From Mobile Phone Sensing to Human Geo‐Social Behavior Understanding

The study of geo‐social behaviors has long been a scientific problem. In contrast to traditional social science, which suffers from the problems such as high data collection cost and imported user subjectivity, a new approach is presented to study social behaviors based on mobile phone sensing data. Different from other similar studies on mobile social sensing, three different types of geo‐social behaviors, including online interaction, offline interaction, and mobility patterns, are characterized based on a newly released Nokia mobile phone data set. We further discuss the impact factors to these behaviors as well as the correlation among them. The findings in this article are crucial for many different fields, ranging from urban planning, location‐based services, to social recommendation.     

Measuring Mobile Phone Use: Self-Report Versus Log Data

Approximately 40% of mobile phone use studies published in scholarly communication journals base their findings on self-report data about how frequently respondents use their mobile phones. Using a subset of a larger representative sample we examine the validity of this type of self-report data by comparing it to server log data. The self-report data correlate only moderately with the server log data, indicating low criterion validity. The categorical self-report measure asking respondents to estimate “how often” they use their mobile phones fared better than the continuous self-report measure asking them to estimate their mobile phone activity “yesterday.” A multivariate exploratory analysis further suggests that it may be difficult to identify under- and overreporting using demographic variables alone.     

The Digital Divide Objectified in the Design: Use of the Mobile Telephone by Underprivileged Youth in Sri Lanka

Most discussions on the digital divide have predominantly focused on social disparities in the physical accessibility of information and communication technologies (ICT), and the proposed solutions are related to providing low cost access to the underprivileged. The mobile phone has been considered as a good solution due to its relatively low cost. This paper, based on an empirical study in Sri Lanka, demonstrates that even though the underprivileged population has adopted the mobile phone, most of the computer based communication facilities available in the phones are ‘inaccessible’ to such users due the objectification of broader social inequalities in the design of phones. In other words, the digital divide is objectified in the design.     

The Paradox of Mobility in the Kenyan ICT Ecosystem: An Ethnographic Case of How the Youth in Kibera Slum Use and Appropriate the Mobile Phone and the Mobile Internet

The Kenyan ICT ecosystem has attracted vast global media and policy attention because of notable mobile phone adoption in the country. However, empirical research of how Kenyans use and appropriate new media and ICTs in the diverse contexts within the country remains limited. In order to contribute to the emerging literature on Sub-Saharan Africa ICT ecosystems as well as the Mobility discussions within Mobiles for Development M4D and Information and Communication Technologies for Development ICT4D, this paper discusses an empirical case of how the youth of Kibera use and appropriate the mobile phone and the mobile Internet. The purpose of this critical realist ethnographic research article is to explicate the events in the historical development of the Kenyan ICT ecosystem as well as the components of social and physical structure in Kibera slum along with the relationships between them. This paper argues that the mobile phone eases communication and strengthens existent social ties for the youth of Kibera. However, it cannot bypass the hierarchical nature of Kenya where “class and place of residence are distinctive social markers in the process of social networking” [Wallis, C. (2011). Mobile phones without guarantees: The promises of technology and the contingencies of culture. New Media & Society, 13(3), 471–485. Wallis, C. (2013). Technomobility in China: Young migrant women and mobile phones. New York, NY: New York University Press]. Therefore, the young Kiberans predominantly use and appropriate the mobile phone to network with those in the same lower income strata. This is because they are widely perceived in Kenyan society as the “other and what does not belong” because they are slum residents [Hall, S. (2013). The spectacle of the other. In S. Hall, J. Evans, & S. Nixon (Eds.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (2nd ed., pp. 223–283). Sage. p. 257].     

