Designing a personal informatics system for users without experience in self-tracking: a case study

Thanks to the advancements in ubiquitous and wearable technologies, Personal Informatics (PI) systems can now reach a larger audience of users. However, it is not still clear whether this kind of tool can fit the needs of their daily lives. Our research aims at identifying specific barriers that may prevent the widespread adoption of PI and finding solutions to overcome them. We requested users without competence in self-tracking to use different PI instruments during their daily practices, identifying five user requirements by which to design novel PI tools. On such requirements, we developed a new system that can stimulate the use of these technologies, by enhancing the perceived benefits of collecting personal data. Then, we explored how naïve and experienced users differently explore their personal data in our system through a user trial. Results showed that the system was successful at helping individuals manage and interpret their own data, validated the usefulness of the requirements found and inspired three further design opportunities that could orient the design of future PI systems.     

A Quantified Past: Toward Design for Remembering With Personal Informatics

This article questions how people will interact with a quantified past—the growing historical record generated by the increasing use of sensor-based technologies and, in particular, personal informatics tools. In a qualitative study, we interviewed 15 long-term users of different self-tracking tools about how they encountered and made meaning from historical data they had collected. Our findings highlight that even if few people are self-tracking as a form of deliberate lifelogging, many of them generate data and records that become meaningful digital possessions. These records are revealing of many aspects of people’s lives. Through considerable rhetorical data-work, people can appropriate such records to form highly personal accounts of their pasts. We use our findings to identify six characteristics of a quantified past and map an emerging design space for the long-term and retrospective use of personal informatics. Principally, we propose that design should seek to support people in making account of their data and guard against the assumption that more, or “better,” data will be able to do this for them. To this end, we speculate on design opportunities and challenges for experiencing, curating, and sharing historical personal data in new ways.     

Web designers and web users: Influence of the ergonomic quality of the web site on the information search

Despite rapid growth in the number of web sites, there is still a significant number of ergonomic problems which hinder web users. Many studies focus on analysing cognitive processes and difficulties experienced by web users, but very few are interested in web designers’ difficulties or in comparing their respective activities. Towards this end, the two experimental studies presented in this article compare the strategies developed both by professional web designers and (novice vs. experienced) web users while searching for information on web sites of varying ergonomic quality. More precisely, we investigated whether web designers can effectively use their own strategies as web users when designing web sites. We presented a comparison of novice web users, experienced web users and professional web designers searching behavior and cognitive load when using ergonomic and non-ergonomic web sites. In addition, we asked web designers to predict the strategy used by novice web users. Based on the results obtained in the two experiments, we conclude that web designers are not able to predict strategies of novice users and do not behave like novice users. Consequently, ways for supporting web designers in developing a user-centered activity are necessary, and certain ways are suggested at the end of this article.     

个人数据空间管理中的任务挖掘策略

在个人数据空间管理过程中,用户需要处理大量异质数据如邮件、文档、图片等.随着用户数据在数量和种类上的增多,如何有效管理这些数据,为用户提供有效的存储及查询服务成为一个具有挑战性的问题.传统数据管理工具如文件系统、桌面搜索工具等并未给用户提供足够的管理能力.究其原因,个人数据空间是由数据、用户以及服务三要素组成.而传统数据管理工具却忽略了用户这一要素,因此仅能在存储路径或全文索引的基础上提供服务.实际上数据与用户之间具有密不可分的联系,个人数据空间中的数据正是来自于用户行为.而用户行为是由一个一个任务组成的.挖掘个人数据中的任务,可以建立起数据间基于用户行为的语义关系,进而可以为用户提供任务视角的数据管理服务以及基于任务的查询服务.正是基于这一思想,提出了基于用户行为挖掘用户任务的方法.通过分析用户行为,发现个人数据由用户行为产生的时序关系,然后根据该时序关系生成用户的任务.实验证明该方法是有效的.     

Personal Data Management Systems: The security and functionality standpoint

Riding the wave of smart disclosure initiatives and new privacy-protection regulations, the Personal Cloud paradigm is emerging through a myriad of solutions offered to users to let them gather and manage their whole digital life. On the bright side, this opens the way to novel value-added services when crossing multiple sources of data of a given person or crossing the data of multiple people. Yet this paradigm shift towards user empowerment raises fundamental questions with regards to the appropriateness of the functionalities and the data management and protection techniques which are offered by existing solutions to laymen users. These questions must be answered in order to limit the risk of seeing such solutions adopted only by a handful of users and thus leaving the Personal Cloud paradigm to become no more than one of the latest missed attempts to achieve a better regulation of the management of personal data. To this end, we review, compare and analyze personal cloud alternatives in terms of the functionalities they provide and the threat models they target. From this analysis, we derive a general set of functionality and security requirements that any Personal Data Management System (PDMS) should consider. We then identify the challenges of implementing such a PDMS and propose a preliminary design for an extensive and secure PDMS reference architecture satisfying the considered requirements. Finally, we discuss several important research challenges remaining to be addressed to achieve a mature PDMS ecosystem.     

