Mobile Diet Diary

Overweight is becoming a severe problem, especially for older adults. In the Netherlands, half of the population above 45 is suffering from overweight. Besides diminishing people’s quality of life, it can lead to lifestyle related diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Overweight older adults can benefit form eHealth. Information and Communication Technology in the medical domain can assist self-care activities, including increasing lifestyle knowledge and medical adherence. In addition, with the upcoming use of mobile devices, assistance can be offered anytime and anywhere.

However, there is little research on the usability of mobile devices for older adults. Due to their reduced sensory and cognitive abilities, older adults experienced problems with interacting with innovative technology, such as mobile applications. In addition, the reduction of abilities varies from user to user. To serve this user group adequately, it is essential to apply design guidelines for older adults and acknowledge the variety of user requirements. Research has shown that multimodal interaction can increase usability, different modalities can complement each other, and different modalities are more suitable in different contexts.

Following the eHealth concept and research on technology for older adults, we designed a multimodal mobile diet diary for older adults’ self-care. In the diary, users can log their dietary activities. Based on the entries, the diary provides feedback on how maintaining a healthy diet in general and gives user specific indication which consumed nutrition is healthy or unhealthy. An example of general feedback is: “Did you know that proteins support the maintenance of bones and muscles?” An example of user specific feedback is: ”You have eaten too many fats today. Try to eat more products that contain less fat, such as fruit and vegetables.” The multimodal diary feedback is personalized, i.e., the user can set the feedback modality (text, graphics and speech, or a combination) to his or her liking and context.

During a study at TNO Experience Lab, a smart home environment, we evaluated the diet diary with 32 older men and women (55 – 65). The diary proved usable and educational. In conclusion, we designed a usable personalized mobile diet diary that supports overweight older adults with self-care.

Keywords: Older adults, Mobile lifestyle diary, Self-care

Target user group: Dutch overweight older adults

Contact: Mirosalv Bojic, Olivier Blanson Henkemans, Mark Neerincx, Charles van der Mast & Jasper Lindenberg (TU Delft / TNO)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Windows Mobile

Dependencies:

• Windows Mobile 5.0 or later
• 320x240 screen resolution
• .NET Compact Framework 2.0 redistributable installed (download here)
• 25 MB of free space

IYOUIT

IYOUIT is a mobile application that allows users to automatically collect context information centered on places they visit and people they meet. The application aims at making it easy to automatically collected such data on a standard phone and facilitates an instant and light-hearted sharing of personal experiences within communities and rich contextual tagging for use in everyday life.

IYOUIT is shaped towards the support of four target domains: Share (community-based context sharing), Life (life support through context-aware guidance), Blog (enhanced contextual blogging) and Play (playful experience of context-awareness in games). The application is based on its own context management framework to host various services and data sources. Framework components, for instance, track the positions of users via GPS and cellular information and identify places of interest over time. Further context sources include the whereabouts of buddies, scanned Bluetooth or WLAN beacons, local weather, photos, sounds, observed products, books or messages.

All data collected by IYOUIT is aggregated into a wealth of context information and made accessible to the user on the Web and on the mobile phone. For selected contextual sources, value is added through the transformation of quantitative context information into qualitative statements about a user’s given situation. By hooking up to Web2.0 services like Flickr and Twitter, the application allows the user to share personal context with others online. Sharing can be instant, by posting single data items to such services, or through the aggregated contextual experience in potentially lifelong online blogs.

IYOUIT has been developed as a prototype by DoCoMo Euro-Labs in Munich together with the Dutch Telematica Instituut in a joint research project on platform support for Context Awareness in mobile services and applications. The prototype suite of services is made available in a mobile client for all Nokia Series-60 phones, its own Web portal as well as through the integration with the abovementioned 3rd party Web2.0 services Flickr and Twitter. The application is free of charge and designed to be used seamlessly 24/7.

During the 6-month trial period of the Mobile Experience of MobileHCI’08 and beyond, user support will be provided.

Keywords: Context Awareness, Mobile Blogging, Web 2.0

Target user group: IYOUIT targets at everyone attracted by mobile Web2.0 services and the wish to instantly share personal context data in easy and light-hearted ways.

Contact: Matthias Wagner (DoCoMo Communications Laboratories Europe)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Nokia Series-60 3rd edition
• Nokia Series-60 2nd edition

Dependencies: No additional hardware or installations required. GPS is nice to have, but not mandatory.

Mobile Touch Stratego

Mobile Touch Stratego is a massive real-life multiplayer mobile team game inspired by the classic Stratego board game. The object is to conquer the enemy flag. The rules are as for Stratego: miner defuses bomb, spy exposes marshall, etcetera.

