Recent advances in small inexpensive sensors, low-power processing, and activity modeling have enabled applications that use on-body sensing and machine learning to infer people's activities throughout everyday life. To address the growing rate of sedentary lifestyles, we have developed a system, UbiFit Garden, which uses these technologies and a personal, mobile display to encourage physical activity. We conducted a 3-week field trial in which 12 participants used the system and report findings focusing on their experiences with the sensing and activity inference. We discuss key implications for systems that use on-body sensing and activity inference to encourage physical activity.

Using a mobile device while moving limits attention and motor ability and can result in reduced performance. Mobile devices that can sense and adapt to contextual factors such as movement may reduce this performance deficit. We performed two studies evaluating the feasibility of walking user interfaces (WUIs) that adapt their layout when the user is moving. In a pilot study with 6 users, we evaluated the effects of different button sizes on performance when walking while using a portable music player. Results showed significant interactions between size and movement. In the second study, 29 users evaluated the performance of a WUI that dynamically changed button sizes as the user moved. Results show that our dynamic user interface performs at the level of its component static interfaces without any additional penalty due to adaptation. This work adds to our design knowledge about walking user interfaces and provides lessons learned in evaluating mobile devices while walking in public spaces.

Episodic memory exercises such as reminiscing and storytelling have been shown to provide therapeutic benefits for older adults by prolonging their ability to lead an independent lifestyle. In this paper, we describe a mobile reminiscence tool called Memory Karaoke, which facilitates episodic memory exercise through contextualized storytelling of meaningful experiences by using contextual cues such as location, time, and photos. We present results from two studies we conducted with Memory Karaoke to explore which contextual cues contribute to best exercising a person's episodic memory. Our findings suggest that while viewing photos do exercise episodic memory to some extent, additional contextual cues (e.g. location and time) can solicit a greater amount of episodic memory exercise. This suggests that Memory Karaoke's selective capture process and its ability to contextualize memories while users retell stories are two effective features which help it to support episodic memory use. These results, together with positive qualitative feedback, provide promising evidence for Memory Karaoke as a viable mobile alternative for helping older adults to exercise their episodic memory and, in turn, assist them in successfully "aging in place".

To evaluate ubiquitous computing technologies, which may be embedded in the environment, embedded in objects, worn, or carried by the user throughout everyday life, it is essential to use methods that accommodate the often unpredictable, real-world environments in which the technologies are used. This article discusses how we have adapted and applied traditional methods from psychology and human-computer interaction, such as Wizard of Oz and Experience Sampling, to be more amenable to the in situ evaluations of ubiquitous computing applications, particularly in the early stages of design. The way that ubiquitous computing technologies can facilitate the in situ collection of self-report data is also discussed. Although the focus is on ubiquitous computing applications and tools for their assessment, it is believed that the in situ evaluation tools that are proposed will be generally useful for field trials of other technology, applications, or formative studies that are concerned with collecting data in situ.

Overweight and obesity are a global epidemic, with over one billion overweight adults worldwide (300+ million of whom are obese). Obesity is linked to several serious health problems and medical conditions. Medical experts agree that physical activity is critical to maintaining fitness, reducing weight, and improving health, yet many people have difficulty increasing and maintaining physical activity in everyday life. Clinical studies have shown that health benefits can occur from simply increasing the number of steps one takes each day and that social support can motivate people to stay active. In this paper, we describe Houston, a prototype mobile phone application for encouraging activity by sharing step count with friends. We also present four design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity that we derived from a three-week long in situ pilot study that was conducted with women who wanted to increase their physical activity.

Location-based computing (LBC) is becoming increasing important in both industry and academia. A key challenge is the pervasive deployment of LBC technologies; to be effective they must run on a wide variety of client platforms, including laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones, so that location data can be acquired anywhere and accessed by any application. Moreover, as a nascent area, LBC is experiencing rapid innovation in sensing technologies, the positioning algorithms themselves, and the applications they support. Lastly, as a newcomer, LBC must integrate with existing communications and application technologies, including web browsers and location data interchange standard.This paper describes our experience in developing the Place Lab architecture, a widely used first-generation open source toolkit for client-side location sensing. Using a layered, pattern-based architecture, it supports modular development in any dimension of LBC, enabling the field to move forward more rapidly as these innovations are shared with the community as pluggable components. Our experience shows the benefits of domain-specific abstractions, and how we overcame high-level language constraints to support a wide array of platforms in this emerging space. We also describe our experience in re-engineering parts of the architecture based on the needs of the user community, including insights on software licensing issues.