TouchTone: Interactive Local Image Adjustment Using Point‐and‐Swipe

Recent proliferation of camera phones, photo sharing and social network services has significantly changed how we process our photos. Instead of going through the traditional download‐edit‐share cycle using desktop editors, an increasing number of photos are taken with camera phones and published through cellular networks. The immediacy of the sharing process means that on‐device image editing, if needed, should be quick and intuitive. However, due to the limited computational resources and vastly different user interaction model on small screens, most traditional local selection methods can not be directly adapted to mobile devices. To address this issue, we present TouchTone, a new method for edge‐aware image adjustment using simple finger gestures. Our method enables users to select regions within the image and adjust their corresponding photographic attributes simultaneously through a simple point‐and‐swipe interaction. To enable fast interaction, we develop a memory‐ and computation‐efficient algorithm which samples a collection of 1D paths from the image, computes the adjustment solution along these paths, and interpolates the solutions to entire image through bilateral filtering. Our system is intuitive to use, and can support several local editing tasks, such as brightness, contrast, and color balance adjustments, within a minute on a mobile device.     

Mattering Matters: Agency,Empowerment, and Mobile Phone Use by Female Microentrepreneurs

This article attempts to enrich our understanding of the role that mobile phones play in the empowerment of women in the developing world. We adapt and explicate an innovative social psychological concept, “mattering,” embed it in the literature that examines the impact of mobile phones on social development outcomes, and consider the utility of mattering for the ICT4D community. Mattering is the perception that others are aware of, interested in, and depend on us. Based on a sample of 335 female microentrepreneurs in Chennai, India, we created a valid and reliable measure of mattering and its three dimensions. Mattering was predicted by (1) entrepreneurial expectations, an element of an individual's mindset; (2) social use of mobile phones; and (3) the perceived benefits of mobile phones for maintaining business networks. Findings suggest that mobile phone use plays a significant role in contributing to female entrepreneurs' perception that they matter.     

The action of looking at a mobile phone display as nonverbal behavior/communication: A theoretical perspective

This study investigates the now-common action of looking at a mobile phone display, thereby offering insight into the present communication situation in an era in which the use of high-performance mobile phones has become ubiquitous. In this study, the action of looking at a mobile phone display is considered nonverbal behavior/communication. This study applies a basic, general model to elucidate the present situation of face-to-face communication in light of the increasing prevalence of social interaction via mobile phone use. The results derived from the model include mobile phone users’ increasing social power and an accumulation of potential discontent in relation to different interpretations. This study concludes that in an era of high-performance mobile phones, the social context in face-to-face communication can be influenced by the act of looking at a mobile phone display.     

Correlating mobile phone usage and travel behavior – A case study of Harbin,China

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile phones and the Internet, are increasingly pervasive in modern society. These technologies provide new resources for spatio-temporal data mining and geographic knowledge discovery. Since the development of ICTs also impacts physical movement of individuals in societies, much of the existing research has focused on examining the correlation between ICT and human mobility. In this paper, we aim to provide a deeper understanding of how usage of mobile phones correlates with individual travel behavior by exploring the correlation between mobile phone call frequencies and three indicators of travel behavior: (1) radius, (2) eccentricity, and (3) entropy. The methodology is applied to a large dataset from Harbin city in China. The statistical analysis indicates a significant correlation between mobile phone usage and all of the three indicators. In addition, we examine and demonstrate how explanatory factors, such as age, gender, social temporal orders and characteristics of the built environment, impact the relationship between mobile phone usage and individual activity behavior.     

OLED lifetime issues from a mobile‐phone‐industry point of view

Abstract— Lifetime issues have been a hot topic throughout the history of OLEDs. The rapid development of lifetimes since 2002 has enabled OLED displays to become acceptable for mobile phones. The lifetime requirements of 30,000 hours expressed by the representatives of mobile‐phone‐terminal makers were felt to be unrealistic to be obtained in 2003, since the lifetime of the blue color was below 1000 hours. Today, 5 years later, lifetimes of AMOLED panels are over 50,000 hours. OLED displays are suffering from a burn‐in effect due to limited lifetime. After 2003, it was understood by the panel and terminal makers that instead of lifetime, burn‐in sensitivity became the limiting factor from an AMOLED‐panel usability point of view. The burn‐in effect becomes visible at 2–3% luminance degradation levels between adjacent pixels. To take this effect into account in mobile‐phone applications, the lifetime needs to be increased from 30,000 to 60,000 hours, and suitable algorithms need to be used for the display of the terminal. There is also pressure to double the peak luminance values used in the terminals in order to improve the performance of the screen in outdoor environments. The roles of the material developers, panel makers, and terminal makers are reviewed in this paper from a lifetime perspective.     

