Ubiquitous Technology Research Articles

KinVoices: Using Voices of Friends and Family in Voice Interfaces

With voice user interfaces (VUIs) becoming ubiquitous and speech synthesis technology maturing, it is possible to synthesise voices to resemble our friends and relatives (which we will collectively call 'kin') and use them on VUIs. However, designing such interfaces and investigating how the familiarity of kin voices affect user perceptions remain under-explored. Our surveys and interviews with 25 users revealed that VUIs using kin voices were perceived as more engaging, persuasive and safer yet eerier than VUIs using common virtual assistant voices. We then developed a technology probe, KinVoice, an Alexa-based VUI that was deployed in three households over two weeks. Users set reminders using KinVoice, which in turn, gave the reminders in synthesised kin voices. This was to explore users' needs, uncover challenges involved and inspire new applications. We discuss design guidelines for integrating familiar kin voices into VUIs, applications that benefit from its usage, and implications for balancing voice realism and usability with security and diversification.

Ubiquitous Technologies and Learning

This study makes an original contribution to the literature on social media usage for learning purposes through the phenomenological approach of enquiry. It examined the general motivations for social media usage; how social media is used to meet academic needs; perceived academic benefits; and how social media usage disrupts studies. A total of 24 undergraduate students were engaged in rigorous focus group discussions. Results showed that social media has been adapted to suit the academic needs of users through the process of appropriation. It was found that although social media could be a viable platform for inter-university-collaborative-learning, respondents hardly engaged in that. It was suggested that students create inter-university social media groups for collaborative learning. There were accounts of negative implications of using social media, like addiction and distractions. Students must adopt tactics to handle distractions which could prove helpful in out-of-school settings like the workplace.

Anomaly detection for volunteered geographic information: a case study of Safecast data

ABSTRACT Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), defined as geographic information contributed voluntarily by individuals, has grown exponentially with the aid of ubiquitous GPS-enabled technologies. VGI projects have generated a large amount of geographic data, providing a new data source for scientific research. However, many scientists are concerned about the quality of VGI data for research, given the lack of rigorous and systematic quality control procedures. This study contributes to the improvement of quality control procedures by proposing a Cross-Volunteer Referencing Anomaly Detection (CVRAD) method to filter anomalous data, using the crowdsourced Safecast radiation data as a case study. The anomaly detection method is validated using two data sets: (1) an official radiation survey data set collected by the KURAMA car-borne system, (2) a set of anomalous Safecast measurements filtered by Safecast moderators. The validation results show that the proposed CVRAD method outperformed the 1.5 IQR benchmark method in minimizing the overall measurement error and detecting abnormal imports of Safecast measurements, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the overall accuracy of crowdsourced radiation measurements.

A single narrative will not do: Capitalism in the digital age

In recent years, scholars working across a range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in exploring the contours and machinations of digital capitalism. Celebrants extoll the way digital technologies are enhancing processes of capital accumulation, rendering employment more flexible, democractizing innovation, and making new forms of economic co-operation possible. By contrast, skeptics warn that digital technologies are being used to exacerbate inequality, further capitalist domination and extraction, and automate human beings into a future where there is no escape from the ubiquitous surveillance technologies that are used to forward the interests of a powerful techno-elite. The four books I review in this essay all offer critical perspectives on capitalism in the digital age. However, when read collectively, these books also demonstrate that if we are going to enhance our understanding of digital capitalism, then a single narrative will not do. By exploring the different ways digital capitalism is produced, lived, and even resisted by those who are differentially positioned within its ambit, these books make a powerful case for the role anthropology can play in illuminating the complexities, and the transformative possibilities, of our current economic moment.

A scalable factory backbone for multiple independent time-sensitive networks

Convergence of time-sensitive machine control networks as part of the operational technology (OT) with the ubiquitous information technology (IT) networks is an essential requirement for the ongoing digitalization of production. In this paper, we review the fundamental differences between both technologies, the challenges to be solved, existing and upcoming solutions like TSN and their limitations. Furthermore, we introduce an Ethernet extension for a backbone network at factory scale and line rates of 10 - 100Gbit/s. The backbone is intended to carry massive amounts of IT traffic together with the traffic of multiple independent OT networks at the precision of leading-edge field bus technologies in the sub-microsecond range. The backbone remains transparent and does not require changes to the attached OT sub-networks. We prove our claims by prototype measurements, interoperability tests and field trials.

