities of mobile hand-held devices have fostered the development of open source operating systems and a wealth of applications for mobile phones and tablet devices. This new generation of smart devices, including iPhone and Google Android, are powerful enough to accomplish most of the user tasks previously requiring a personal computer. Moreover, mobile devices have access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from a full suite of sensors such as GPS, camera, microphone and others.In this paper, we discuss the security threats that stem from these new smart device capabilities and the online application markets for mobile devices. These threats include malware, data exfiltration, exploitation through USB, and user and data tracking. We present our ongoing research efforts to defend or mitigate the impact of attacks against mobile devices. Our approaches involve analyzing the source code and binaries of mobile applications, kernel-level and data encryption, and controlling the communication mechanisms for synchronizing the user contents with computers and other phones including updates or new version of the operating system or applications over USB. We also explain the emerging challenges in dealing with these security issues when the end-goal is to deploy security-enhanced smart phones into military and tactical scenarios.KeywordsMobile DeviceSmart PhoneBlock CipherSecurity RiskSymbolic ExecutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Due to the nature of ubiquitous environments there is a strong relation between them and auto-configurable systems. In ubiquitous computing environments, devices interact with the context performing an auto-configuration of system settings. The main idea presented in this paper is the use of profiles as an important key to provide auto configurability for mobile environments, especially in ubiquitous environments and Ambient Intelligence scenarios. This work is mainly focused on security settings. We define a profile as a repository of structured data representing present and past states of an entity. Ubiquitous entities use profiles to convey their properties to other entities. Our vision of a profile does not include its use by the application as information storage for internal use. Finally, we propose the use of smartcards as a mean to provide security for ubiquitous services. Smartcards can store user information, invoke services and process temporary service results. For these reasons, and as aforementioned, we consider smartcards as a suitable vehicle to provide ubiquitous services. Users on ubiquitous scenarios should be able to access services from any place using their smartcards. By this way it; is possible not require complex computing mobile devices, like PDAs.

Location awareness is a key ingredient to many applications of mobile devices. Devices with the ability to determine their own position in space can retrieve, filter, or present information depending on this position. There are, however, different ways to look at this situation resulting in different distributions of computational resources. A strongly simplified description model will be introduced and a number of existing systems, from both research and industry, will be analyzed according to this model. With a view to scalability in ubiquitous computing worlds, we will examine the tradeoffs with respect to putting more computational effort and design wits into the environment and infrastructure or into the actual mobile device. Some of the ideas presented here were discussed in a paper at the first workshop on artificial intelligence (AI) in mobile devices, AIMS 2000 (Butz et al. 2000).

Feedback, especially timely, specific, and actionable feedback, frequently does not occur. Efforts to better understand methods to improve the effectiveness of feedback are an important area of educational research. This study represents preliminary work as part of a plan to investigate the perceptions of a student-driven system to request feedback from faculty using a mobile device and Web-based application. We hypothesize that medical students will perceive learner-initiated, timely feedback to be an essential component of clinical education. Furthermore, we predict that students will recognize the use of a mobile device and Web application to be an advantageous and effective method when requesting feedback from supervising physicians. Focus group data from 18 students enrolled in a 4-week anesthesia clerkship revealed the following themes: (1) students often have to solicit feedback, (2) timely feedback is perceived as being advantageous, (3) feedback from faculty is perceived to be more effective, (4) requesting feedback from faculty physicians poses challenges, (5) the decision to request feedback may be influenced by the student’s clinical performance, and (6) using a mobile device and Web application may not guarantee timely feedback. Students perceived using a mobile Web-based application to initiate feedback from supervising physicians to be a valuable method of assessment. However, challenges and barriers were identified.

Type 2 diabetes is a prevalent, chronic disease, which places significant burden on societies and individuals. This article reports the participatory research design of an exploratory study that introduces mobile tablet devices in the self-management of type 2 diabetes in a primary healthcare setting. Strategies from democratic dialogic theory were used in the design of the research to steer the participatory engagement between researchers and healthcare practitioners. The outcome of this phase of the research was the issue of six ‘invitations’ to 28 people with diabetes to frame their use of a mobile tablet device in managing their health. Those invitations were clustered in two themes, Empowered and Compelled, representing typical patient attitudes and behaviours. The work reported here sets the stage for a longitudinal and socially complex study that encompasses a new and comprehensive General Practitioner (GP) Super Clinic with an array of health and administrative staff, patients with a chronic health condition requiring continual self-management, a wide continuum of digital literacy capability in all participants and an ever-increasing digital society. It reports a novel research design methodology that merges democratic dialogic theory and participatory design, resulting in a grounded and agreed approach to a mobile health intervention.

Mobile devices and specific applications for sport professionals have become nowadays very useful in specific training, but their potential is not fully exploited. The general goal of this paper is to point out bridges between the two communities of sport professionals and mobile applications developers. In this paper we survey these mobile devices according to these two different viewpoints. We first take into account their utility, the sports involved, and the specific training processes and present the available offer of mobile devices and applications. Main producers and tools are mentioned as well. The sport profesional viewpoint shows the way they are percieving the mobile applications and devices in the training process, and what are their expectations. Then we consider the technological aspects of the mobile devices and their potential for sport professionals. The technological aspects are treated from the developer's point of view. We present what the nowadays mobile devices are able to offer for the benefit of the sport, due to their design and embedded technology, tools and capabilities. Different operating systems, main producers of mobile devices and developers of mobile applications are briefly mentioned. A short classification of the applications for mobile devices is given, and the levels of the corresponding software developping skills are also mentioned. This suggest an ideal composition of a mobile application developing team. Our paper is an invitation for reflexion on the modern approaches of professional sport training through the nowadays mobile technologies. The invitation is addressed both to sport professionals and mobile devices developers. We conclude that the mobile devices and applications have a huge potential for sport professionals and, at the same time, the sport training offers a large domain of applications to the mobile devices developers.