Using RSS feeds for effective mobile web browsing

While mobile phones are becoming more popular, wireless communication vendors and device manufacturers are seeking new applications for their products. Access to the large corpus of Internet information is a very prominent field. However, the technical limitations of mobile devices pose many challenges. Browsing the Internet using a mobile phone is a large scientific and cultural challenge. Web content must be adapted before it can be accessed by a mobile browser. This work presents a new methodology that uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for the adaptation of web content for use in mobile phones. This methodology is based on concrete design guidelines and supports different viewing modes. The mobile tool provided using the RSS feeds is evaluated based on user-centered evaluation and the results are presented.     

Automatic form filling on mobile devices

Filling out forms for web based services on mobile devices is a very time consuming and frustrating task for users because of the limited text input capabilities. This is a critical bottleneck to obtaining a wide acceptance of such services, especially mobile commerce that often requires filling user data. We developed an architecture based on a local proxy on a mobile device and a lightweight algorithm for a comprehensive analysis of forms, which leads to the most probable user data to be filled in, driven by an initial rule set [Chie Noda, John Hamard, Enrico Rukzio, Alexander De Luca, Method and Apparatus for Automatic Form Filling on Mobile Devices, Patent. Publication number EP1777629, Publication date 2007-04-25]. We further discuss our implementation and the evaluation results for the algorithm as well as the usability of the prototype.     

A heuristic checklist for an accessible smartphone interface design

Smartphone technology has evolved into a multi-functional device with advanced capabilities, but this mobile technology remains inaccessible to many individuals with visual impairments or upper extremity disabilities. This paper provides a heuristic checklist for accessible smartphone interface design, developed through reviewing existing design standards and guidelines and validating these guidelines with user involvement. Specifically, a set of preliminary user requirements (59 items) was extracted from existing standards, guidelines, and user requirements regarding mobile handheld device accessibility. Subsequently, the requirement set was filtered using a participatory method and then integrated to create an operational version of design guidelines. These guidelines were then used in a heuristic evaluation and usability testing on high-fidelity prototypes produced by a commercial manufacturer. A heuristic checklist for designing accessible smartphones was formed, which may also be applicable to other touchscreen handheld devices (e.g., printer screen) in terms of accessibility features. The initial set of 59 user requirements was re-organized into 44 statements in six general categories: mechanical controls, display, speech and general operation controls, audio feedback controls, touch-operated controls, and others. Using results from both qualitative and quantitative methods provides support, though with some limitations, for this accessibility checklist. This checklist is intended as a practical design support tool for use in early design phases of handheld products. A number of challenges and limitations are discussed as well.     

Quantitative assessment of mobile web guidelines conformance

Conformance metrics for the mobile web can play a crucial role as far as engineering mobile websites are concerned, especially if they are automatically obtained. In this way, developers can have an idea in numeric terms of how suitable their developments are for mobile devices. However, there are a plethora of devices with their own particular features (screen size, formats support, etc.) that restrict a unified automatic assessment process. This paper proposes a tool-supported method for device-tailored assessment in terms of conformance with Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, including the definition of five quantitative metrics for automatically measuring mobile web conformance: Navigability, Page layout, Page definition, User input and Overall score. The behaviour of these metrics was analysed for different devices and different web paradigms, both mobile web pages and their equivalent desktop pages. As expected, the results show that mobile web pages on more capable devices score higher. In addition, 20 users took part in an experiment aimed at discovering how conformance-based scores relate to usability dimensions. The results demonstrate that automatic scoring approaches strongly correlate with usability scores obtained by direct observation, such as task completion time and user satisfaction. This correlation is even stronger for the device-tailored assessment than the one that assumes a general profile for all devices. For instance, results show a strong negative correlation between Overall score and task completion time: ρ (9) = −0.81, (p < 0.05) for the generalist approach and ρ (9) = −0.88 for the device-tailored one, entailing that mobile web guidelines and the metrics based on their conformance capture usability aspects. This result challenges the widely accepted belief that conformance to guidelines does not imply more usable web pages, at least for web accessibility conformance.     