Each player has a smartphone which displays his role. Enemy players are attacked by tapping smartphones together using the novel sound-based patent-pending "Mobile Touch" technology. Players can confuse the enemy by switching roles with team mates.

This game means running around with other kids and having a lot of fun. Mobile gaming has never been as physically interactive as this!

Keywords: Stratego, Active, Team play

Target user group: Groups of children of the age 8-12 years that are playing outside under adult supervision. Typical examples are groups of boy scouts or a school class on camp.

Contact: Victor Klos (TNO)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Windows Mobile Pocket PC

Dependencies:

• Warning: Mobile Touch Stratego is NOT A CASUAL GAME!!!!
• The game requires Windows Mobile pocket PC phone devices with internet access
• A minimum of six devices is needed to demonstrate the game play
• A minimum of ten devices and players are needed to actually play the game
• Given the team-against-team nature of the game, it can not be played on a stand-alone device

Toolkit for open Human Computer Interaction in Ambient Computing Environments

Traditional computer applications understand mouse and keyboard input for controlling behavior of the system. Wireless technology allows the same devices for distant control. The use of wireless mouse and keyboard for remote control of computer applications is uncomfortable and inconvenient. Depending on goal, task and situation of the user one could also envision controlling applications with other input devices that fit better to the user’s personal attributes, in particular in ambient computing environments. By principle, software applications react on input commands independent of the device being used to create the command. Distinctly defining the meaning of the input and enabling the user to anticipate the triggered reaction of the computer application is more important than the concrete device.

Toolkit for device-independent interaction To support developers to build own solutions we deliver a toolset enabling them to implement interactive applications. Our toolkit comprises all necessary components for the definition of input events to be processed, the communication between input devices and application hosts, and the attachment of input listeners to services on the server. For realisation, the tools translate the specification of remote input into Java programming code and compiled byte code.

It contains five tools:

• Modelling: Graphical tool for definition of exchanged data.
• Coding: Preview and export of programming code for Java-server and client in Java MicroEdition.
• Building: Compiling and export of byte-code.
• Testing: Running Java-server inside the toolkit. Run JavaME byte-code of clients inside the emulator of Sun’s Wireless Toolkit.
• Deploying: Create binaries, libraries and scripts for deployment.

A solution built with the toolkit, for example to use a mobile device as input device to an ambient services, is based on a combination of your specific application logic, your realisation of remote user interface, and our software libraries for the device connection. The software transmits input commands over wireless networks (WLAN). Incoming events are distributed to selected processing applications, or can be integrated into the local event queue of the target operating system. For the realisation we use an approach for distributed system development based on adapted web service technology. With this approach, we precisely distinguish between client and server parts of the system. On both sides we carefully avoid installation of large backend systems. We took particular care that our approach does not require the installation and maintenance of a complete web server on the server side.

Keywords: User Interface Development, Remote Interaction in Ambient Computing Environments, Remote Interaction Devices

Target user group: System-Developers, Interaction-Designers, Programmers, Distributors

Contact: Andreas Lorenz (Fraunhofer Institute Applied Information Technology, St. Augustin, Germany)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Java 1.5 or higher

Dependencies:

• JDK required for building and testing
• Sun’s Wireless Toolkit required for building and emulating JavaME byte-code
• Java MIDP required on the mobile device, (Remark: poor JavaME support of some Windows Mobile based devices)
• Wireless-LAN support required
• Contains software released under Apache License Version 2.0
• Contains software released under GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
• Contains software released under the terms of the MIT X11 license.
• Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files in the context of Mobile Experiences track of MobileHCI 2008. Commercial use of this software, parts of this software, software created with this software, or parts of software created with this software requires written permission.

LocoMash

LocoMash is a mobile mass observation system to allow groups of individuals equipped with mobile camera phones and an internal or external GPS to create real time spatial and temporal photographic mash-ups around particular events or places. Its J2ME application that allows users to take photographs then add their own titles or text for either immediate or later up-load. The location of the event is zoned prior to the event to later spatial filtering of content generated at a particular location.

Keywords: none

Target user group: not specified

Contact: Paul Coulton and Will Bamford (Lancaster University, UK)

Supported devices and platforms:

• any mobile phone

Dependencies:

• MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.0 (or better)
• Support for the location JSR 179 with either internal or external GPS

M3Dcam

Essentially it’s a J2ME application that allows you to create your own mobile 3D anaglyph photos using the mobile phone camera by taking two slightly offset pictures with the result separated into red and cyan colour planes. The software allows you to then adjust the relationship between the red and cyan planes so you can get the best image to either view on your phone or up-loaded to the site.

