Reminiscence is known to play an important part in helping to mitigate the effects of dementia. Within the HCI community, work has typically focused on supporting reminiscence at an individual or social level but less attention has been given to supporting reminiscence in residential care settings. This lack of research became particularly apparent during the COVID pandemic when traditional forms of reminiscence involving physical artefacts and face-to-face interactions became especially challenging. In this paper we report on the design, development and evaluation of a reminiscence system, deployed in a residential care home over a two-year-period that included the pandemic. Mnemosyne comprises a pervasive display network and a browser-based application whose adoption and use we explored using a mixed methods approach. Our findings offer insights that will help shape the development and evaluation of future systems, particularly those that use pervasive displays to support unsupervised reminiscence.

Smart Donations is a blockchain-based platform that offers users ‘contracts’ that donate funds to certain causes in response to real-world events e.g., whenever an earthquake is detected or an activist tweets about refugees. We designed Smart donations with Oxfam Australia, trialled it for 8-weeks with 86 people, recorded platform analytics and qualitatively analysed questionnaires and interviews about user experiences. Temporal qualities emerge when automation enforces conditions that contributed to participants’ awareness of events that are usually unconscious, and senses of immediacy in contributing to crisis response and ongoing involvement in situations far-away while awaiting conditions to be met. We suggest data driven automation can reveal diverse temporal registers, in real-world phenomena, sociality, morality and everyday life, which contributes to experiencing a ‘right time’ to donate that is not limited to productivity or efficiency. Thus, we recommend a sensitivity to right time in designing for multiple temporalities in FinTech more generally.

Widespread sensing devices enable a world in which physical spaces become personalised in the presence of mobile users. An important example of such personalisation is the use of pervasive displays to show content that matches the requirements of proximate viewers. Despite prior work on prototype systems that use mobile devices to personalise displays, no significant attempts to trial such systems have been carried out. In this article, we report on our experiences of designing, developing and operating the world’s first comprehensive display personalisation service for mobile users. Through a set of rigorous quantitative measures and 11 potential user/stakeholder interviews, we demonstrate the success of the platform in realising display personalisation, and offer a series of reflections to inform the design of future systems.

Public interactive displays (PID) are a promising technology for providing information and collecting feedback in public spaces. Research on PIDs has shown that, like all public displays, their efficacy is reduced by display blindness. Rather than increase the visual attention-grabbing nature of PIDs, we propose that additional understanding is required around how and when these displays are able to offer value to users. We tackle this through a systematic analysis of PID studies published in the literature, which led to 9 aspects of value across 4 factors: people, location, community, and time. We discuss the identified aspects and their utility for the design of PIDs through a review of our own deployments carried out by 4 different labs across 5 countries. We conclude with a set of recommendations for identifying and optimising the intended value of future PIDs.

Beside reminiscing, the increasing cognitive decline in dementia can also be addressed through sensory stimulation allowing the immediate, nonverbal engagement with the world through one's senses. Much HCI work has prioritized cognitive stimulation for reminiscing or personhood often on small screens, while less research has explored sensory stimulation like the one enabled by large displays. We describe a year-long deployment in a residential care home of a wall-sized display, and explored its domestication through 24 contextual interviews. Findings indicate strong engagement and attachment to the display which has inspired four psychosocial interventions using online generic content. We discuss the value of these findings for personhood through residents' exercise of choices, the tension between generic/personal content and its public/private use, the importance of participatory research approach to domestication, and the infrastructure-based prototype, illustrated by the DementiaWall and its generative quality.

This paper reports on the first year of a three-year-long co-creation project with older adults. We focus our analysis on one particular workshop in which participants stopped designing and began to think about promoting the app we were co-creating. The workshop proved uniquely important for examining assumptions we had made about how and why the co-creation process would be successful. This paper concedes flaws in these assumptions and in the execution of the methodology as a way of illuminating dynamics that act on research projects in ways that are antithetical to effective co-creation. Reporting on the unexpected results of our participant engagements, we reveal new insights into the challenges in executing co-creation methodology.