Configurations of Relationships in Different Media: FtF, Email, Instant Messenger, Mobile Phone, and SMS

This study analyzes the configurations of communication relationships in Korea through face-to-face, email, instant messaging, mobile phone, and short message service media. Through a web survey, we asked respondents to identify (1) for each of the five media (2) up to five of their most frequent communication partners, (3) the partner's social role (including colleagues, family, friends), and (4) their own employment category. Individual-level and network-level analyses were used to compare variations in communication relationships and configurations of relationships among social roles overall, within each medium, and for different employment categories, and to identify configurations of relationships across media. IM, SMS, and mobile phone are distinctive media for students, mobile phone for homeworkers, and email for organizational workers. Moreover, mobile phones tend to be used in reinforcing strong social ties, and text-based CMC media tend to be used in expanding relationships with weak ties. Finally, face-to-face (FtF) seems to be a universal medium without significant differences across respondents' employment categories.     

Hybrid recommendations for mobile commerce based on mobile phone features

Mobile data communications have evolved as the number of third generation (3G) subscribers has increased. The evolution has triggered an increase in the use of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, to conduct mobile commerce and mobile shopping on the mobile web. There are fewer products to browse on the mobile web; hence, one‐to‐one marketing with product recommendations is important. Typical collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation systems make recommendations to potential customers based on the purchase behaviour of customers with similar preferences. However, this method may suffer from the so‐called sparsity problem, which means there may not be sufficient similar users because the user‐item rating matrix is sparse. In mobile shopping environments, the features of users' mobile phones provide different functionalities for using mobile services; thus, the features may be used to identify users with similar purchase behaviour. In this paper, we propose a mobile phone feature (MPF)‐based hybrid method to resolve the sparsity issue of the typical CF method in mobile environments. We use the features of mobile phones to identify users' characteristics and then cluster users into groups with similar interests. The hybrid method combines the MPF‐based method and a preference‐based method that uses association rule mining to extract recommendation rules from user groups and make recommendations. Our experiment results show that the proposed hybrid method performs better than other recommendation methods.     

The Effects of Mobile Phone on the Socio-economic Life of the Rural Dwellers in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

This article aims to provide information on the effects of the mobile phone on the socio-economic life of the rural dwellers in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The study adopted a semi-structured interview method. The study covered nine villages selected from Delta and Bayelsa States in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Convenience sampling technique was used to select 129 respondents who voluntarily agreed to participate in the study. The interview was tape recorded and the information collected from the tape recordings were transcribed and coded. Similar viewpoints toward the same question were put together for the analysis. The study revealed that the mobile phone has brought immerse socio-economic impact on the rural dwellers in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The study revealed that mobile phone use enable the rural dwellers to communicate with family members and friends in urban areas; relatives in urban areas send recharge cards for them to sell for money instead of traveling to meet them, and Call Center Operators become self-employed and through that make a living. Finally, the frequent recharging of mobile phones leads to indebtedness. The participants mentioned challenges such as network failure, non-availability of recharge cards, unreliable or complete absence of power supply to charge batteries, high charges by Network Service Providers, stealing of mobile phones, and unskilled persons repairing phones in rural areas. The introduction of mobile phones has lead to reduction of rural–urban migration by many jobless youths.     