Non-visual access to mobile devices: A survey of touchscreen accessibility for users who are visually impaired

Accessibility revolves around building products, including electronic devices and digital content, so that diverse users can conveniently utilize them, irrespective of their capabilities. In recent years, the concept of touchscreen accessibility has gained a remarkable attention, especially within the considerable reliance on mobile touchscreen devices (MTDs) for information acquisition and dissemination as we witness nowadays. For users who are visually impaired, MTDs unlock different opportunities for independence and functioning. Thus, with the increasing ubiquity of MTDs and their potential extensive utility for all demographics, it becomes paramount to ensure that these devices and the content delivered on them are accessible. And while it might seem straightforward to achieve accessibility on MTDs, attaining this outcome is governed by an interplay between different elements. These involve platform (i.e., operating system) built-in support of accessibility features, content rendering modalities and structures pertaining to user needs and the peculiarities of MTDs as informed in standard accessibility guidelines, user studies uncovering preferences and best practices while interacting with MTDs, national legislations and policies, and the use of third-party devices such as assistive technologies. In this paper, mobile touchscreen accessibility for users who are visually impaired is surveyed with focus on three aspects: (1) the existing built-in accessibility features within popular mobile platforms; (2) the nature of non-visual interaction and how users who are visually impaired access, navigate, and create content on MTDs; and (3) the studies that tackled different issues pertaining to touchscreen accessibility, such as extraction of user needs and interaction preferences, identification of most critical accessibility problems encountered on MTDs, integrating mobile accessibility in standard accessibility guidelines, and investigation of existing guidelines in terms of sufficiency and appropriateness.     

Informal learning with PDAs and smartphones

Abstract There has been increasing interest in informal learning in recent years alongside interest in how such learning can be supported by technology. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which adults make use of their own mobile devices to support informal learning. In this study, a survey was used to investigate whether, and to what extent, experienced users of mobile devices use their mobile devices to support intentional informal learning. If so, do they make use of mobile device connectivity to support opportunistic informal learning and does such connectivity support or encourage collaborative informal learning? Experienced mobile device users were recruited from web forums and business, and asked whether they used their devices to support informal learning. A pattern of learning uses emerged, some of which deployed the mobile device capabilities relatively unchanged, others triggered adaptations to typical learning activities to provide a better fit to the needs of the learner. These informal learning activities provided the basis for the design of a flexible mobile learning framework that can be extended to support developments in mobile technology, and increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies by informal learners.     

Barriers common to mobile and disabled web users

World Wide Web accessibility and best practice audits and evaluations are becoming increasingly complicated, time consuming, and costly because of the increasing number of conformance criteria which need to be tested. In the case of web access by disabled users and mobile users, a number of commonalities have been identified in usage, which have been termed situationally-induced impairments; in effect the barriers experienced by mobile web users have been likened to those of visually disabled and motor impaired users. In this case, we became interested in understanding if it was possible to evaluate the problems of mobile web users in terms of the aggregation of barriers-to-access experienced by disabled users; and in this way attempt to reduce the need for the evaluation of the additional conformance criteria associated with mobile web best practice guidelines. We used the Barrier Walkthrough (BW) method as our analytical framework. Capable of being used to evaluate accessibility in both the disabled and mobile contexts, the BW method would also enable testing and aggregation of barriers across our target user groups.We tested 61 barriers across four user groups each over four pages with 19 experts and 57 non-experts focusing on the validity and reliability of our results. We found that 58% of the barrier types that were correctly found were identified as common between mobile and disabled users. Further, if our aggregated barriers alone were used to test for mobile conformance only four barrier types would be missed. Our results also showed that mobile users and low vision users have the most common barrier types, while low vision and motor impaired users experiencing similar rates of severity in the barriers they experienced. We conclude that the aggregated evaluation results for blind, low vision and motor impaired users can be used to approximate the evaluation results for mobile web users.     