Contextualized mobile recommendation service based on interactive social network discovered from mobile users

Personal context is the most significant information for providing contextualized mobile recommendation services at a certain time and place. However, it is very difficult for service providers to be aware of the personal contexts, because each person’s activities and preferences are very ambiguous and depending on numerous unknown factors. In order to deal with this problem, we have focused on discovering social relationships (e.g., family, friends, colleagues and so on) between people. We have assumed that the personal context of a certain person is interrelated with those of other people, and investigated how to employ his neighbor’s contexts, which possibly have a meaningful influence on his personal context. It indicates that we have to discover implicit social networks which express the contextual dependencies between people. Thereby, in this paper, we propose an interactive approach to build meaningful social networks by interacting with human experts. Given a certain social relation (e.g., isFatherOf), this proposed systems can evaluate a set of conditions (which are represented as propositional axioms) asserted from the human experts, and show them a social network resulted from data mining tools. More importantly, social network ontology has been exploited to consistently guide them by proving whether the conditions are logically verified, and to refine the discovered social networks. We expect these social network is applicable to generate context-based recommendation services. In this research project, we have applied the proposed system to discover the social networks between mobile users by collecting a dataset from about two millions of users.     

Moving towards inclusive design guidelines for socially and ethically aware HCI

Most people acknowledge that personal computers have enormously enhanced the autonomy and communication capacity of people with special needs. The key factor for accessibility to these opportunities is the adequate design of the user interface which, consequently, has a high impact on the social lives of users with disabilities.The design of universally accessible interfaces has a positive effect over the socialisation of people with disabilities. People with sensory disabilities can profit from computers as a way of personal direct and remote communication. Personal computers can also assist people with severe motor impairments to manipulate their environment and to enhance their mobility by means of, for example, smart wheelchairs. In this way they can become more socially active and productive. Accessible interfaces have become so indispensable for personal autonomy and social inclusion that in several countries special legislation protects people from ‘digital exclusion’.To apply this legislation, inexperienced HCI designers can experience difficulties. They would greatly benefit from inclusive design guidelines in order to be able to implement the ‘design for all’ philosophy. In addition, they need clear criteria to avoid negative social and ethical impact on users. This paper analyses the benefits of the use of inclusive design guidelines in order to facilitate a universal design focus so that social exclusion is avoided. In addition, the need for ethical and social guidelines in order to avoid undesirable side effects for users is discussed. Finally, some preliminary examples of socially and ethically aware guidelines are proposed.     

Sensory-augmented computing: wearing the museum's guide

Personal computers have not lived up to their name. Most machines sit on a desk and interact with users for only a small fraction of the day. Notebook computers have become smaller and faster, enabling mobility but the same staid user paradigm persists. Typically you must stop everything you're doing, use both hands, and give the computer your full attention. Wearable computing is poised to shatter our preconceptions of how we should use a computer. A personal computer should be worn like eyeglasses or clothing and continuously interact with the user on the basis of context. With heads-up (head-mounted) displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context-sensing and communication tools, wearable computers may act as intelligent assistants. It is argued that a wearable computing device that perceives its surroundings and presents multimedia information through a heads-up display can behave like an intelligent assistant to fulfill the promise of personal computing     

From the user's perspective: Perceptions of risk relative to benefit associated with using the Internet

We departed from existing studies on Internet use by exploring users' perception of their own use of the Internet. Using a mixed-method explanatory sequential design approach, we first asked users to generate lists of actions they take on the Internet and then asked them why they engage in these 35 activities. Using the information gleaned from the interviews, we developed surveys that asked 261 users (ages 19–68) to rate the perceived risk (defined as situations that contain uncertainty regarding outcomes and/or possess the potential for negative consequences) associated with each action, benefits received from each action, frequency with which they engage in the action, and amount of information they are willing to share to engage in the action. We also assessed a number of individual difference characteristics. Our study results (1) provide an Internet Action list usable in future studies; (2) provide an initial understanding that users (to a degree) engage in Internet actions for the benefits they perceive they gain; (3) show that users share little personal information, if any, to get those benefits; and (4) users have little ability to accurately evaluate the true risk (i.e., due to Internet threats) associated with those actions.     

