A new dimension of the digital divide: Exploring the relationship between broadband connection,smartphone use and communication competence

The study explores group differences in demographic characteristics; Internet usage (device ownership, Internet availability, and frequency of weekly Internet use); and communication competence (instrumental, creative, and networking skills) between people who have and who do not have wired and/or wireless broadband connections and smartphones. The results of the one-way ANOVA and Scheffe’s post-hoc comparisons demonstrate significant differences in groups with different network connection types across demographic lines, different levels of Internet usage, and different communication competences. The results of the multinomial regression show significant differences across the variables between wired-only users and wired and smartphone users as well as between wired-only users and wired, wireless, and smartphone users. However, group differences between wired and smartphone users and wired, wireless, and smartphone users are significant only in device ownership and creative skill. We concluded that smartphone use was likely to aggravate the gaps of demographics, access, and skills in the seamlessly connected media environment. Meanwhile, access gap made the most impact on information, communication, leisure/entertainment, and financial management activities online, followed by skill and demographic gaps. The findings imply that access and skill gaps could be higher barriers to the active engagement in diverse online activities and consequently create an overlapping effect on the established divide.     

Understanding the asymmetric perceptions of smartphone security from security feature perspective: A comparative study

Smartphones are being used and relied on by people more than ever before. The open connectivity brings with it great convenience and leads to a variety of risks that cannot be overlooked. Smartphone vendors, security policy designers, and security application providers have put a variety of practical efforts to secure smartphones, and researchers have conducted extensive research on threat sources, security techniques, and user security behaviors. Regrettably, smartphone users do not pay enough attention to mobile security, making many efforts futile. This study identifies this gap between technology affordance and user requirements, and attempts to investigate the asymmetric perceptions toward security features between developers and users, between users and users, as well as between different security features. These asymmetric perceptions include perceptions of quality, perceptions of importance, and perceptions of satisfaction. After scoping the range of smartphone security features, this study conducts an improved Kano-based method and exhaustively analyzes the 245 collected samples using correspondence analysis and importance satisfaction analysis. The 14 security features of the smartphone are divided into four Kano quality types and the perceived quality differences between developers and users are compared. Correspondence analysis is utilized to capture the relationship between the perceived importance of security features across different groups of respondents, and results of importance-satisfaction analysis provide the basis for the developmental path and resource reallocation strategy of security features. This article offers new insights for researchers as well as practitioners of smartphone security.     

Compulsive smartphone usage and users' ill-being among young Indians: Does personality matter?

Personality characteristics are found to have significant influence on the extent of smartphone usage among the Indian youth. Compulsive usage of smartphones, however, affects the users’ emotional and physical health. The objective of this study is to examine how personality characteristics are related to compulsive smartphone usage and if compulsive smartphone usage impacts users’ ill being. Personality characteristics such as extraversion and conscientiousness are found to be leading to the compulsive smartphone usage, whereas neuroticism, openness to new experience, and agreeableness are found to be negatively influencing compulsive smartphone usage. Extraversion is found to have maximum influence on an individual’s compulsive tendency to use smartphone, followed by conscientiousness. The findings of this study also made the authors believe that compulsive smartphone usage, affects both emotional (affecting inter-personal and family relationships) and physical (lack of quality sleep and physical discomfort) health of the smartphone users. Emotional health, however, is found to be more affected by compulsive smartphone usage compared to physical health. Given these findings, it is desirable that youths in Indian should be appropriately guided to use smartphones judiciously so that they do not end up being the victims of compulsive usage and subsequently addiction.     