J2MEMicroDB: a new Open Source lightweight database engine for J2ME mobile devices

J2ME is the development platform for mobile devices with larger support and availability in the market right now. Due to the minimalist definition of this architecture it does include neither API’s for data persistence management, like object serialization, and relational database access nor standard APIs to access a remote host. This paper presents J2MEMicroDB, an Open Source software that implements object serialization, a local relational database engine on the mobile device and a remote database access protocol that allows access to any JDBC database. In the design and implementation of J2MEMicroDB specific requirements and limitation of mobile devices have been considered. Even some performance improvements have been developed, like BTree indexing structures which improves significantly the efficiency of the searches, as the presented cross-platform benchmarking proves.     

Discovering determinants of users perception of mobile device functionality fit

In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in the use of mobile devices. The ubiquitous and multifunctional nature of these devices with internet connectivity and personalization features make them a unique context to investigate what factors shape mobile users perception of their mobile device functionality fit with their needs. In order to answer this question, we proposed a research model in which we introduced multifunctional use and perceived device-functionality fit as two new constructs. The results of our study show that a significant portion of individuals’ perceived device-functionality fit can be explained by their perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and symbolic value of the device. In terms of the theoretical contribution, our research suggests revamping the concept of device-functionality fit when it comes to mobile devices by accounting for both hedonic and utilitarian aspects of mobile devices. In terms of practical implications, our study highlights the importance of the social image that mobile devices create in the society for their users as well as the importance of look-and-feel aspects of mobile devices in shaping users perception of fit between functionalities of their mobile devices and their needs.     

A modeling and simulation framework for mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is an emerging paradigm for transparent elastic augmentation of mobile devices capabilities, exploiting ubiquitous wireless access to cloud storage and computing resources. MCC aims at increasing the range of resource-intensive tasks supported by mobile devices, while preserving and extending their resources. Its main concerns regard the augmentation of energy efficiency, storage capabilities, processing power and data safety, to improve the experience of mobile users. The design of MCC systems is a challenging task, because both the mobile device and the Cloud have to find energy-time tradeoffs and the choices on one side affect the performance of the other side. The analysis of the MCC literature points out that all existing models focus on mobile devices, considering the Cloud as a system with unlimited resources. Also, to the best of our knowledge, no MCC-specific simulation tool exists. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a modeling and simulation framework for the design and analysis of MCC systems, encompassing all their components. The main pillar of the proposed framework is the autonomic strategy consisting of adaptive loops between every mobile devices and the Cloud. The proposed model of the mobile device takes into account online estimations of the actual Cloud performance – not only the nominal values of the performance indicators. At the same time, the model of the Cloud takes into consideration the characteristics of the workload, to adapt its configuration in terms of active virtual machines and task management strategies. Moreover, the developed discrete event simulator is an effective tool for the evaluation of an MCC system as a whole, or single components, considering different classes of parallel jobs.     

An economics-based negotiation scheme among mobile devices in mobile grid

In this paper, we propose an economics-based distributed negotiation scheme among mobile devices in mobile grid. In our model, there are energy negotiation and transactions between buyer devices and seller devices. Dynamic allocation of energy resources in mobile grid is performed through online transactions within markets. Mobile devices can be sellers and buyers that use optimization algorithms to maximize predefined utility functions during their transactions. Seller device agents sell the underlying energy resources of the mobile device. Buyer device agent makes buying decisions within the budget constraints to acquire energy resources. An economics-based negotiation algorithm among mobile devices is proposed. The proposed algorithm decomposes mobile grid system optimization problem into a sequence of two sub-problems. In the simulation, the performance evaluation of economics-based negotiation algorithm is evaluated.     