Anonymous smartphone data collection: factors influencing the users’ acceptance in mobile crowd sensing

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) assumes a collaborative effort from mobile smartphone users to sense and share their data needed to fulfill a given MCS objective (e.g., modeling of urban traffic or wellness index of a community). In this paper, we investigate the user’s perception of anonymity in MCS and factors influencing it. We conducted a 4-week extensive smartphone user study to fulfill three main objectives. (1) Understand if users prefer to share data anonymously or not anonymously. (2) Investigate the possible factors influencing the difference between these two modalities, considering: (a) users’ sharing attitude, (b) shared data kind and (c) users’ intimacy when data are shared (we defined intimacy as the users’ perception of their context with respect to place, number and kind of people around them). (3) Identify further users’ personal factors influencing their perception of anonymity via multiple interviews along the user study. In the results, we show that data are shared significantly more when anonymously collected. We found that the shared data kind is the factor significantly contributing to this difference. Additionally, users have a common way to perceive anonymity and its effectiveness. To ensure the success of anonymization algorithms in the context of MCS systems, we highlight which issues the researchers developing these algorithms should carefully consider. Finally, we argue about new research paths to better investigate the user perception of anonymity and develop anonymous MCS systems that users are more likely to trust based on our findings.     

Chro-Ring: a time-oriented visual approach to represent writer’s history

Personal histories of ancient Chinese writers have attracted many people. This kind of information is always in the form of obscure texts and the multiple facets are interrelated, so learning personal history in a traditional way is time-consuming. Fortunately, information visualization technique can help us with the problem. To clearly present time-oriented information visually about a famous writer to users, we propose Chro-Ring, a visualization system for representing faceted temporal data. It is time-oriented and displays multiple facets of personal information using multiple visualization views with a delicate layout. We implemented it in a scenario and conducted a user study to evaluate its effectiveness.     

A Nonformal Interactive Therapeutic Multisensory Environment for People With Cerebral Palsy

A new multisensory system that aims at fostering the interaction of people with cerebral palsy is presented. This article describes the strategies and technologies used to provide people who have moderate to severe cerebral palsy with playful and fun activities designed according to their abilities. These activities are based on interactive systems that use computer vision and generate graphics and sounds in real time. The well-being that is achieved through the use of these activities is the result of gaining a significant degree of autonomy by the users. The presented system was first developed in the Cerebral Palsy Centre of Tarragona, Spain. Its motivation came from the low rate of users able to interact with computers. Although several assistive technology gadgets and special software applications (e.g., cause–effect and educational activities, simple navigation environments, etc.) were used, most users simply did not understand the interaction mechanisms. It was thought that a highly interactive activity (reinforced with sounds and images closely related with gestures) would be more accessible to most users in spite of their sensory, motor, and cognitive impairments. Tests with impaired users show that the proposal promotes participation, engagement, and play. In this article, the experimental methodology, the used and developed tools, and the results that were obtained are explained.     

Everyday use of computer-mediated communication tools and its evolution over time: An ethnographical study with older people

Based on a 3-year ethnographical study, this paper discusses the prolonged use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools by approximately 400 older people in an adult education centre in Barcelona (Spain). Contrary to oversimplified views of older people as ICT users, this paper shows that they make a very rich use of CMC tools. Relevant elements of this use are their permanent desire to feel and be included, social, independent and competent ICT users. Despite the numerous interaction issues they face when using ICT, some are constant across different tools. Difficulties due to cognition limit their interactions more severely than those problems due to perceiving visual information or using the mouse. By examining the longitudinal aspect of the study, this paper addresses the evolution of technology use and whether the interaction issues that most of the current older people exhibit will be relevant when today’s more ICT literate young adults grow older. Interaction issues due to cognition are time-persistent, and independent of both experience and practice with ICT. Difficulties reading from the screen or using input devices are overcome with ICT experience. The strategies adopted by older people for coping with all these interaction issues are always targeted at feeling and being included, social, independent and competent ICT users. The results deepen current understanding of tools use in connecting older people with their social circles and the interaction issues most of them encounter when using ICT. The results also suggest that cognitive-related problems will be the most important ones in our work with the next generation of older people.     