Language,modality, and mobile media use experiences: Social responses to smartphone cues in a task-oriented context

With people’s growing use of virtual agents and voice assistants on smartphones, researchers have pointed out that mobile phones are not only acting as intermediaries that connect users from different places, but also communication terminals that present different combinations of social cues. This study applies the Computers are Social Actors paradigm in human-phone interaction and postulates that compared to non-anthropomorphic language and text cues, anthropomorphic language and vocal cues will have more effects on users’ social responses to smartphones. This study also explores the role of individual differences in users’ social responses to smartphones. Based on a lab experiment using a between-subjects factorial design, the study suggests that although anthropomorphic language and voice-based information did not have main effects on users’ social responses, people’s mobile media usage and intensive phone use interacted with these cues in their social responses to the smartphones. In addition, this study implies that it is the combination of social cues, individual differences, and communication contexts that contributes to people’s social reactions to the smartphones. The findings of the study can inform user interface design and precipitate further discussion about the ethical issues in human-phone interaction.     

面向移动LBS的智能手机室内定位技术探讨

移动互联网的发展给基于位置的服务(LBS)带来了广泛的应用前景,智能手机的普及使用户定位和获取LBS变得更加方便。目前,手机定位技术特别是室内定位,仍不够成熟,已经成为制约LBS业务发展的技术瓶颈。本文在研究定位技术现状和发展趋势的基础上,提出一种新的室内定位方法,依靠智能手机内置传感器进行图像特征识别和运动状态检测,即可完成室内环境的准确定位,具有成本低、简单方便、灵活易扩展的优点,能够满足移动LBS业务模式发展需求。     

Mirroring Smartphones for Good: A Feasibility Study

An increasing number of applications and functions are being introduced into smartphones, but smartphones have limited computation ability and battery resources. To enhance smartphone capacity, cloud computing and virtualization techniques can be used to shift the workload from smartphone to computational infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a new framework in which a mirror is kept for each smartphone on a computing infrastructure in the telecom network. With mirrors, the workload can be greatly reduced, and smartphone resources can be virtually expanded. The feasibility of deploying this framework in telecom networks is demonstrated in the protocol design, a synchronization study, and a scalability test. Two applications are introduced to show how computational workload on the smartphone and traffic in the telecom network are significantly reduced using our techniques.     

Crafting a smartphone repurchase decision making process: Do brand attachment and gender matter?

In this fast changing digital era, smartphones users tend to change their smartphones regularly. Therefore, retaining existing consumers has been a challenging task for smartphone manufacturer brands. Given the status quo in smartphone industry and deficiencies in smartphone research, this study proposes a model that integrates Expectation Confirmation Model and brand attachment to shed light on smartphone repurchase decision making process. Besides, gender differences are also accounted for in the model. This study employs a two-staged approach, namely PLS-ANN, in analysing the data collected from 510 existing smartphone owners. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was firstly engaged, and followed by artificial neural network analysis. Besides, a non-parametric partial least squares multi-group analysis has also been conducted to discover gender differences in such decision making process. The results suggest that brand attachment is the most influential and relevant driver of consumers’ intention to repurchase smartphones from current brand (measured by continuance intention). Moreover, male consumers are more sensitive to the influence of brand attachment in developing their satisfaction and continuance intention, while female consumers are relying more on perceived usefulness. Interestingly, perceived usefulness does not significantly influence male consumers in continuance intention development. Practical and theoretical implications are subsequently offered.     

运用XD与HBuilderX在Android平台的智能手机App设计及应用

随着智能手机时代的到来,大多数人的生活方式已经改变,如今,智能手机已成为人们工作的一部分,并在他们的工作中起着重要作用。作为移动互联网行业的关键领域,智能手机在互联网行业中变得越来越重要。人们一直在密切关注智能手机App设计的用户体验。以智能手机App为核心的用户体验构建设计是智能手机应用程序设计的核心和关键点,也是使得用户需求得以满足的重要方式。智能手机App的存在时间相对较短。其开发过程缺少完整的设计过程和理论支持。如何给用户提供良好体验的App设计就显得非常重要。针对此问题,一方面,需要从逻辑设计入手考虑用户体验。另一方面,通过调查来分析用户体验,进行有效的图形设计。在手机App层出不穷的新时期,要合理设计智能手机的应用程序,以增强用户体验。     

