The population of older adults relative to the total population is rising rapidly worldwide, and this contributes to an increased burden on healthcare systems. Older adults with complex needs are often limited in their ability to perform basic daily activities, and they may require task-specific supports. With continuous health-monitoring systems, the ability to recognize people's activities in their homes can enable automated assisted living systems, caregivers and clinicians to provide suitable adaptive care. With the advent of miniaturized sensing technology, which can be wearable, it is now possible to collect and store data on different aspects of human movement under realistic independent living conditions.In our most recent Smart Condo™ study, twenty-six participants spent one two-hour session in the one-bedroom living environment, either alone or in pairs, and performed a scripted protocol of activities of daily living. Twelve of these participants wore the commercial smart eyewear device JINS MEME, which collected electrooculography, accelerometer and gyroscope data throughout their sessions. In this paper, we describe our method for offline classification of the participants' activities. We show that this method yields equal or better results with a variety of activities compared to approaches that involve more restrictive wearable device setups. The results demonstrate the suitability of JINS MEME for recognition of activities of daily living and identify limitations associated with the current model.

Understanding gaming motivations is important given the growing trend of incorporating game-based mechanisms in non-gaming applications. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of an online gaming motivations scale based on a 3-factor model. Data from 2,071 US participants and 645 Hong Kong and Taiwan participants is used to provide a cross-cultural validation of the developed scale. Analysis of actual in-game behavioral metrics is also provided to demonstrate predictive validity of the scale.

Examining how in-game behavior preferences map onto real world demographics provides important empirically-derived insights into how to match game-based mechanisms to target demographic segments. Using behavioral and demographic data from 1,037 World of Warcraft players, we use multiple regressions to provide this mapping. Given current interest in "gamifying" applications, we believe these findings are relevant for both gaming and non-gaming research.

Buying virtual currencies with real money from a third-party often violates the terms of use of online games. This study quantitatively investigates players who buy in-game gold from a third-party in World of Warcraft. A cross-cultural survey dataset of 2865 players reveals that differences between Asian and Western players are negligible compared to differences across genders, job categories, and play motivations. Our findings have implications for the design and study of interactions between players and virtual currencies.

We studied the extent to which time-on-task is correlated with perception of usability for people who are familiar with a phone model and for those who are not. Our controlled experiment, conducted in Japan, correlated subjective usability assessments with time-on-task for expert and novice users on three different mobile phone models. We found that the correlation between perceived usability and time-on-task is stronger when participants are more familiar with the phone model. While not significant when initially inspecting a new phone model, a negative correlation between time-on-task and perceived usability becomes significant with as little as an hour's time doing tasks on the unfamiliar phone. This suggests that designing the UI to make time-on-task as short as possible may not have much effect on the purchase decision, but as experience increases, it may increase the loyalty of existing users.

Personality inference can be used for dynamic personalization of content or system customization. In this study, we examined whether and how personality is expressed in Virtual Worlds (VWs). Survey data from 1,040 World of Warcraft players containing demographic and personality variables was paired with their VW behavioral metrics over a four-month period. Many behavioral cues in VWs were found to be related to personality. For example, Extraverts prefer group activities over solo activities. We also found that these behavioral indicators can be used to infer a player's personality.

Studies in the Proteus Effect have shown that users conform to stereotypes associated with their avatar's appearance. In this study, we used longitudinal behavioral data from 1,040 users in a virtual world to examine the behavioral outcome of conflicting gender cues between user and avatar. We found that virtual gender had a significant effect on in-game behaviors for both healing and player-vs-player activity.

We analyze mechanisms of player retention and commitment in massively multiplayer online games. Our ground assumptions on player retention are based on a marketing model of customer retention and commitment. To measure the influence of gameplay, in-game sociality, and real-life status on player commitment, we use the following metrics: weekly play time, stop rate and number of years respondents have been playing the game. The cross-cultural sample is composed of 2865 World of Warcraft players from North-America, Europe, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong who completed an online questionnaire. We differentiate players in terms of demographic categories including age, region, gender and marital status.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting complex social interactions among over 12 million players. While the "lone gamer" stereotype still persists, there is little data on gaming with other players with whom one shares a "real life" (RL) social relationship. Our work departs from previous studies in focusing on the hybrid of online and offline sociality, rather than only one or the other. We provide perhaps the first systematic quantitative characterization of MMO play with RL friends, family and other social connections. A large online survey collected data from 2865 WoW players from the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The findings overwhelmingly support the view that playing WoW may often serve to enhance, not diminish, RL social interactions. In addition, we present benchmark results on demographics and WoW play practices in world regions previously not studied. The consistency of the patterns of findings across East/West and gender groupings suggests fascinating issues for further research.

In this paper we investigate effects of the content of interruptions and of the time of interruption delivery on mobile phones. We review related work and report on a naturalistic quasi-experiment using experience-sampling that showed that the receptivity to an interruption is influenced by its content rather than by its time of delivery in the employed modality of delivery - SMS. We also examined the underlying variables that increase the perceived quality of content and found that the factors interest, entertainment, relevance and actionability influence people's receptivity significantly. Our findings inform system design that seeks to provide context-sensitive information or to predict interruptibility and suggest the consideration of receptivity as an extension to the way we think and reason about interruptibility.

An increasingly large number of users connect to virtual worlds on a regular basis to conduct activities ranging from gaming to business meetings. In all these worlds, users project themselves into the environment via an avatar: a 3D body which they control and whose appearance is often customizable. However, considering the prevalence of this form of embodiment, there is a surprising lack of data about how and why users customize their avatar, as well as how easy and satisfying the existing avatar creation tools are. In this paper, we report on a study investigating these issues through a questionnaire administered to more than a hundred users of three virtual worlds offering widely different avatar creation and customization systems (Maple Story, World of Warcraft, and Second Life). We illustrate the often-surprising choices users make when creating their digital representation and discuss the impact of our findings for the design of future avatar creation systems.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) can be fascinating laboratories to observe group dynamics online. In particular, players must form persistent associations or "guilds" to coordinate their actions and accomplish the games' toughest objectives. Managing a guild, however, is notoriously difficult and many do not survive very long. In this paper, we examine some of the factors that could explain the success or failure of a game guild based on more than a year of data collected from five World of Warcraft servers. Our focus is on structural properties of these groups, as represented by their social networks and other variables. We use this data to discuss what games can teach us about group dynamics online and, in particular, what tools and techniques could be used to better support gaming communities.

The use of embodied agents, defined as visual human-like representations accompanying a computer interface, is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from educational software to advertisements. In the current work, we assimilate previous empirical studies which compare interfaces with visually embodied agents to interfaces without agents, both using an informal, descriptive technique based on experimental results (46 studies) as well as a formal statistical meta-analysis (25 studies). Results revealed significantly larger effect sizes when analyzing subjective responses (i.e., questionnaire ratings, interviews) than when analyzing behavioral responses such as task performance and memory. Furthermore, the effects of adding an agent to an interface are larger than the effects of animating an agent to behave more realistically. However, the overall effect sizes were quite small (e.g., across studies, adding a face to an interface only explains approximately 2.5% of the variance in results). We discuss the implications for both designers building interfaces as well as social scientists designing experiments to evaluate those interfaces.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) routinely attract millions of players but little empirical data is available to assess their players' social experiences. In this paper, we use longitudinal data collected directly from the game to examine play and grouping patterns in one of the largest MMOGs: World of Warcraft. Our observations show that the prevalence and extent of social activities in MMOGs might have been previously over-estimated, and that gaming communities face important challenges affecting their cohesion and eventual longevity. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of future games and other online social spaces.