Navigation services (e.g., in-car navigation systems and online mapping sites) compute routes between two locations to help users navigate. However, these routes may direct users along an unfamiliar path when a familiar path exists, or, conversely, may include redundant information that the user already knows. These overly complicated directions increase the cognitive load of the user, which may lead to a dangerous driving environment. Since the level of detail is user specific and depends on their familiarity with a region, routes need to be personalized. We have developed a system, called MyRoute, that reduces route complexity by creating user specific routes based on a priori knowledge of familiar routes and landmarks. MyRoute works by compressing well known steps into a single contextualized step and rerouting users along familiar routes.

Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. These new technologies present a difficult privacy tradeoff, as disclosing one's location to another person or service could be risky, yet valuable. To explore whether and what users are willing to disclose about their location to social relations, we conducted a three-phased formative study. Our results show that the most important factors were who was requesting, why the requester wanted the participant's location, and what level of detail would be most useful to the requester. After determining these, participants were typically willing to disclose either the most useful detail or nothing about their location. From our findings, we reflect on the decision process for location disclosure. With these results, we hope to influence the design of future location-enhanced applications and services.

The subArctic user interface toolkit has extensibility as one of its central goals. It seeks not only to supply a powerful library of reusable interactive objects, but also make it easy to create new, unusual, and highly customized interactions tailored to the needs of particular interfaces or task domains. A central part of this extensibility is the input model used by the toolkit. The subArctic input model provides standard reusable components that implement many typical input handling patterns for the programmer, allows inputs to be handled in very flexible ways, and allows the details of how inputs are handled to be modified to meet custom needs. This paper will consider the structure and operation of the subArctic input handling mechanism. It will demonstrate the flexibility of the system through a series of examples, illustrating techniques that it enables - many of which would be very difficult to implement in most toolkits.

The latest development in the concept of Mobile Presence within the mobile industry and HCI/UI community has promised yet another drastic change in the way we communicate with one other and lead our every-day lives. When Presence was limited to the Instant Messaging (IM) space, users could only know the status of others while they were at the computer (e.g. busy, away, etc). In contrast, mobile devices can be carried around at any time with their owner, so this discreet method of communicating is taking an interesting turn. Mobile Presence is much more ambitious: it could let others know your preferred method of communication based on your device's offerings (e.g. SMS, voice call, IM, video telephony, or even Push-to-Talk), alert you to where your friends are located at this moment, sense what mood others are in (thus whether it's appropriate to contact them at all), or even allow you to view a video clip broadcasting someone's profile before you attempt to contact them. In a perfect world, Presence will guarantee the most timely, convenient and appropriate communication at anytime, anywhere, to anyone in your "buddy list." But what's behind all these promises? Do you feel creepy being watched by others even if they are your friends and family? What if the government or any kind of "Big Brother" can easily sneak a look at presence information? Where do we see the fine line between the benefits of presence and invasion of privacy? How can we in the Mobile HCI community help shaping the future of Mobile Presence? In this panel, we discuss the factors to be considered for the design of mobile presence.

In this article, we describe the design process of Reno, a location-enhanced, mobile coordination tool and person finder. The design process included three field experiments: a formative Experience Sampling Method (ESM) study, a pilot deployment and an extended user study. These studies were targeted at the significant personal security, privacy and data protection concerns caused by this application. We distil this experience into a small set of guidelines for designers of social mobile applications and show how these guidelines can be applied to a different application, called Boise. These guidelines cover issues pertaining to personal boundary definition, control, deception and denial, and group vs. individual communication. We also report on lessons learned from our evaluation experience, which might help practitioners in designing novel mobile applications, including the choice and characterization of users for testing security and privacy features of designs, the length of learning curves and their effect on evaluation and the impact of peculiar deployment circumstances on the results of these finely tuned user studies.