This paper reports on a co-speculative interview study with charitable donors to explore the future of programmable, conditional and data-driven donations. Responding to the rapid emergence of blockchain-based and AI-supported financial technologies, we specifically examine the potential of automated, third-party 'escrows', where donations are held before they are released or returned based on specified rules and conditions. To explore this we conducted pilot workshops with 9 participants and an interview study in which 14 further participants were asked about their experiences of donating money, and invited to co-speculate on a service for programmable giving. The study elicited how data-driven conditionality and automation could be leveraged to create novel donor experiences, however also illustrated the inherent tensions and challenges involved in giving programmatically. Reflecting on these findings, our paper contributes implications both for the design of programmable aid platforms, and the design of escrow-based financial services in general.

Obtaining meaningful user consent is increasingly problematic in a world of numerous, heterogeneous digital services. Current approaches (e.g. agreeing to Terms and Conditions) are rooted in the idea of individual control despite growing evidence that users do not (or cannot) exercise such control in informed ways. We consider an alternative approach whereby users can opt to delegate consent decisions to an ecosystem of third-parties including friends, experts, groups and AI entities. We present the results of a study that used a technology probe at a large festival to explore initial public responses to this reframing -- focusing on when and to whom users would delegate such decisions. The results reveal substantial public interest in delegating consent and identify differing preferences depending on the privacy context, highlighting the need for alternative decision mechanisms beyond the current focus on individual choice.

A plethora of sensors embedded in wearable, mobile, and infrastructure devices allow us to seamlessly capture large parts of our daily activities and experiences. It is not hard to imagine that such data could be used to support human memory in the form of automatically generated memory cues, e.g., images, that help us remember past events. Such a vision of pervasive "memory-augmentation systems", however, comes with significant privacy and security implications, chief among them the threat of memory manipulation: without strong guarantees about the provenance of captured data, attackers would be able to manipulate our memories by deliberately injecting, removing, or modifying captured data. This work introduces this novel threat of human memory manipulation in memory augmentation systems. We then present a practical approach that addresses key memory manipulation threats by securing the captured memory streams. Finally we report evaluation results on a prototypical secure camera platform that we built.

In this paper we present fieldwork findings from engagements with a cooperative group of strategic and operations transport maintainers, responsible for the maintenance of drainage infrastructure to mitigate the risk and impact of flooding on the network. Through transport maintainer perspectives from rail and highways sectors, we focus on developing an understanding of work-practices in the context of transport surface-water management, and how the recent acceleration towards 'data-driven' technologies in support of maintenance intervention decision-making (i.e. the work of coordinating the cleaning of drainage) is integrated and impacting on current work-practice. Furthermore, we document and consider how maintainers perceive the potential role of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and highlight emerging opportunities and tensions that may arise ahead of its future design and implementation.

Road congestion, air pollution and sustainability are increasingly important in major cities. We look to understand how last-mile deliveries in the parcel sector are impacting our roads. Using formative field work and quantitative analysis of consignment manifests and location data, we identify how the effectiveness of life-style couriers is contributing to both environmental and non-environmental externalities. This paper presents an analysis of delivery performances and practices in last-mile logistics in central London, quantifying the impacts differing levels of experience have on overall round efficiency. We identify eleven key opportunities for technological support for last-mile parcel deliveries that could contribute to both driver effectiveness and sustainability. We finish by examining how HCI can lead to improved environmental and social justice by re-considering and realizing future collaborative visions in last-mile logistics.

Users often need to authenticate at situated displays in order to, for example, make purchases, access sensitive information, or confirm an identity. However, the exposure of interactions in public spaces introduces a large attack surface (e.g., observation, smudge or thermal attacks). A plethora of authentication models and input modalities that aim at disguising users' input has been presented in the past. However, a comprehensive analysis on the requirements for secure and usable authentication on public displays is still missing. This work presents 13 design considerations suitable to inform practitioners and researchers during the development process of authentication systems for situated displays in public spaces. It draws on a comprehensive analysis of prior literature and subsequent discussion with five experts in the fields of pervasive displays, human-computer-interaction and usable security.

Reviewing lifelogging data has been proposed as a useful tool to support human memory. However, the sheer volume of data (particularly images) that can be captured by modern lifelogging systems makes the selection and presentation of material for review a challenging task. We present the results of a five-week user study involving 16 participants and over 69,000 images that explores both individual requirements for video summaries and the differences in cognitive load, user experience, memory experience, and recall experience between review using video summarisations and non-summary review techniques. Our results can be used to inform the design of future lifelogging data summarisation systems for memory augmentation.

