Maslow, A. H. A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-396. 1943. [HTML]

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This is a seminal paper by which Maslow first introduced the hierarchy of human needs. While reading the paper I highlighted a couple of interesting ideas:

– Any motivated behavior must be understood to be a channel through which many basic needs maby be expressed or satisfied.

– Classification of motivations myst ve based upon goals rather than upon istigating;

– Motivations are only one class of determinants of behavior. While behavior is almost always motivated, it is amolst always biologically, culturally and situationally determined as well.

– the present theory should be considered as a program for future research;

– a cause for reversal of the hierarchy is that when a need has been satisfied for a long time this need might become underevaluated.

– another partial eplanation of apparent reversals is seen in the fact that there are many determinant in behavior other than the need and desires (e.g. marthyrs).

– most members ofour society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic need and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs ate the same time.

– our needs emerge only when more prepotent needs have been gratified. When a need is faily well satisfied the next prepotent (‘higher’) need emerge, in turn to dominate the conscious life and to serve as the center of organization of behavior, since gratified needs are not active motivators.

[a more extensive review here]

Kaasinen, E. User needs for location-aware mobile services. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. volume 7, number 1, pp. 70-79. 2003. [PDF]

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This paper present a qualitative study of mobile services that could be enhanced with location-aware features thus providing the user’s point of view. The authors conducted interviews with 13 evaluation groups with a total of 55 persons of different ages, genders, ans socio-economic status. To guide the interactions, they provided participants with structured scenarios and prototypes that they had to test. Also, they conducted interviews with experts during a conference.

The paper draws conclusion about key issues related to users’ needs. Topical information, the kind of information that might change while the user is on the mobe, turned out to be important to the user (e.g., weather forecast, train schedule). They also identified the push vs pull modality of delivery information to the user as being one of the possible issued with designing these kind of services. Users declared the need of having detailed search options, the ability of personalizing the interaction with the service and that of contributing to the system providing data. Also, they discussed the need of giving the ability to the user to override the recommendations of the system (e.g., exporatory search). Privacy was also mentioned.

Dey, A. Understanding and Using Context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 5, No. 1. (20 February 2001), pp. 4-7. [PDF]

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This work builds on previous studies of contextual applications and proposes to define what context is a what context-aware applications are. The author refer to the work of Schilit and Theimer (1994) where context is referred to as location, identities of nearby people and objects, and changes to those objects. A later definition of Schilit , Adams, and Want (1994) and the definition of Pascoe (1998) defines the important aspects of context, which are: where you are, who you are with, and what resources are nearby.

The author consider these definitions as too generic and presents his own: “Context is any information that can be used to characterise the situation of an entity, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves.“

Subsequently, the author defines context-aware applications as: “A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task.” According to the author, there are three categories of features that a context aware application can support: a) presentation of information and services to a user; b) automatic execution of a service for a user; c) tagging of context to information to support later retrieval.

As a last contribution, the paper introduces the situation abstraction, which is an aggregated description of the states of relevant entities.

S. Tamminen, A. Oulasvirta, K. Toiskallio, and A. Kankainen, “Understanding mobile contexts,” Personal Ubiquitous Comput., no. 8, pp. 135–143, 2004. [PDF]

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This paper describes an ethmomethodologically inspired study of 25 participants in Helsinki. The authors were interested in understanding the challenges that ubiquitous computing has to face because of the changing context of the user. The authors wrote their implications thinking about phisical devices mor than thinking about services.

Starting from the definition of context in the HCI field, the authors describe how scholars did not agree on a single definition of context. Their starting point was that contexts are always determined by their specific use situations in relation with the motives, plans, other poeple, mobile computers, and the like. They believe that by explicating the actions and resources by which people go about, they can gain insight on how mobile contexts get done and the extent by which these can be modeled and recognized by ubiquitous devices. The authors organized a group of 25 participants that they shadowed and interviewed during the course of 3 days.

Their storyline was divided into travel episodes consisting of temporally organized action patterns depicting a meaningul journey between two places. A special emphasis was given to finding nodal events, where an action transformed the present context into another recognizable context (e.g., reading the newspaper on the metro).

They describe 5 characteristics of mobile contexts: 1) situational acts within planned ones, actions performed in ad-hoc manner during the journey. Plans do not simply determine action (Suchman). 2) claiming personal an group spaces, users create space around themselves for the actions they are about to take. 3) social solutions to problem sin navigation, seeking help through the social channel. 4) temporal tensions, situations where time becomes problematic in relation to the action at hand and where, at the same time, the temporal aspect of a situation is actively used to orient action. 5) multitasking, social conventions might reduce some cognitive load.