Programmable Embodied Agents are portable, wireless, interactive devices embodying specific, differentiable, interactive characteristics. They take the form of identifiable characters who reside in the physical world and interact directly with users. They can act as an out-of-band communication channel between users, as proxies for system components or other users, or in a variety of other roles. Traditionally, research into such devices has been based on costly custom hardware. In this paper, we report on our explorations of the space of physical character-based interfaces built on recently available stock consumer hardware platforms, structured around an initial framework of applications.

In this paper we present a simple but general set of techniques for modifying output in a 2D user interface toolkit. We use a combination of simple subclassing, wrapping, and collusion between parent and output objects to produce arbitrary sets of composable output transformations. The techniques described here allow rich output effects to be added to most, if not all, existing interactors in an application, without the knowledge of the interactors themselves. This paper explains how the approach works, discusses a number of example effects that have been built, and describes how the techniques presented here could be extended to work with other toolkits. We address issues of input by examining a number of extensions to the toolkit input subsystem to accommodate transformed graphical output. Our approach uses a set of "hooks" to undo output transformations when input is to be dispatched. KEYWORDS: User Interface Toolkits, Output, Rendering, Interactors, Drawing Effects. INTRODUCTION ...

The visual and event driven nature of modem user interfaces, while a boon to users, can also make them more difficult to debug than conventional programs.This is because only the very surface representation of interactive objects -their final visual appearance -is visible to the programmer on the screen.The remaining "programming details" of the object remain hidden.If the appearance or behavior of an object is incorrect, often few clues are visible to indicate the cause.One must usually turn to text oriented debugging techniques (debuggers or simply print statements) which are separate from the interface, and often cumbersome to use with event-driven control flow.This paper describes a new class of techniques designed to aid in the debugging of user interfaces by making more of the invisible, visible.This class of techniques: debugging lenses, makes use of transparent lens interaction techniques to show debugging information.It is designed to work in situ -in the context of a running interface, without stopping or interfering with that interface.-Thispaper describes and motivates the class of techniques, gives a number of specific examples of debugging lenses, and ,describes their implementation in' the subArctic user interface toolkit.

Article Free Access Share on Supporting dynamic downloadable appearances in an extensible user interface toolkit Authors: Scott E. Hudson Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Ian Smith Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, and College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, and College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GeorgiaView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '97: Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyOctober 1997 Pages 159–168https://doi.org/10.1145/263407.263539Published:01 October 1997Publication History 12citation443DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations12Total Downloads443Last 12 Months29Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This paper describes a fundamental dual tradeoff that occurs in systems supporting awareness for distributed work groups, and presents several specific new techniques which illustrate good compromise points within this tradeoff space. This dual tradeoff is between privacy and awareness, and between awareness and disturbance. Simply stated, the more information about oneself that leaves your work area, the more potential for awareness of you exists for your colleagues. Unfortunately, this also represents the greatest potential for intrusion on your privacy. Similarly, the more information that is received about the activities of colleagues, the more potential awareness we have of them. However, at the same time, the more information we receive, the greater the chance that the information will become a disturbance to our normal work. This dual tradeoff seems to be a fundamental one. However, by carefully examining awareness problems in the light of this tradeoff it is possible to devise techniques which expose new points in the design space. These new points provide different types and quantities of information so that awareness can be achieved without invading the privacy of the sender, or creating a disturbance for the receiver. This paper presents four such techniques, each based on a careful selection of the information transmitted.

Constraint systems have been used for some time to implement various components of a user interface.High level support for flexible screen layou~t has been among the more important uses; layout constraints in a user interface toolkit provide a declarative mechanism for controlling the size and position of objects in an interactive display, along with an efficient update mechanism for maintaining display layouts automatically in the face of dynamic changes.This paper describes a new technique for implementing one-way layout constraints which overcomes a substantial limitation of previous systems.In particular, it allows constraints to be implemented in an extremely small amount of space -as little as 17 bits per constraint and still maintain the level of performance needed for good interactive response.These ultralightweight constraints, while not handling all (cases, cover most relationships used for layout, and allow conventional constraints to be applied when needed.This paper will consider both a general technique for ultra-lightweight layout constraints and its specific implementation in a new JavaTM-basecl user interface toolkit.

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No abstract available.

No abstract available.