Of course you will need a pair of 3D glasses to appreciate the results but they are widely available across the internet for a negligible amount.

Keywords: none

Target user group: not specified

Contact: Paul Coulton and Will Bamford (Lancaster University, UK)

Supported devices and platforms:

• any mobile phone

Dependencies:

• MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.0 (or better)
• Allowing camera access through J2ME

Mirage

Mirage Money is the first demonstration of the capabilities the S60 MIRAGE-X API. The game is a flight-simulation with the phone screen being the window to the virtual, or augmented, world. The mission of the player is to ‘fly’ around in the 3-D world to collect the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on screen. The game is controlled by simply moving the phone in the required direction.

Keywords: none

Target user group: not specified

Contact: Paul Coulton and Fadi Chehimi (Lancaster University, UK)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Symbian S60 (currently only compatible with N95, N95-8G, and N82)

Dependencies:

• Accelerometer

BluePlanner

BluePlanner is a java application that exploits opportunistic communication technologies for enabling a seamless content distribution in mobile environments. By leveraging on Bluetooth as the communication medium, and by relying on the physical proximity of users for exchanging data, BluePlanner enables a selective sharing of information which is tightly coupled with users’ social habits and behavior. Such data sharing process is transparent to the end-user, and is driven solely by the interests inserted into the application. Such an approach enables complex forms of social interactions, where the personal handheld device represents the key to transparently get to know people or events “socially related” to you. This is expected to partially fill the gap existing between online social networking tools (e.g., facebook) and real world life.

In the proposed mobile experience, we plan to evaluate the users’ perception and acceptance of opportunistic communication technologies in the case of a conference environment. BluePlanner will be used to support attendees during the MobileHCI conference, facilitating the social interaction among themselves and their interaction with the conference organizers.

Before mobileHCI, participating users will be asked to express their interests among predefined list of categories through the BluePlanner website. This will include conference-related topics (e.g., research areas) as well as social interests (e.g., food, music). As a result, users will receive a version of the BluePlanner software already pre-configured with their profile, and specifically customized for their personal handheld device.

During mobileHCI, the users will carry their mobile device and receive content depending on the settings inserted into the application. As an example, users can (i) create a Business Card and share it over the BluePlanner network, (ii) organize and share their personalized agenda (iii) create new social or business events to be shared with other attendees. From the organizers perspective, BluePlanner will provide the possibility to transparently interact with participants, advertising upcoming events, commercial information, or even asking attendees a feedback on the conference itself. This will be enabled through a content distribution point which will be used for allowing organizers to easily inject/gather content into/from the opportunistic content distribution network.

After mobileHCI, the evaluation of the users experience will begin. This will consist of several parts. On the one hand, we will evaluate users interactions in terms of data diffusion process. With this respect we will evaluate the circulation of contents as a consequence of users’ participation and expressed interests. At the same time, we will analyze how the injected content can affect users’ behavior during the event. Finally, we will use questionnaires for assessing the ultimate users’ perception of the proposed technologies.

Keywords: Opportunistic data sharing, Conference planner, Social Networking

Target user group: Mobile HCI attendees are the target user group. The software is expected to be configured before the event, and utilized during the conference itself.

Contact: Iacopo Carreras, Oscar Mayora and David Tacconi (CREATE-NET)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Windows Mobile
• Symbian S40
• Symbian S60

Tested on Nokia devices N-series E-series, HTC, E28

Dependencies:

• JSR82 (Bluetooth java APIs)

E3, The emotional experience evaluator

With the quality of the user experience now being at the forefront of research in the field of HCI, this application has been created to aid product developers in measuring the affective experiences elicited by their products. The application itself is intended for use by those users who participate in the beta testing of new digital products. Using this application, a user is able to make an appraisal of their emotional encounters with a digital product and to convey this information back to the developers. When using the application, the user is presented with a small number of questions, from which an emotional profile will be created. This profile will be displayed to the user, and will enable developers to target specific emotional outcomes in their designs. This tool is currently a work in progress and through its use at MobileHCI 2008 we hope to gain valuable test data that will further the development of the application along the strands of user interface and emotion processing via techniques of artificial intelligence.

Keywords: Emotion Sampling, Affective Experiences, Appraisal Theory

Target user group: Those users who actively participate in beta testing new digital products.

Contact: Oliver M. Williams (Bournemouth University)

Supported devices and platforms:

• Application should work on any mobile device with a web browser and basic CSS support.

Dependencies:

• A web browser with connection to the internet is required.