In information technology, vanilla (pronounced vah-NIHL-uh ) is an adjective meaning plain or basic. The unfeatured version of a product is sometimes referred to as the vanilla version. The term is based on the fact that vanilla is the most popular or at least the most commonly served flavor of ice cream.

This article appeared yesterday on “La Vanguardia“, one of the major newspaper in Spain.

domingo, 04 de julio de 2010
NUEVAS INICIATIVAS
MoviPill: jugar y medicarse

El departamento de I+D de Telefónica en Barcelona lleva meses desarrollando un juego para móviles llamado MoviPill que controla la periodicidad con la que algunas personas tienen que tomar pastillas a diario. La principal característica de esta aplicación es que utiliza técnicas persuasivas basadas en el juego y la relación social para conseguir una mayor disciplina de los pacientes a la hora de seguir las indicaciones del médico. Los estudios de la Organización Mundial de la Salud estiman que sólo el 50% de los pacientes siguen las indicaciones de sus médicos a la hora de medicarse. El programa MoviPill, desarrollado por Rodrigo de Oliveira, Mauro Cherubini y Núria Oliver, combina el juego, la relación entre pacientes y un dispositivo para las pastillas que controla si los pacientes dicen la verdad cuando introducen en el teléfono que han cumplido en la toma del medicamento. El programa establece un ranking en el que cada paciente puede ver cómo está situado respecto a otros en el “juego” de tomar la medicación cuando le toca. Pruebas desarrolladas con pacientes en Andalucía demuestran que, al jugar, los incumplimientos se reducen en un 60%.

[LINK]

The article refer to the work we developed last summer on MoviPill, an application for mobile phone to help elderly comply with their medications. The scientific contribution of this work was recently accepted for publication in the forthcoming UBICOMP 2010. [PDF]

S. R. Klemmer, J. Graham, G. J. Wolff, and J. A. Landay, “Books with voices: paper transcripts as a physical interface to oral histories,” in CHI ’03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, (New York, NY, USA), pp. 89–96, ACM, 2003. [PDF]

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This paper describes Books with Voices, an enhacement of paper transcripts enabling random access to digital video interviews on a PDA. Historians collect a huge amount of audio interviews that later are transcribed. However, the audio recording preserves some value as the original voice of the interviewee, the intonation of the words, etc. Unfortunately, because this material is mostly undedited and difficult to find, the textual trasncripts are the preferred source of infromation. Therefore, the authors proposed a prototype that could help relate a certain textual transcript to the original audio souce.

They performed a qualitative evaluation of the prototype with 13 participants. The video helped readers clarify the text and observe non-verbal cues.

The paper contains also a thorough literature review on the subject.

C. Duarte and L. Carriço, When You Can’t Read It, Listen to It! An Audio-Visual Interface for Book Reading, vol. 5616 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 24–33. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009. [PDF]

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This paper describe the Digital Talking Book player for mobile devices, an application that was designed to allow people with visual impairments to learn from audiobooks. It allows the user to replicate the same functionalities of a paper book on digital content. The paper presents an usability evaluation of the prototype.

S. Zerachovitz and M. Zuker, “The book is talking to you – using an audio version of the course textbooks to support learning,” in Proceeding of ITHET07 conference, (Kumamoto, Japan), June 10-13 2007. [PDF]

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This paper presents subjective-reported data that support the thesis that audio-books of course material is helpful for students with learning disabilitites and for those whose main language is not the one the course is taught. The authors found that students like tghe convenience of learning whenever and wherever they choose. Many student listened to the audio books while reading the printed book. Learning by the audio book si more passive than learning by reading. Many students felt that learning while listening to the audio book increased their comprehension.

I. Trancoso, C. Duarte, A. Serralheiro, D. Caseiro, L. Carriço, and C. Viana, “Spoken language technologies applied to digital talking books,” in Proceedings of Interspeech, (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), September 17-21 2006. [PDF]

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This paper presents the DTB player, which offer to visually impaired users an evolution of paper books. The prototype offers a multimodal interface that presents the textual content of the book synchronized with an audio narration, either pre-recorded by a human speaker or constructed using a text-to-speech synthetizer. Speech recognition allows further the user to add bookmarks or annotation to the book. This paper summarized the different language technologies that may be integrated in spoken books and the different application domains in which spoken books might be used.