Library café or elsewhere: usage of study space by different majors under contemporary technological environment

PurposeAs current university students may access information for their study anytime, anywhere with ubiquitous mobile technologies, this research re-examines the roles of study space in students' learning and campus life.Design/methodology/approachA survey was conducted to collect students' opinions and habits regarding the usage of different study spaces. Results in three different academic majors (science and engineering, arts and business) of a comprehensive international university were compared.FindingsThe authors’ findings showed a more diversified space usage among students, with the library café increasingly important in students' learning and life while learning commons remain important. However, there were only minor differences among these three study majors towards the learning and entertaining spaces, as these students generally apply inquiry-based learning.Originality/valueWhile some researches have investigated students' usage of university and library learning spaces, few studies have focused on the study space issue in Hong Kong or other metropolises in the East under the current mobile learning environment. This study's insights could help libraries and universities improve the management of their physical spaces to meet student needs.

Applying Self-Supervised Learning to Medicine: Review of the State of the Art and Medical Implementations

Machine learning has become an increasingly ubiquitous technology, as big data continues to inform and influence everyday life and decision-making. Currently, in medicine and healthcare, as well as in most other industries, the two most prevalent machine learning paradigms are supervised learning and transfer learning. Both practices rely on large-scale, manually annotated datasets to train increasingly complex models. However, the requirement of data to be manually labeled leaves an excess of unused, unlabeled data available in both public and private data repositories. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a growing area of machine learning that can take advantage of unlabeled data. Contrary to other machine learning paradigms, SSL algorithms create artificial supervisory signals from unlabeled data and pretrain algorithms on these signals. The aim of this review is two-fold: firstly, we provide a formal definition of SSL, divide SSL algorithms into their four unique subsets, and review the state of the art published in each of those subsets between the years of 2014 and 2020. Second, this work surveys recent SSL algorithms published in healthcare, in order to provide medical experts with a clearer picture of how they can integrate SSL into their research, with the objective of leveraging unlabeled data.

Children's social interactions within a socioenactive scenario

New ubiquitous technologies and interaction paradigms can play a key role in facilitating social interaction processes among children. A class of systems named “enactive” aims to support fluid interaction between technology and people via feedback cycles — the effect of technology on the human agent is fed back by the human action on the technology — based on the use of data sensors. We have extended this concept in a long-term project on socioenactive systems, by emphasizing social aspects in the enactive phenomena. In this article, we investigate how a robot-based experience can promote social behavior among children in an educational context. The study was conducted in workshops with 26 children (4–5 years old), organized in two groups. The system scenario used a narrative based on an adaptation of the Little Red Riding Hood tale to investigate children's interaction in playing embodied-based situations. Data captured from video-recorded workshop sessions were analyzed post hoc using the Grounded Theory methods. In total, 26 interaction coding were identified, with a high interrater reliability assessed by Cohen's Kappa (k = 0.84). Our findings indicate that 50.5% of the children's actions were the result of children-children and group-robot interactions, compared to the 38% of children interacting individually with the robot. This indicates children's high degree of embodied peer collaboration and initiative to accomplish the tasks in the proposed scenario. These results contribute to inform the design and construction of future socioenactive systems.

Rethinking time: ubichronic time and its impact on work

ABSTRACT Modern technology is ubiquitous i.e., “always there” – available to us when we want it and engaging us even when we don’t actively seek it. This constantly available ubiquitous technology influences people’s perception of time. This conceptual paper explores how ubiquitous technology creates a new time vision we call ubichronic time. We argue ubichronic time is qualitatively different from existing time visions and highlight the new values and behaviours associated with it. Specifically, people who have an ubichronic time vision perform disparate activities that span short durations across the day, find specific tiny units of time valuable and cram many repeated activities into a day. We also argue ubichronic time will have profound implications on the way we work and as such propose new concepts and research directions on how the way we work needs to adapt at the individual, team, and organisational levels.

The NUDGE trial pragmatic trial to enhance cardiovascular medication adherence: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

BackgroundNearly half of patients do not take their cardiovascular medications as prescribed, resulting in increased morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs. Mobile and digital technologies for health promotion and disease self-management offer an opportunity to adapt behavioral “nudges” using ubiquitous mobile phone technology to facilitate medication adherence. The Nudge pragmatic clinical trial uses population-level pharmacy data to deliver nudges via mobile phone text messaging and an artificial intelligent interactive chat bot with the goal of improving medication adherence and patient outcomes in three integrated healthcare delivery systems.MethodsThe Theory of mHealth, the Expanded RE-AIM/PRISM, and the PRECIS-2 frameworks were used for program planning, implementation, and evaluation, along with a focus on dissemination and cost considerations. During the planning phase, the Nudge study team developed and piloted a technology-based nudge message and chat bot of optimized interactive content libraries for a range of diverse patients. Inclusion criteria are very broad and include patients in one of three diverse health systems who take medications to treat hypertension, atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, diabetes, or hyperlipidemia. A target of approximately 10,000 participants will be randomized to one of 4 study arms: usual care (no intervention), generic nudge (text reminder), optimized nudge, and optimized nudge plus interactive AI chat bot. The PRECIS-2 tool indicated that the study protocol is very pragmatic, although there is variability across PRECIS-2 dimensions.DiscussionThe primary effectiveness outcome is medication adherence defined by the proportion of days covered (PDC) using pharmacy refill data. Implementation outcomes are assessed using the RE-AIM framework, with a particular focus on reach, consistency of implementation, adaptations, cost, and maintenance/sustainability. The project has limitations including limited power to detect some subgroup effects, medication complications (bleeding), and longer-term outcomes (myocardial infarction). Strengths of the study include the diverse healthcare systems, a feasible and generalizable intervention, transparent reporting using established pragmatic research and implementation science frameworks, strong stakeholder engagement, and planning for dissemination and sustainment.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.govNCT03973931. Registered on 4 June 2019. The study was funded by the NIH; grant number is 4UH3HL144163-02 issued 4/5/19.

