Increasingly, we use mobile applications and services in our daily life activities, to support our needs for information, communication or leisure. However, user acceptance of a mobile application depends on at least two conditions; the application's perceived experience and the appropriateness of the application to the user's context and needs. Yet, we have a weak understanding of a mobile user's Quality of Experience (QoE) and the factors influencing it. This paper presents 4 week long, 29 Android phone users study, where we collected both QoE and underlying network's Quality of Service (QoS) measures through a combination of user, application and network data on the user's phones. We aimed to derive and improve the understanding of users' QoE for a set of widely used mobile applications in users' natural environments and different daily context. We present data acquired in the study and discuss implications for mobile applications design.
Inevitably, mobile applications and services on a growing scale assist us in our daily life situations, fulfilling our needs for leisure, entertainment, communication or information. However, user acceptance of a mobile application depends on the application's perceived quality of experience (QoE) and it also includes the criticality of the application to the user's context and situation at hand. Statistics for usage of mobile applications provided via ‘app stores' show that more than 50% of these applications never reach a minimal required user acceptance level, and get removed from the store. However, despite the importance of understanding of the mobile user QoE, a sound methodology for evaluation of this experience, and of factors influencing it, does not exist. Moreover, this QoE relates to the level of quality of service (QoS) provided by the underlying service and network infrastructures, which usually is provided at ‘best-effort' level. Therefore, in our research we aim to provide a set of rigorous and robust methodological steps to be taken to quantify a mobile user QoE in his natural environments and different contexts, and to analyze its relation with the underlying QoS. We aim to evaluate the applicability if the methodology in a large scale mobile user study for a set of widely used mobile applications.
Background: Mental health has long been a neglected problem in global healthcare. The social and economic impacts of conditions affecting the mind are still underestimated. However, in recent years it is becoming more apparent that mental disorders are a growing global concern and there is a necessity of developing novel services and researching effective means of providing interventions to sufferers. Such novel services could include technology-based solutions already used in other healthcare applications but are yet to make their way into standard psychiatric practice. Methods: This manuscript proposes a system where sensors are utilised to devise an “early warning” system for patients with bipolar disorder. The system, containing wearable and environmental sensors, would collect behavioural data independent from the patient's self-report. To test the feasibility of the concept, a prototype system was devised, which was followed by trials including four healthy volunteers as well as a bipolar patient. Results: The sensors utilised in the study yielded behavioural data which may be of significant use in detecting early effects of a bipolar episode. Basic processing performed on particular data inputs provided information about activity patterns in areas, which are usually strongly influenced by the course of Bipolar Disorder. Conclusions: The manuscript discusses the basic usage issues and other barriers which are to be tackled before technology-based approaches to mental care can be successfully rolled out and their true value appraised.
3D geodata are more and more available as well as realtime visualization possibilities with free three-dimensional viewers such as Google Earth. This implies a growing demand of 3D city models, which are 3D representations at the scale of the city. Despite their intended wide range of applications, such models cannot be used for many urban tasks as they cannot represent the urban information associated with these tasks. On the contrary, ontologies have proven their capacity and usability in the representation of information and knowledge of various domains. In this paper we will present, on the basis of case studies, how ontologies can overstep the semantic limitation of 3D city models and how ontology-based models can be interconnected thus increasing the interoperability of urban information.
There exist many popular crowdsourcing and social services (Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)) to share information and documents such as Flickr, Foursquare, Twitter , Facebook, etc. They all use metadata, folksonomy and more importantly a geographic axis with GPS coordinates and/or geographic tags. Using this available folksonomy in VGI services we propose a logical approach to highlight and possibly discover the characteristics of geographic places. The approach is based on the notion of spatial coverage and a model of tags categorization and on their semantic identification, using semantic services such as GeoNames, OpenStreetMap or WordNet. We illustrate our model with Flickr to retrieve the characteristics (function, usage?) of places even if those places have a small number of related photos. Those found characteristics allow tag disambiguation and can be use to complete the semantic gap on places and POIs such as the function of buildings, which can exist in geographic services.
Health care is one of the most prominent areas for the application of wireless technologies. New services and applications are today under research and development targeting different areas of health care, from high risk and chronic patients' remote monitoring to mobility tools for the medical personnel. In this direction the MobiHealth1 project developed and trailed a system and a service that is using UMTS for the continuous monitoring and transmission of vital signals, like Pulse Oximeter sensor , temperature, Marker, Respiratory band, motion/activity detector etc., to the hospital. The system, based on the concept of the Body Area Network, is highly customisable, allowing sensors to be seamlessly connected and transmit the monitored vital signal measurements. The system and service was trialed in 4 European countries and it is presently under market validation.