MViewer: mobile phone spatiotemporal data viewer

Nowadays movement patterns and people’s behavioral models are needed for traffic engineers and city planners. These observations could be used to reason about mobility and its sustainability and to support decision makers with reliable information. The very same knowledge about human diaspora and behavior extracted from these data is also valuable to the urban planner, so as to localize new services, organize logistics systems and to detect changes as they occur in the movement behavior. Moreover, it is interesting to investigate movement in places like a shopping area or a working district either for commercial purposes or for improving the service quality. These kinds of tracking data are made available by wireless and mobile communication technologies. It is now possible to record and collect a large amount of mobile phone calls in a city. Technologies for object tracking have recently become affordable and reliable and hence we were able to collect mobile phone data from a city in China from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2008. The large amount of phone call records from mobile operators can be considered as life mates and sensors of persons to inform howmany people are present in any given area and how many are entering or leaving. Each phone call record usually contains the caller and callee IDs, date and time, and the base station where the phone calls are made. As mobile phones are widely used in our daily life, many human behaviors can be revealed by analyzing mobile phone data. Through mobile phones, we can learn the information about locations, communications between mobile phone users during their daily lives. In this work, we propose a comprehensive visual analysis system named as MViewer, Mobile phone spatiotemporal data Viewer, which is the first system to visualize and analyze the population’smobility patterns from millions of phone call records. Our system consists of three major components: 1) visual analysis of user groups in a base station; 2) visual analysis of the mobility patterns on different user groups making phone calls in certain base stations; 3) visual analysis of handoff phone call records. Some well-established visualization techniques such as parallel coordinates and pixelbased representations have been integrated into our system. We also develop a novel visualization schemes, Voronoidiagram-based visual encoding to reveal the unique features of mobile phone data. We have applied our system to real mobile phone datasets that are kindly provided by our project partners and obtained some interesting findings regarding people’s mobility patterns.     

Gravitating towards mobile phone (GoToMP) during lecture periods by students: Why are they using it? and how can it be measured?

With the growing amount of research on the use of technology, especially the mobile phones, the paucity of research in the area of mobile phone use that focus on the reasons why students use their mobile phones during lecture periods is somewhat surprising. Findings from the previous studies have documented that students continue to use their mobile phones during lecture periods even in classes where its use is banned. Thus, the motives that determine students' continued intention to use their mobile phones during lecture periods becomes an important issue that deserves urgent attention from researchers and education policymakers. In the present investigation, we tried to fill this gap by examining the determinants of students' continuance use of mobile phones during lecture periods. To achieve this, three stages of instrument development (item generation, scale development, and instrument testing) were undertaken through two studies. The results of the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the existence of six dimensions in the proposed measurement instrument (which we referred to as gravitating towards mobile phone (GoToMP)); the dimensions are boredom, class-related use, social connection, emergency, addiction, and perceived behavioral control. The combined findings from the two studies reported here provide initial evidence that GoToMP exhibits excellent psychometric properties and can be used in future empirical research on mobile phone use behaviors of students.     

Duration of stay based weighted scheduling framework for mobile phone sensor data collection in opportunistic crowd sensing

Advancement of mobile phone based new sensing paradigm like opportunistic and participatory crowd sensing has lead to increase in both multimedia and scalar sensor data traffic over wireless networks. In opportunistic crowd sensing, there are more chances of missing required mobile phones sensor data due to unpredictable mobility nature of users. Analysis of scheduling schemes under realistic human mobility models has become an important issue for pervasive sensing applications specifically for mobile phone based crowd sensing. This paper refers to a weighted scheduling framework for collecting mobile phone sensor data under Levy Walk mobility model. The proposed method uses duration of stay of mobile phone users as one of the important parameter to improve the scheduling performance in terms of reducing the rate of missing of mobile nodes and thereby increasing the rate of collection of required sensor data. The simulation results show that for improving the scheduling performance in opportunistic crowd sensing, high weight value should be given for duration of stay parameter, when mobile nodes stay within the data collection region for more than schedule iteration time with high probability.     

Application of Evolutionary Neural Networks on Optimization Design of Mobile Phone Based on User's Emotional Needs

Taking users’ emotional needs into consideration, this research aims to propose a new method to present product design features exactly and completely. On the basis of genetic algorithm integrated with back‐propagation (BP) neural networks, taking the mobile phone as research object, an optimization design algorithm was finally designed. First, the continuous and discrete design variables that describe mobile phones were screened with methods of dimensions, coordinate label, and morphological analysis. Forty three‐dimensional (3D) mobile phone models were designed by using 3D design software PROE. Accordingly, 12 representative mobile phones were selected through multidimensional scaling analysis and cluster analysis. Fourteen pairwise Kansei image words were obtained by collecting, screening, surveys, and statistical analysis method. Second, a BP neural networks model between design variables and user preference along with Kansei image words was established and verified with questionnaire survey data. Finally, the optimization design model for mobile phones was established considering design requirements and users’ emotional needs. A genetic algorithm integrated with BP neural networks was used to optimize mobile phone design. The results show that the optimization scheme is superior to others, and this paper will provide design suggestion for mobile phone designers.     