Context-driven encrypted multimedia traffic classification on mobile devices

The Internet has been experiencing immense growth in multimedia traffic from mobile devices. The increase in traffic presents many challenges to user-centric networks, network operators, and service providers. Foremost among these challenges is the inability of networks to determine the types of encrypted traffic and thus the level of network service the traffic needs to maintain an acceptable quality of experience. Therefore, end devices are a natural fit for performing traffic classification since end devices have more contextual information about device usage and traffic. This paper proposes a novel approach that classifies multimedia traffic types produced and consumed on mobile devices. The technique relies on a mobile device’s detection of its multimedia context characterized by its utilization of different media input/output (I/O) components, e.g., camera, microphone, and speaker. We develop an algorithm, MediaSense, which senses the states of multiple I/O components and identifies the specific multimedia context of a mobile device in real-time. We demonstrate that MediaSense classifies encrypted multimedia traffic in real-time as accurately as deep learning approaches and with even better generalizability.     

XMobile: A MB-UID environment for semi-automatic generation of adaptive applications for mobile devices

Ubiquitous Computing promises seamless access to information anytime, anywhere with different and heterogeneous devices. This kind of environment imposes new challenges to software development. For example, information and user interface should be adapted according to contextual characteristics such as user, environment, and access device. In case of device adaptation, the development challenge is related to the heterogeneity of the devices, which requires software engineers to create different versions for each type of device and every platform. This paper proposes a MB-UID (model-based user interface development) approach for semi-automatic generation of adaptive applications for mobile devices. An environment, called XMobile, offers a device-independent user interface framework and a code generation tool for providing fast development of multi-platform and adaptive applications according to device and platform features. A case study is also presented to illustrate how the environment can be used for constructing an application for heterogeneous devices with different network connectivity modes.     

Improving mobile search using content enrichment

Providing an effective mobile search service is a difficult task given the unique characteristics of the mobile space. Small-screen devices with limited input and interaction capabilities do not make ideal search devices. In addition, mobile content, by its concise nature, offers limited indexing opportunities, which makes it difficult to build high-quality mobile search engines and indexes. In this paper we consider the issue of limited page content by evaluating a heuristic content enrichment framework that uses standard Web resources as a source of additional indexing knowledge. We present an evaluation using a mobile news service that demonstrates significant improvements in search performance compared to a benchmark mobile search engine.     

Real-time collaboration through web applications: an introduction to the Toolkit for Web-based Interactive Collaborative Environments (TWICE)

The widespread availability of personal mobile devices, combined with the increasing availability of stationary public devices such as large interactive displays, creates new opportunities for computer-supported collaborative work. In particular, these two factors enable the emergence of collaborative scenarios, whether planned or spontaneous, in any location, and previous obstacles to such collaborative settings such as limitations on the number of devices available for use and infrastructure costs can be overcome more easily. As hardware restrictions diminish, the need for software toolkits that simplify the development of distributed collaborative applications allowing for device heterogeneity, true multi-user interaction and spontaneous emergence increases. In this article, we describe the Toolkit for Web-based Interactive Collaborative Environments whose aim is to address these issues. This is done using current standard web technologies extended for real-time application (and structured using specific development guidelines) while ensuring compatibility with the manifold new evolutions in the currently ongoing development of open web platform (HTML5, websockets, etc). While our own work has mainly focused on synchronous co-located collaborative systems (same place/same time), our solution, the technologies used, as well as the concepts that are introduced are easily extendable for remote and/or asynchronous collaboration.     

Efficient framework for mobile walkthrough application

The past few years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number and variety of graphics intensive mobile applications, which allow users to interact and navigate through large scenes such as historical sites, museums and virtual cities. These applications support many clients and impose a heavy requirement on network resources and computational resources. One key issue in the design of cost efficient mobile walkthrough applications is the data transmission between servers and mobile client devices. In this paper, we propose an effective progressive mesh transmission framework that stores and divide scene objects into different resolutions. In this approach, each mobile device progressively receives and processes only the object’s details matching its display resolution which improves the overall system’s response time and the user’s perception. A fine grained cache mechanism is used to keep the most frequently requested objects’ details in the device memory and consequently reduce the network traffic. Experiments, in simulated and real world environment, are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework under various settings of the virtual scene and mobile device configuration. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can improve the walkthrough system performance in mobile devices, with a relatively small overhead.     