Paper, glass, algorithm: teleprompters and the invisibility of screens

The teleprompter, invented in 1948 as a memory aid for show business, has become a ubiquitous technology in modern politics. Yet, the hidden ways in which this device shapes our understanding of performance, newscasting, and political rhetoric are rarely studied by media scholars. Recognizing this lacuna, this article traces the evolution of the teleprompter from a cumbersome, human-operated device to an invisible system of screens designed to conceal its own existence. The teleprompter has not only shaped the standardization of speech, but also restructured the televised spectacle by collapsing the sonic, the tactile, and the optical. By focusing on teleprompter fiascos and moments of breakdown from President Eisenhower to President Trump, we make a broader argument regarding the importance of failure and the accidental to the study of visual culture.

Anticipating Technology‐Enabled Care at home

AbstractThe spread and growth of ubiquitous smart technology to deliver public health outcomes, particularly within/at home, urgently requires greater scholarly attention. This paper uses data from interviews with professionals in Scotland who are designing and implementing Technology‐Enabled Care (TEC) for current and future homes. Theoretically informed by both critical geographies of home and futures scholarship, this paper presents a three‐part framework – “homes‐that‐are,” “homes‐that‐ought,” and “homes‐to‐be” – to explore the techno‐solutionist accounts of home, bringing to bear the messiness and complexity of home, both its conceptualisation and experience. It highlights prediction as an emerging form of anticipatory practice, generating new questions and conceptualisations about the openness of futures. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of understanding the underlying assumptions of those who make decisions when planning for future TEC and housing; about who they imagine they are planning for, and how diverse these futures are.

Instruments of Vision

In the age of ubiquitous visual technologies and systems, our perceptive apparatuses are constantly challenged, adapted, and shaped by instruments and machines, rendering the observing body as an active site of knowledge. Your Eye's Motion by Luna is an interactive installation that uses real-time eye-tracking to control a robotic creature named Luna (Figure 1). Materializing eye movements through a wondrous spectacle of light, motion, and color, the observer becomes conscious of her gaze enacted and extended by a robotic counterpart. Building on a diverse set of theories and understandings of vision from the fields of cybernetics, visual studies, embodied mind, and more, the project explores how our perceptual apparatuses and bodies are reconfigured in relation to machines and the environment to afford new ways of seeing. Once we see how observing bodies accommodate feedback from actions to cognition, we can uncover the embodied and affective potential of eye movement as an interface for robotics. The curiosity of Luna invests in this potential, articulating a unity between our embodied percepts and machinic environments to create a "vision machine."

Ubiquitous Technologies for Emotion Recognition

Emotions play a very important role in how we think and behave. As such, the emotions we feel every day can compel us to act and influence the decisions and plans we make about our lives. Being able to measure, analyze, and better comprehend how or why our emotions may change is thus of much relevance to understand human behavior and its consequences. Despite the great efforts made in the past in the study of human emotions, it is only now with the advent of wearable, mobile, and ubiquitous technologies that we can aim at sensing and recognizing emotions, continuously and in the wild. This Special Issue aims at bringing together the latest experiences, findings, and developments regarding ubiquitous sensing, modeling, and recognition of human emotions.

Disruptions Encouraged: Ubiquitous Technologies and Teaching Complex Studio Processes

AbstractTeaching complex studio processes requires methods beyond linear step‐by‐step instruction and methods more consistent with authentic studio practices. Instructors have to be able to deconstruct their own decision‐making processes, processes that have become somewhat automatic through experience, and then use this insight to anticipate how learners with less experience might respond when presented with a similar series of creative dilemmas. The author outlines a project in which pre‐service art teachers in a secondary methods course employ technology‐mediated methods, i.e. graphic organisers, instructional videos and online learning guides, to better understand complex studio processes and how to teach those processes through ubiquitous technologies The qualities of this work became evident during the 2020 coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic and consequent school closures, when the pandemic presented teacher preparation programmes with a unique challenge in how to negotiate pre‐service teaching practicums in a semester where students did not have ready access to a secondary art classroom.