Smartphone application personality and its relationship to personalities of smartphone users and social capital accrued through use of smartphone social applications

Few studies have considered the personalities of smartphone applications. This study identifies four underlying smartphone application personality dimensions: interactive and daring, interesting and attractive, open and wide-ranging, and principled and wholesome. The smartphone application personalities reveal the strong interactive property of smartphones. This study also investigates how smartphone users’ personalities, smartphone social applications that connect people directly or indirectly, and perceived social capital accrued through smartphone social application usage contribute to smartphone application personality. The analysis shows that the shift from voice calls and SMS to Facebook and instant messaging causes traditional communication applications to play little role in contributing to smartphone application personality. In addition to having hedonic value, entertainment applications should also be viewed as able to contribute to social capital and all of the smartphone application personality dimensions. Although the neuroticism personality of smartphone users plays a lesser role than extraversion in contributing to smartphone social application usage, social capital formation and smartphone application personality, smartphones are useful for individuals high in neuroticism to gain social capital. The inward-looking and exclusiveness properties of bonding social capital cause it to contribute negatively to the interactive and attractive smartphone application personality.     

Offloading framework for computation service in the edge cloud and core cloud: A case study for face recognition

A fast rate of progress has allowed the proliferation of smartphones and eased their extensive presence in people's daily life. However, low processing speed and limited battery capacity have hindered improvements in the smartphone's computational capabilities. Offloading computational tasks to the cloud could solve this problem by enabling users to access these services over the Internet. Edge cloud computing has been recognized as an emerging field within the cloud computing paradigm, where computation servers are situated at the edge of the Internet to reduce network delay and traffic. Nevertheless, offloading tasks to the cloud is not always beneficial due to variable network conditions and increased processing costs. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning-based offloading framework has been presented that provides smartphones with the ability to make decisions for local processing in the smartphone or to offload processing tasks to the cloud (edge and/or core). Thus, a smartphone can minimize the combination of the processing time, energy consumption, and monetary cost and maximize the accuracy of face recognition as well. Simulation results under synthetic scenarios show that the proposed offloading framework can effectively adapt to the dynamic cloud computing and networking environment.     

Energy-efficient and cost-effective web API invocations with transfer size reduction for mobile mashup applications

Recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the extensive coverage of wireless networks have enabled numerous mobile users to access Web resources with smartphones. Mobile mashup applications are very attractive to smartphone users due to specialized services and user-friendly GUIs. However, to offer new services through the integration of Web resources via Web API invocations, mobile mashup applications suffer from high energy consumption and long response time. In this paper, we propose a proxy system and two techniques to reduce the size of data transfer, thereby enabling mobile mashup applications to achieve energy-efficient and cost-effective Web API invocations. Specifically, we design an API query language that allows mobile mashup applications to readily specify and obtain desired information by instructing a proxy to filter unnecessary information returned from Web API servers. We also devise an image multi-get module, which results in mobile mashup applications with smaller transfer sizes by combining multiple images and adjusting the quality, scale, or resolution of the images. With the proposed proxy and techniques, a mobile mashup application can rapidly retrieve Web resources via Web API invocations with lower energy consumption due to a smaller number of HTTP requests and responses as well as smaller response bodies. Experimental results show that the proposed proxy system and techniques significantly reduce transfer size, response time, and energy consumption of mobile mashup applications.     

Personal and social predictors of use and non-use of fitness/diet app: Application of Random Forest algorithm

This study investigated the various groups of factors that predict individuals’ use and non-use of fitness and diet apps on smartphones. Unlike previous research on fitness and diet apps which have mainly studied individuals’ intentions to use the apps, this study focused on the prediction accuracy of various factors that lead people to use fitness and diet apps through analysis of data collected from users as well as non-users of these apps. To examine prediction accuracy, this study applied the Random Forest algorithm. According to the findings, prediction accuracy higher than that of 70 percent was observed for nine factors: age, annual income, education, perceived obesity, dieting efforts, number of smartphone apps currently used, daily time spent with smartphone apps, perceived benefits from exercise, and social influence. A major contribution of this study is its detection of those factors predicting actual behavioral decisions regarding use of fitness and diet apps, as opposed to future intentions..     