Perses: A framework for the continuous evaluation of the QoS of distributed mobile applications

The increasing capabilities of mobile devices have led to the emergence of new paradigms exploiting them. These paradigms foster the onload and distribution of functionalities on mobile devices, allowing the development of distributed mobile applications. This distribution reduces the latency and the data traffic overhead and improves privacy. As in any other mobile application, their success largely depends on the quality of service (QoS) they offer. Nevertheless, the evaluation of distributed mobile applications is particularly complex due to the number, heterogeneity, and interactions between the devices involved. Current techniques allow developers to assess the quality of a single device, but they are not designed for highly heterogeneous, distributed, and collaborative environments. This paper presents a framework called Perses, which allows the creation of virtual scenarios with multiple heterogeneous mobile devices to launch end-to-end tests to evaluate not only each device but also the interactions among them. The framework was evaluated against a real deployment, showing that the behavior and the quality attributes measured are similar to those of the real deployment, allowing developers to evaluate these applications before launching them. Finally, Perses was integrated into a DevOps methodology to automate its execution and further facilitate its adoption by software companies.     

A mobile crowd sensing ecosystem enabled by CUPUS: Cloud-based publish/subscribe middleware for the Internet of Things

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a novel class of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications for community sensing where sensors and mobile devices jointly collect and share data of interest to observe phenomena over a large geographic area. The inherent device mobility and high sensing frequency has the capacity to produce dense and rich spatiotemporal information about our environment, but also creates new challenges due to device dynamicity and energy constraints, as well as large volumes of generated raw sensor data which need to be processed and analyzed to extract useful information for end users. The paper presents an ecosystem for mobile crowd sensing which relies on the CloUd-based PUblish/Subscribe middleware (CUPUS) to acquire sensor data from mobile devices in a flexible and energy-efficient manner and to perform near real-time processing of Big Data streams. CUPUS has unique features compared to other MCS platforms: It enables management of mobile sensor resources within the cloud, supports filtering and aggregation of sensor data on mobile devices prior to its transmission into the cloud based on global data requirements, and can push information of interest from the cloud to user devices in near real-time. We present our experience with implementation and deployment of an MCS application for air quality monitoring built on top of the CUPUS middleware. Our experimental evaluation shows that CUPUS offers scalable processing performance, both on mobile devices and within the cloud, while its data propagation delay is mainly affected by transmission delay on wireless links.     

Using extended web technologies to develop Bluetooth multi-platform mobile applications for interact with smart things

Nowadays the classic web paradigms are being subjected to changes; every day millions of users around the world use their Smartphones to access web applications from anywhere. The World Wide Web it is one of the biggest repositories of information in the world, and that information is stored in internet servers and repositories, but today in the real world there are many other information sources such as electronic devices with communication capabilities: smart appliances and sensor networks. The Smartphones are equipped with communication hardware elements like the Bluetooth module, which allows the Smartphone to exchange information with nearby electronic devices. Every day more and more mobile applications are being developed for native platforms that use Bluetooth’s communication module to send and receive information from different sources. Native mobile applications use the specific platform’s APIs to manage the Bluetooth communication actions (send and receive information, search for devices, etc.), however, web applications do not have technical capabilities to manage the Smartphone’s Bluetooth communication module and thereof cannot use that kind of information. The main objective of this research work is to design a novel framework that allows classic web applications to use information from nearby electronic devices. The proposed framework must be easy to use and able to be integrated with common web technologies. Developers can use this framework to include new information sources and data exchange procedures in an easy way. The new type of information can be merged with the web to develop or improve algorithms and web applications.     

课堂教学质量评价系统移动智能终端平台的设计与实现

本文利用Google Android平台和PHP动态网页技术实现了移动课堂教学质量评价系统,可以使督导、学生等用户通过智能手机随时随地完成教学评价工作。文中重点讨论了Android移动终端应用程序实现的关键技术。应用实践表明,该移动平台的使用可以进一步地提高工作效率。