The Aceh Besar midwives with mobile phones project: Design and evaluation perspectives using the information and communication technologies for healthcare development model

The introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) such as mobile phones to basic health service providers in rural areas can help bridge lacunae in their work environment, resulting from under‐capacitated resources, constrained access to information and delayed interventions. The midwife mobile phone project was implemented in 15 health centres in Aceh Besar, Indonesia involving 223 midwives. The study group (121 participants) used project cell phones to transmit health statistics to a central database, contact coordinators and peers for health advice and information, and communicate with doctors and patients. The ICT for healthcare development model (Author, Lwin, Ang, Lin, & Santoso, 2008) was used a heuristic to determine project effectiveness. Findings from the project indicate that the mobile phone has proven to be an effective and efficient device for facilitating smoother communication, and allowing speedier emergency response. The system also aids in gathering and disseminating health‐related information to midwives, who in turn convey this knowledge to the patient community. The Technology‐Community‐Management model (Author & Zhao, 2009; Lee & Author, 2008) was used as a conceptual framework for probing the design of ICT for development projects. In particular, infrastructural, economic, technological, and socio‐cultural barriers were examined to highlight the tension between a top‐down hierarchical model of technology diffusion versus a more participatory bottom‐up approach.     

Scanning backlight for motion‐blur reduction on mobile displays

Abstract— Small‐form‐factor liquid‐crystal displays (LCDs) are mainly used in mobile applications (e.g., mobile phones, PDAs, and portable game consoles) but also in digital still cameras, video cameras, automotive applications, etc. Like all active‐matrix LCDs, mobile displays suffer from motion blur caused by the sample‐and‐hold effect. One option for improving the motion portrayal on active‐matrix LCDs is the use of a scanning backlight, which results in an imaging behavior similar to the one present in impulsive displays. In this paper, the realization of a scanning backlight for mobile displays is reported. This employs a backlight with seven individually lit segments for reducing the motion blur. Results of perception experiments performed with two identical displays confirm the benefit of using this technology. Optimal driving conditions result in a major improvement in motion portrayal on mobile LCDs.     

A model of the relationship between psychological characteristics,mobile phone addiction and use of mobile phones by Taiwanese university female students

While many researches have analyzed the psychological antecedents of mobile phone addiction and mobile phone usage behavior, their relationship with psychological characteristics remains mixed. We investigated the relationship between psychological characteristics, mobile phone addiction and use of mobile phones for 269 Taiwanese female university students who were administered Rosenberg’s self-esteem scale, Lai’s personality inventory, and a mobile phone usage questionnaire and mobile phone addiction scale. The result showing that: (1) social extraversion and anxiety have positive effects on mobile phone addiction, and self-esteem has negative effects on mobile phone addiction. (2) Mobile phone addiction has a positive predictive effect on mobile phone usage behavior. The results of this study identify personal psychological characteristics of Taiwanese female university students which can significantly predict mobile phone addiction; female university students with mobile phone addiction will make more phone calls and send more text messages. These results are discussed and suggestions for future research for school and university students are provided.     

Effect of SAM hand phantom on TRP of EN‐DC 5G terminal

5G terminal is more susceptible to environmental impacts because of its more sophisticated and complex design. To investigate the effect of human hands on 5G terminal, we construct the measurement system and test the transmission performance of 5G mobile phone in the free space and human hand model, respectively. The combination of B3 (4G) and N77 (5G) TRP is tested and analyzed since 5G mobile phones need to be connected to both 4G and 5G networks under NSA network. It is obtained that the TRP tested in SAM hand phantom is lower than that of measurements in free space. Moreover, the measured results show that left hand and right hand have different impact on the performance of the mobile phone, which is closely related to the layout of the mobile phone. Therefore, we cannot only use the level of EIRP to evaluate the transmitting performance of DUT, but also need to introduce abnormal rate to evaluate. The abnormal rates of N77 are higher than that of B3 when the DUT is fixed in SAM hand phantom. The test results can help researchers to optimize the layout of mobile phones.