Examining the factors that influence early adopters’ smartphone adoption: The case of college students

The influence of early adopters on potential adopters’ decisions of whether or not to adopt a product is known to be critical. In this paper, we examine the factors that influence the adoption behavior of smartphone early adopters by looking at smartphone adoption behavior of college students, because a large portion of the early adopters of smartphones are college students. Our focus is on the effect of normative peer influence on a college student’s smartphone adoption. We also examine the influence of other factors such as self-innovativeness, self-efficacy, the decision maker’s attitudes towards a product, financial burden of using the product, familial influence, and other demographic factors (e.g., age and gender). College students’ adoption behavior is studied using logit and probit choice models developed based on random utility theory. The discrete choice models are empirically estimated using survey data. We find important influence of friends, financial burden, and other family members on the smartphone adoption of college students who adopted smartphones earlier than other students.     

Identification of key cyberbullies: A text mining and social network analysis approach

Cyberbullying is a major problem in society, and the damage it causes is becoming increasingly significant. Previous studies on cyberbullying focused on detecting and classifying malicious comments. However, our study focuses on a substantive alternative to block malicious comments via identifying key offenders through the application of methods of text mining and social network analysis (SNA). Thus, we propose a practical method of identifying social network users who make high rates of insulting comments and analyzing their resultant influence on the community. We select the Korean online community of Daum Agora to validate our proposed method. We collect over 650,000 posts and comments via web crawling. By applying a text mining method, we calculate the Losada ratio, a ratio of positive-to-negative comments. We then propose a cyberbullying index and calculate it based on text mining. By applying the SNA method, we analyze relationships among users so as to ascertain the influence that the core users have on the community. We validate the proposed method of identifying key cyberbullies through a real-world application and evaluations. The proposed method has implications for managing online communities and reducing cyberbullying.     

一种新型的WSN量子加密系统

目前无线传感器网络越来越普及,在不久的将来无线传感器网络的服务将会遍布全球。由于无线传感器网络在用户数据方面并没有IPSec的安全策略,因此具有一定程度的安全风险。我们在此设计了一种量子加密机制。这种应用于无线传感器网络的加密机制试图不仅使用类似于IPSec的策略,而且使用新型的量子加密技术。这种系统将有助于改善无线传感器网络的安全性。     

Can smartphones be specialists? Effects of specialization in mobile advertising

Based on the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm, this study extends the expectations regarding the superiority of specialists over generalists to mobile technology by examining whether the specialization of a hardware agent (i.e., a smartphone) and a software agent (i.e., an application) has psychological effects on smartphone users who are exposed to mobile advertisements. Results from a between-subjects experiment (N = 80) show that specialist smartphones and applications induce greater trust in advertisements and an increased purchase intention toward the advertised products than generalist smartphones and applications. In addition, the effects of specialization on purchase intention are mediated by trust in advertisements. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Is real screen time a determinant of problematic smartphone and social network use among young people?