There is a widespread belief that pervasive technologies will encourage and facilitate partnerships between citizens and civic authorities, enabling individuals to play a greater role in civic planning, service delivery and infrastructure management. However, at present sustained use and perceived value of civic engagement technologies remains low because the design space is poorly understood by system developers who focus almost exclusively on empowering citizens rather than adopting an informed, inclusive approach that addresses the needs of both citizens and civic authorities, and helps establish trusted relationships between these different stakeholders. We report on an extensive study of civic engagement in the domain of public infrastructure maintenance and provide insights into the civic management processes to support future design of trusted civic engagement interactions.

As in all collaborative work, trust is a vital ingredient of successful computer supported cooperative work, yet there is little in the way of design principles to help practitioners develop systems that foster trust. To address this gap, we present a set of design patterns, based on our experience designing systems with the explicit intention of increasing trust between stakeholders. We contextualize these patterns by describing our own learning process, from the development, testing and refinement of a trust model, to our realization that the insights we gained along the way were most usefully expressed through design patterns. In addition to a set of patterns for trust, this paper seeks to demonstrate of the value of patterns as a means of communicating the nuances revealed through ethnographic investigation.

There is increasing interest in using digital signage to deliver highly personalised content. However, display personalization presents a number of architectural design challenges in particular, how best to provide personalisation without unduly compromising viewers' privacy. While previous research has focused on understanding specific elements of the overall vision, our work presents details of the first significant attempt at a system that integrates future pervasive display networks and mobile devices to support display personalisation. We describe a series of usage models and design goals for display personalisation and then present Tacita, a system that supports these models and goals. Our architecture includes mobile, display and cloud-based elements and provides comprehensive personalisation features while preventing the creation of user profiles within the display infrastructure, thus helping to preserve users' privacy. An initial evaluation of our prototype implementation of the architecture is also included and demonstrates the viability of the Tacita approach.

Driven by changes in working practices and technology trends, organizations are increasingly reliant on mobile workers and the data they capture. However, while significant work has been carried out on increasing the usability of mobile devices and applications, little attention has been paid to the quality of data captured by mobile workers. If this data is inaccurate or untrustworthy, serious consequences can ensue. In this paper we study a system targeted at mobile workers in the highways sector that is deliberately designed to increase the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data collected. The resulting Inspections application has been very positively received by workers and we present lessons that we believe can be applied to other applications of this type.

As the cost of display hardware falls so the number of public display networks being deployed is increasing rapidly. While these networks have traditionally taken the form of digital signage used for advertising and information there is increasing interest in the vision of "open display networks" [8]. A key component of any open display network is an effective channel for disseminating applications created by third-parties and recent research has proposed a display-oriented "application store" as one such channel [5]. In this paper we present a critical analysis of the requirements and design of display application stores -- providing insights designed to help the implementers of future application stores.

This paper documents a programme of research to explore the development of mobile social travel information systems, where dynamic travel information is produced by travellers themselves and distributed within communities united by similar travel patterns and everyday activities. The resulting system, called OurTravel, was the subject of a series of real-world trials involving three diverse physical communities: a rural village, a group of urban office workers and the attendees of a contemporary arts festival. We describe the design and implementation of the OurTravel system, our experiences of running these trials and the insights gained.

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing enables new multimedia applications that are both resource-intensive and interaction-intensive. For these applications, end-to-end network bandwidth and latency matter greatly when cloud resources are used to augment the computational power and battery life of a mobile device. We first present quantitative evidence that this crucial design consideration to meet interactive performance criteria limits data center consolidation. We then describe an architectural solution that is a seamless extension of today's cloud computing infrastructure.

No abstract available.

There are a large number of projects that aim to use mobile computing technologies to help address transport related issues such as proving better travel information. These projects can often benefit from experience sampling in which mobile devices are used to collect in-situ user feedback on either the mobile computing application or the journey itself. In this demonstration we show elements of the Reflect toolkit, an experience sampling toolkit designed to help survey traveller experiences in-situ using mobile smartphones. The Reflect experience sampling toolkit differs from previous experience sampling research such as MyExperience [1] by specifically focusing on supporting behavioral researchers in the transportation research domain. It enables simple and rapid configuration and deployment of surveys on modern mobile platforms to crowd-source new forms of travel experience data.

