Online crowdsourcing enables the distribution of work to a global labor force as small and often repetitive tasks. Recently, situated crowdsourcing has emerged as a complementary enabler to elicit labor in specific locations and from specific crowds. Teamwork in online crowdsourcing has been recently shown to increase the quality of output, but teamwork in situated crowdsourcing remains unexplored. We set out to fill this gap. We present a generic crowdsourcing platform that supports situated teamwork and provide experiences from a laboratory study that focused on comparing traditional online crowdsourcing to situated team-based crowdsourcing. We built a crowdsourcing desk that hosts three networked terminal displays. The displays run our custom team-driven crowdsourcing platform that was used to investigate collocated crowdsourcing in small teams. In addition to analyzing quantitative data, we provide findings based on questionnaires, interviews, and observations. We highlight 1) emerging differences between traditional and collocated crowdsourcing, 2) the collaboration strategies that teams exhibited in collocated crowdsourcing, and 3) that a priori team familiarity does not significantly affect collocated interaction in crowdsourcing. The approach we introduce is a novel multi-display crowdsourcing setup that supports collocated labor teams and along with the reported study makes specific contributions to situated crowdsourcing research.

Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) is a sensing technique in which near infrared light is transmitted into a sample, followed by light absorbance measurements at various wavelengths. This technique enables the inference of the inner chemical composition of the scanned sample, and therefore can be used to identify or classify objects. In this paper, we describe how to facilitate the use of NIRS by non- expert users in everyday settings. Our work highlights the key challenges of placing NIRS devices in the hands of non-experts. We develop a system to mitigate these challenges, and evaluate it in a user study. We show how NIRS technology can be successfully utilised by untrained users in an unsupervised manner through a special enclosure and an accompanying smartphone app. Finally, we discuss potential future developments of commoditised NIRS.

While the population is aging the role of information and communication technology (ICT) has grown in elderly care. This development has brought versatile ICT-related supportive systems to professionals and laymen working with aging people. The current study analyzed how professionals in elderly care perceived their workflow challenges before new ICT is developed and implemented to support their work. The results of this study are set to inform the design of a novel ICT system for a sheltered care home.

We develop and evaluate a data hiding method that enables smartphones to encrypt and embed sensitive information into carrier streams of sensor data. Our evaluation considers multiple handsets and a variety of data types, and we demonstrate that our method has a computational cost that allows real-time data hiding on smartphones with negligible distortion of the carrier stream. These characteristics make it suitable for smartphone applications involving privacy-sensitive data such as medical monitoring systems and digital forensics tools.

We evaluate the situational impairments caused by cold ambient temperature on fine-motor movement and vigilance during mobile interaction. For this purpose, we tested two mobile phone applications that measure fine motor skills and vigilance in controlled temperature settings. Our results show that cold adversely affected participants' fine-motor skills performance, but not vigilance. Based on our results we highlight the importance of correcting measurements when investigating performance of cognitive tasks to take into account the physical element of the tasks. Finally, we identify a number of design recommendations from literature that can mitigate the adverse effect of cold ambiance on interaction with mobile devices.