Smartphone use by adolescents is increasingly attracting the interest of social scientists, parents, and educational stakeholders (teachers, educators, educational policy makers), generally in a negative context. There are, however, many myths surrounding the issue, resulting from the reproduction of stereotypes about the psychosocial functioning of adolescents in cyberspace, as well as inadequately constructed research tools that measure how new media are used. This text is an attempt to show the phenomenon of problematic Internet use through the prism of screen time measured using real data from smartphones. The research was conducted in first half of 2022 among adolescents aged 13–19 in Bosnia and Herzegovina (N = 1185, mean age = 15.47 with standard deviation = 1.84). The research was implemented using a triangulation of tools such as the Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS Scale), Software Installed on the Smartphone (SIS Scale), The Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS), and the Screen Time Scale (STS). From the data collected, it was noted that: 1) Screen time correlates weakly with problematic smartphone use and social networking; 2)The average period of smartphone use in the study group is 3 h49 minutes per day, of which 37 min are related to web browsing, while 2 h22 minutes are related to social networking; 3) A quarter of adolescents use a smartphone more than 5.5 h per day, of which more than 2 h15 minutes is screen time related to social media; 4) Approximately half of the respondents use smartphones slightly more than 2 h per day; 5) Girls use smartphones for longer than boys; 6) Place of residence (city or countryside) does not affect screen time; 7) Screen time is related to a medium degree to the type of software installed on the smartphone; 8) There is a need to refine the measurement methodology of screen time and to abandon self-declaration in this area.     

Analysis of users and non-users of smartphone applications

Purpose

Smartphones facilitate the potential adoption of new mobile applications. The purpose of this research is to study users and non-users of three selected mobile applications, and find out what really drives the intention to use these applications across users and non-users.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors measured actual usage of mobile applications in a panel study of 579 Finnish smartphone users, using in-device measurements as an objective way to identify users and non-users. A web-based survey was used in collecting data to test an extended TAM model in explaining intention to use.

Findings

Perceived technological barriers negatively affect behavioural control, reflecting people’s assessment of themselves being capable of using the services without trouble. Behavioural control is directly linked to perceived usefulness (except for games) and perceived enjoyment, as hypothesized. Perceived enjoyment and usefulness were generically found to explain intention to use applications for both users and for non-users.

Research limitations/implications

With regards to the impact of social norms, the study finds that further research needs to be done in exploring its impact more thoroughly. The dataset of the research, consisting purely of male-dominated, young smartphone users, make the generalization of results difficult.

Practical implications

There are differences regarding what drives the usage of different kinds of mobile applications. In this study, map applications and mobile Internet, are driven by more utilitarian motivations, whereas games are more hedonic. It is also clear that not everybody are using applications facilitated by smartphones, and therefore the presented approach of studying users and non-users separately provides a new approach to analyze adoption on a practical level.

Originality/value

This research proves that models like TAM should not treat mobile services as a generic concept, but instead to specifically address individual mobile services. The research also demonstrates the unique value of combining objective usage measurements (reflecting actual behaviour) with traditional survey data in more comprehensively modelling service adoption.     

uSensing:一种支撑智能手机接入无线传感器网络的跨平台系统

This paper presents a universal platform “uSensing”to support smartphones to communicate with sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Since phones have different CPU processers and operating systems, it is a challenge to merge these heterogeneities and develop such a universal platform. In this paper, we design both hardware and software to support the “universal”feature of uSensing: 1) “uSD”card: an IEEE 802.15.4 physical communication card with SD interface; 2) “uSink-Ware”: a WSNs middleware running on smartphones. Integrated with uSD card and uSinkWare, phones become mobile data sinks to access into WSNs and parse messages from sensor nodes. We demonstrate the proposed uSensing platform in a commercial smartphone to connect with our WSNs testbed, and validate that the smartphone has the same WSNs functions as commercial fixed sink. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of uSensing platform through measuring phone's CPU load and power consumption, and analyze the performance of these metrics theoretically. The results suggest that the phone-based mobile sink has enough capability to serve as a mobile sink of WSNs and can work up to twenty hours due to low power consumption.     

浅析移动终端的安全风险及防护建议

随着智能终端和移动通信技术的飞速发展,购物、支付、理财产品等金融业务层出不穷,移动终端的安全性成为了安全攻击的目标也是社会热点问题。本文对移动终端进行了风险分析,辅以使用Kali Linux系统攻击同一个WiFi局域网内的安卓手机作为案例加以说明,并提出了安全防护建议。