Transient use of displays by mobile users was prophesied two decades ago. Today, convergence of a range of technologies enable the realization of this vision. For researchers in this space, one key question is where to physically locate the application for which the display has been appropriated. The emergence of cloud and cloudlet computing has increased the range of possible locations. In this paper we focus on understanding the extent to which application location impacts user experience when appropriating displays. We describe a usage model in which public displays can be appropriated to support spontaneous use of interactive applications, present an example architecture based on cloudlets, and explore how application location impacts user experience.

In this paper we reflect on our long-term experiences of developing, deploying and supporting an experimental digital signage system. Existing public display systems almost always feature a single point of control that is responsible for scheduling content for presentation on the network and provide sophisticated mechanisms for controlling play-out timing and relative ordering. Our experiences suggest that such complex feature-sets are unnecessary in many cases and may be counter productive in signage systems. We describe an alternative, simpler paradigm for encouraging widespread use of signage systems based on shared 'content channels' between content providers and display owners. Our system has been in continuous use for approximately 3 years. We reflect and draw lessons from how our user community has adopted and used the resulting public display network. We believe that these reflections will be of benefit to future developers of ubiquitous display networks.

Today, one does not have to travel far to find examples of digital signage, yet the adoption of interactive gesture based public displays remains quite rare. Subsequently, not much is known about them despite a large array of potential advantages. This paper contributes to our understanding of how people perceive, respond to and interact with such displays outside the controlled environment of a research lab. Unlike other works which have focused on isolated aspects of in-lab interaction, we present a detailed examination that addresses a wide range of responses to such a display - including those who ignore them completely. To facilitate our study we created an experimental coarse gesture based software suite and then deployed the system along with associated applications as part of an existing large scale public display network. Using this as a base, we executed four studies designed to passively observe the reactions of passers-by and followed these up with a fifth controlled experiment that compared the effectiveness of two different kinds of gesture in the context of menu item selection. To conclude, we present our key-findings and highlight possible avenues of further study for the future of gesture based digital signage.

An increasing trend in mobile and pervasive computing is the augmentation of everyday public spaces with local computation - leading to so called smart environments. However, there are no well accepted techniques for supporting spontaneous interaction between mobile users and these smart environments, though a wide range of techniques have been explored ranging from gesture recognition to downloading applications to a user's phone. In this paper we explore an approach to supporting such interaction based on the use of Bluetooth Device (user-friendly) Names as a control channel between users' mobile phones and computational resources in their local environment. Such an approach has many advantages over existing techniques though it is not without limitations. Our work focuses specifically on the use of Device Names to control and customize applications on large public displays in a campus environment. This paper describes our basic approach, a number of applications that we have constructed using this technique and the results of our evaluation work which has included a range of user studies and field trials. The paper concludes with an assessment of the viability of using our approach for interaction scenarios involving mobile users and computationally rich environments.

The NEMO project is exploring the use of mobile sensor nodes toaugment physical work artefacts in order to ensure compliance with health and safety regulations. In this paper we present our experiences of designing and deploying the NEMO Hand Arm Vibration (HAV) monitoring system. Long term exposure to hand arm vibration can lead to serious health conditions and the NEMO HAV monitoring system offers an integrated architecture for capturing HAV exposure data in the field, providing feedback about exposure levels both in the field and as input to a back-end database. Our design allows health and safety regulations specified at the enterprise level to be embedded within the wireless sensor nodes allowing them to operate without any infrastructural support. The system has been the subject of a two week field trial that took place with the collaboration of a British construction and maintenance company. During the field trial, the NEMO HAV system was deployed to a roa dmaintenance patching gang and data were collected on HAV exposure caused by hydraulic drills. The paper reports on the results of the field trial and the lessons learned through the real deployment of the system.

A major challenge in pervasive computing is to develop systems that can reliably recognize human activity patterns, such as bathing from sensor data. Typical sensor deployments generate sparse datasets with thousands of sensor readings and few instances of activities. The imbalance between the number of features (i.e. sensors firing) and the classification targets (i.e. activities) complicates the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for discovering relationships between sensor signals and observed human activities from sparse datasets. The framework builds on the use of Bayesian networks for modeling activities by representing statistical dependencies between sensors. This allows us to solve two key problems: firstly, how to automatically determine an effective structure for a Bayesian network that recognizes a particular activity without human intervention; and, secondly, we address the pragmatic problem of sparse training data, where the data available to train the activity recognizers is limited. In our approach, we `learn' the structure of the Bayesian networks automatically from the sensor data. We optimize this process in 3 ways: firstly, we perform multicollinearity analysis to focus on orthogonal sensor data with minimal redundancy. Secondly, we propose Efron's bootstrapping to generate large training sets that capture important features of an activity. Finally, we find the best Bayesian network that explains our data using a heuristic search that is unbiased to the ordering between consecutive variables. We evaluate our approach using a data set gathered from MIT's PlaceLab. The inferred networks correctly identify activities for 85% of the time

