Trends in measuring human behavior and interaction

Abstract

Present day applications demand that behavioral measurements are performed in natural environments, where the measuring devices are thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. Understanding users’ behavior in different contexts could be a goal of measuring human behavior, as well as a means for designing user experiences that utilize on pervasive measuring technology. The aim of this thematic issue on ‘Measuring human behavior and interaction’ is to summarize emerging trends and common problems across different branches of social, behavioral sciences, and interaction design that involve measurements of human behavior. It is inspired by the Measuring Behavior 2010 conference [1], which provided a broad and interdisciplinary forum for novel methods to define, measure, and analyze human, animal, and machine behavior. The papers in this thematic issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing are a selection of work presented at or related to the scope of the conference, but also relevant for the readers of PUC journal. One increasingly important issue in the measurement of behavior in computer (or machine)–human interaction is that of the ecological relevance of a study. If a test participant is asked to perform a task in a laboratory environment, then the behavior might be measured almost 100% correctly, but have limited meaning for real-life settings. On the other hand, measurements carried out in the subject’s natural environment are often hampered by the lack of controlled conditions, inadequate replication, and all sorts of technical issues caused by the difficulties of mobile and active subjects. Several of the papers in this thematic issue address that problem in various ways. Maly et al. show how the problem can be addressed by integrating and visualizing several different sources of data recorded from mobile subjects, giving much better power of interpretation than a narrow range of measurements. Their experiment measured navigation of visually impaired subjects in large-scale complex real-world environments. Navigation in such environments is qualitatively different from that of artificial small-scale environments, so laboratory or virtual reality studies have a large risk that their results will be without explanatory power in the real world. Kukka et al. present a study measured in an entirely natural situation, where the use of information services provided to people in a city center was measured, and despite the lack of laboratory conditions, information about the strategies of information seekers could be derived. As in many behavioral studies, that one also proved that the behavior of the people studies was actually quite different from what the subjects themselves said that their behavior would be. Studies in natural environments do not have to be on a large city-wide scale. Zillmer’s paper shows the insights, which can be gained in an oral care campaign by the automated measurement of people brushing their teeth. Such studies are often carried out purely by questionnaire E. I. Barakova (&) Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands e-mail: e.i.barakova@tue.nl