个人健康管理系统数据库的设计与实现

个人健康管理系统能够帮助人们获得大量有价值的健康信息,为了实现一款安全、高效的个人健康管理系统,在充分考虑用户实际需求的前提下,对该系统数据库进行了设计与实现;首先对系统数据库进行了全面的需求分析,然后进行概念结构设计,形成实体联系(E-R)图,并将(E-R)图进行逻辑结构的转换,根据三范式的要求形成数据关系表,同时,在设计过程中通过牺牲一定存储空间的反范式操作,来换取更加快速的查询速度;通过上述方法,最终设计并实现了一款个人健康信息数据库;该数据库能够满足个人健康管理系统的实际开发需求,并且保证系统的查询运行效率,让用户能够更加方便,快捷的使用该系统对健康数据进行管理,达到帮助用户获得更多、更有价值的健康信息的目的。     

Group and Individual Time Management Tools: What You Get is Not What You Need

Some studies of diaries and scheduling systems have considered how individuals use diaries with a view to proposing requirements for computerised time management tools. Others have focused on the criteria for success of group scheduling systems. Few have paid attention to how people use a battery of tools as an ensemble. This interview study reports how users exploit paper, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and a group scheduling system for their time management. As with earlier studies, we find many shortcomings of different technologies, but studying the ensemble rather than individual tools points towards a different conclusion: rather than aiming towards producing electronic time management tools that replace existing paper-based tools, we should be aiming to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each technology and look towards more seamless integration between tools. In particular, the requirements for scheduling and those for more responsive, fluid time management conflict in ways that demand different kinds of support.     

基于用户行为分析的个人信息检索研究

个人信息检索是指个人计算机上用户搜索个人信息(通常是文档)的过程,与互联网检索相比,个人信息检索能够利用的信息很少,这使得其检索结果的排序更加困难。该文通过考察计算机上的用户行为,对个人信息检索的排序问题进行深入的研究。该文考察的用户行为主要包括用户在检索系统中的查询行为和在计算机上的文件访问行为。该文一方面通过查询行为数据训练出结果排序函数,另一方面通过文件访问行为数据获取文件自身的权重,最后利用统计学习方法结合这两类行为的计算结果。实验结果表明,该文提出的方法好于传统的TFIDF排序方法。     

Mapping the course, marking the trail [personal knowledge management]

Personal knowledge management tools function to help humans consider their information assets and needs before searching, so they can ask insightful questions and form search request better. Extending this approach, Mitretek Systems designed and implemented a prototypes of two post-search tools to use after the initial search. The personal information extraction (PIE) tool helps the user build models to organize and explore the information in a collection of documents. The Knowledge Discovery Trails tool (KD trails) records the routes of information-foraging excursions, so people can share of repeat successful approaches. Tools such as these would let knowledge workers improve the ways they search for and manage information, helping them transform an instinctive behavior into a calculated process.     

Beyond the mouse: Understanding user gestures for manipulating 3D objects from touchscreen inputs

Multi-touch interfaces have emerged with the widespread use of smartphones. Although a lot of people interact with 2D applications through touchscreens, interaction with 3D applications remains little explored. Most 3D object manipulation techniques have been created by designers who have generally put users aside from the design creation process. We conducted a user study to better understand how non-technical users tend to interact with a 3D object from touchscreen inputs. The experiment consists of 3D cube manipulations along three viewpoints for rotations, scaling and translations (RST). Sixteen users participated and 432 gestures were analyzed. To classify data, we introduce a taxonomy for 3D manipulation gestures with touchscreens. Then, we identify a set of strategies employed by users to perform the proposed cube transformations. Our findings suggest that each participant uses several strategies with a predominant one. Furthermore, we conducted a study to compare touchscreen and mouse interaction for 3D object manipulations. The results suggest that gestures are different according to the device, and touchscreens are preferred for the proposed tasks. Finally, we propose some guidelines to help designers in the creation of more user friendly tools.     

Following control approach based on model predictive control for wheeled inverted pendulum robot

Personal robots, which are seen as tools that will be needed to support our aging society, will be expected to support the comfortable lifestyles of healthy young people as well as the elderly. However, excessive and premature robot support may adversely impact the physical abilities of their human owner/operators. In this paper, the authors propose a personal robot equipped with wheeled inverted pendulum control that can carry baggage and follow the human being. Since such robots could remove the drudgery associated with carrying luggage, their use could also encourage people to go outside and walk briskly, which could contribute to improved health management. This paper proposes a novel control approach for a robot following the human being. The proposed approach employs a model predictive control that facilitates consideration of several types of upper and lower level constraints a personal robot would require. The effectiveness of our proposed approach was then verified in experiments using a prototype personal robot.     

CRAWDAD: A Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data at Dartmouth

Wireless network researchers are seriously starved for data about how real users, applications, and devices use real networks under real network conditions. CRAWDAD (Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data at Dartmouth) is a new National Science Foundation-funded project to build a wireless-network data archive for the research community. It will host wireless data and provide tools and documents to make collecting and using the data easy. This resource should help researchers identify and evaluate real and interesting problems in mobile and pervasive computing. To learn more about CRAWDAD and discuss its direction, about 30 interested people gathered at a workshop held in conjunction with MobiCom 2005.