Users of mobile tour guides often express a strong desire for the system to be able to provide information on arbitrary objects they encounter during their visit - akin to pointing to a building or attraction and saying "what's that ?" to a human tour guide. This paper reports on a field study in which we investigated user reaction to the use of digital image capture and recognition to support such functionality. Our results provide an insight into usage patterns and likely user reaction to mobile tour guides that use digital photography for real-time object recognition. These results include the counter-intuitive observation that a significant class of users appear happy to use image recognition even when this is a more complex, lengthy and error-prone process than traditional solutions. Careful analysis of user behavior during the field trails also provides evidence that it may be possible to classify tourists according to the methods by which they prefer to acquire information about tourist attractions in their vicinity. If shown to be generally true these results have important implications for designers of future mobile tour guide systems.

In this paper, we describe our experiences of developing and evaluating GUIDE, an intelligent electronic tourist guide. The GUIDE system has been built to overcome many of the limitations of the traditional information and navigation tools available to city visitors. For example, group-based tours are inherently inflexible with fixed starting times and fixed durations and (like most guidebooks) are constrained by the need to satisfy the interests of the majority rather than the specific interests of individuals. Following a period of requirements capture, involving experts in the field of tourism, we developed and installed a system for use by visitors to Lancaster. The system combines mobile computing technologies with a wireless infrastructure to present city visitors with information tailored to both their personal and environmental contexts. In this paper we present an evaluation of GUIDE, focusing on the quality of the visitor's experience when using the system.

The GUIDE system has been developed to provide city visitors with a hand-held context-aware tourist guide. The system has been successfully deployed in a major tourist destination and is currently at the stage where it is publicly available to visitors who wish to explore the city. Reaching this stage has been the culmination of a number of distinct research efforts. In more detail, the development of GUIDE has involved: capturing a real set of application requirements, investigating the properties of a cell-based wireless communications technology in a built-up environment and deploying a network based on this technology around the city, designing and populating an information model to represent attractions and key buildings within the city, prototyping the development of a distributed application running across portable GUIDE units and stationary cell-servers and finally, evaluating the entire system during an extensive field-trial study. This paper reports on our results in each of these areas. We believe that through our work on the GUIDE project we have produced a blueprint for the development of interactive context-aware systems that should be of real value to those in the community who wish to develop such systems in a practical environment.

This article considers the importance of context in mobile systems. It considers a range of context-related issues and focus on location as a key issue for mobile systems. A design framework is described consisting of taxonomies of location, mobility, population, and device awareness. The design framework inorms the construction of a semantic model of space for mobile systems. The semantic model is reflected in a computational model built on a distriuted platform that allows contextual information to be shared across a number of mobile devices. The framework support the design of interactive mobile systems while the platform supports their rapid development.

Due to increasing computational power, long-life batteries and wireless links with improving bandwidth, distributed multimedia applications have become more and more attractive for mobile users. However, the varying quality of service (QoS) on the wireless link is still a major problem. One generally accepted solution to this problem utilises "proxies" which act on behalf of the mobile user and modify the communication data stream in order to match the current QoS conditions. These proxies are generally dependent on protocol layers, applications or application data. Therefore, in order to enable proxy objects to be flexibly inserted for a given multimedia stream, an architecture is required for managing supplied and installed proxy objects.

The traditional approach to developing middleware platforms is to adopt a "black box" philosophy whereby the platform offers a fixed programming model to applications together with fixed per-platform implementations. In this paper, we describe research which is exploring an open approach to the implementation of middleware platforms. Our motivation is to accommodate the demanding requirements for quality-of-service (QoS) adaptation as imposed by mobile multimedia applications. We use an extended CORBA computational model featuring the concept of explicit open bindings. This provides an architectural framework for openness and QoS adaptation. The paper concludes by considering the more general application of an open systems philosophy; in particular, we introduce the concept of reflective middleware.