Mind the gap: State-of-the-art technologies and applications for EEG-based brain-computer interfaces.

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) provide bidirectional communication between the brain and output devices that translate user intent into function. Among the different brain imaging techniques used to operate BCIs, electroencephalography (EEG) constitutes the preferred method of choice, owing to its relative low cost, ease of use, high temporal resolution, and noninvasiveness. In recent years, significant progress in wearable technologies and computational intelligence has greatly enhanced the performance and capabilities of EEG-based BCIs (eBCIs) and propelled their migration out of the laboratory and into real-world environments. This rapid translation constitutes a paradigm shift in human–machine interaction that will deeply transform different industries in the near future, including healthcare and wellbeing, entertainment, security, education, and marketing. In this contribution, the state-of-the-art in wearable biosensing is reviewed, focusing on the development of novel electrode interfaces for long term and noninvasive EEG monitoring. Commercially available EEG platforms are surveyed, and a comparative analysis is presented based on the benefits and limitations they provide for eBCI development. Emerging applications in neuroscientific research and future trends related to the widespread implementation of eBCIs for medical and nonmedical uses are discussed. Finally, a commentary on the ethical, social, and legal concerns associated with this increasingly ubiquitous technology is provided, as well as general recommendations to address key issues related to mainstream consumer adoption.

Design of a Microcontroller Based Community Security System for Developing Nations

There can never be any time in the history of mankind that issue of community security secures the rapt attentions of all and sundries. It is believed in many security circles that the upsurge may not be unconnected from craves for materialism, ubiquitous social media technologies and a breakdown in citizen’s value systems. The design uses an AtMega328P based Microcontroller to develop the security system. It uses Photosensitive and Passive Infrared devices as sensors. Codes were written and compiled. Simulation was done using Proteus while implementation was achieved on breadboard. The system operates each time an intruder is sensed; with the presence of any burglar, a buzzer sounds an alarm and security lighting system switch on for five minutes. A 16 by 2 LCD unit displays the state of the machine. It is believed undoubtedly that the loud noise from the buzzer will keep awake the domestic buildings’ occupants and other security conscious neighbours thereby scaring away the unwanted guests.

Structure of the Region-Technology Network as a Driver for Technological Innovation.

Agglomeration and spillovers are key phenomena of technological innovation, driving regional economic growth. Here, we investigate these phenomena through technological outputs of over 4,000 regions spanning 42 countries, by analyzing more than 30 years of patent data (approximately 2.7 million patents) from the European Patent Office. We construct a bipartite network—based on revealed comparative advantage—linking geographic regions with areas of technology and compare its properties to those of artificial networks using a series of randomization strategies, to uncover the patterns of regional diversity and technological ubiquity. Our results show that the technological outputs of regions create nested patterns similar to those of ecological networks. These patterns suggest that regions need to dominate various technologies first (those allegedly less sophisticated), creating a diverse knowledge base, before subsequently developing less ubiquitous (and perhaps more sophisticated) technologies as a consequence of complementary knowledge that facilitates innovation. Finally, we create a map—the Patent Space Network—showing the interactions between technologies according to their regional presence. This network reveals how technology across industries co-appear to form several explicit clusters, which may aid future works on predicting technological innovation due to agglomeration and spillovers.

Feasibility of Cloud Based Smart Dual Fuel Switching System (SDFSS) of Hybrid Residential Space Heating Systems for Simultaneous Reduction of Energy Cost and Greenhouse Gas Emission

Through tests conducted at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s (TRCA) Archetype Sustainable Houses, a hybrid residential space heating system with a supervisory controller was monitored and studied to evaluate its performance and effectiveness for the heating season. A high efficiency natural gas furnace (NGF) and an electric air source heat pump (ASHP) were coupled together to meet the space heating demand of the house. This integrated system is called the cloud based Smart Dual Fuel Switching System (SDFSS) that considers time-of-use (TOU) pricing, fuel cost, short-term weather forecast, and equipment efficiencies and capacities. This multi-variable decision-making process defines an optimal schedule for the hybrid system to run more cost effectively. This paper analyses two separate SDFSSs. According to these analyses, the SDFSS systems showed lower operating cost with respect to the furnace or the ASHP system alone with various carbon tax (CT) levels from $0 to $250/tonne of CT with an increment of $10/tonne of CT that were simulated, along with a significant GHG emission reduction relative to the conventional heating systems. Furthermore, with these technologies, Canada’s residential sector could potentially meet Canada’s Paris Agreement goals. The SDFSS technology is a is flexible, user friendly, ubiquitous technology for the smooth transition from today’s natural gas dominated space heating system to the future’s low carbon infrastructure powered by a heat pump and renewable energy.

Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen

Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen