Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services

This reports research on users’ attitudes towards and use of GSM devices and discusses the implications these have for the future evolution of hand-held devices. It argues that current usage patterns suggest that there is unlikely to be a widespread convergence of information accessing devices and person to person communication devices. It also argues that the latter devices and their associated applications could provide much richer opportunities for communication behaviours than is currently available, and that therefore design efforts within the mobile HCI community should focus on this rather than on information use applications.

The chance encounter with a colleague in the corridor; the discussion around a table or whiteboard in a meeting room; the interactions over sketches on table napkins in a restaurant: those are all examples of spontaneity in the absence of electronic devices. In ubiquitous computing, where there are “hundreds of computers per room” [7]; personal devices carried or worn by the humans; and computational services associated even with non-electronic entities 3/4 people places and things [4] 3/4 the opportunities for spontaneous sharing of ideas and media should multiply [3,5]. In this talk I shall take spontaneity, like mobility, to be a basic human desideratum. While some might prefer the routine, in general we stand to benefit from the serendipitous availability of other people and computational resources as we move around in our everyday lives.At first sight, there is room for optimism about realising that vision. For example, cash machines are a reasonably successful example of the design of “walk up and use” devices: in a foreign city, we happen upon one and successfully withdraw cash with little chance of error. But spontaneity in ubiquitous computing is far more challenging. First, it encompasses multi-device, multi-human interaction. For example, one user shows the other a document from their mobile personal server [6] on a convenient nearby screen; a group of friends play their media to one another using whatever devices there are between them in a bedroom or living-room [1]. Second, the invisibility of wireless associations can be as much of a hindrance as an aid to spontaneity [2].I will examine the opportunities and the challenges for spontaneous interaction, using case studies to make a progress report for the research community.

Mobile urban environments present a challenge for context-aware computers, because they differ from static indoor contexts such as offices, meeting rooms, and lecture halls in many important ways. Internal factors such as task goals are different-external factors such as social resources are dynamic and unpredictable. An empirical, user-centered approach is needed to understand mobile contexts. For these ends, we present insights from an ethnomethodologically inspired study. The data consist of travel episodes of 25 adult urbanites (incl. elderly, single mothers, adolescents) in Helsinki. We present how situational and planned acts intermesh in navigation, how people create personal spaces while waiting, and how temporal tensions develop and dissolve. Furthermore, we provide examples of social solutions to navigation problems, examine aspects of multitasking, and consider design implications for context-aware mobile computing.

We have performed an ethnographic study that reveals the importance of social interaction, and especially traffic encounters, for the enjoyment of biking. We summarized these findings into a set of design requirements for a service supporting mobile interaction among motorcyclists. The Hocman prototype is designed to meet these requirements. It is an application for handheld devices equipped with wireless ad hoc networking interfaces. It uses a peer-to-peer architecture to accomplish sharing of HTML documents with peers in the immediate proximity. The aim of sharing is to spark social interaction among motorcyclists during brief encounters. We report a field trial on the prototype service in its naturalistic setting. Despite the unmanageable setting, e.g. the vast area, the speed, and unacquainted users, we demonstrate field trials as an effective approach to get feedback on how well a prototype service fulfils the design requirements. The results indicate that the conceptual idea of Hocman was appreciated, which suggest that the focus on interaction in traffic encounters fit with current practice of motorcycling.

We present a case of mobile and tangible computing prototypes developed for architecture design. We have carried out extensive observation of how architecture students visit places, collect material and manipulate it in design projects. The direct implications we inferred analyzing the field work material were the need of mobile support to link contextual information and the collected material. Moreover we envisioned the opportunity to create a tool to navigate and manipulate material from visits. Finally we identified the need of integrating and linking digital media from visits, with the physical environment in the atelier. We have concretized the user needs in a scenario and we describe a set of prototypes: a mobile application to create a media path of the visits, a visualizing tool to navigate and manipulate it, and an infrastructure in the atelier environment to share and access media objects and links between them. In the discussion we analyze challenges in integrating two design spaces of architects with computational support: the remote sites and visits on one hand, the atelier environment with design representations on the other.

Wearable computers are a unique point in the mobile computing design space. In this paper, we examine the use of a wearable in everyday situations. Specifically, we discuss findings from a case study of an expert wearable computer user in an academic research setting over an interval of five weeks. We examine the use of the computer by collecting periodic screen shots of the wearable’s display and utilize these screen shots in interview sessions to create a retrospective account of the machine’s use and the user’s context. This data reveals that the user employs the computer to augment his memory in various ways. We also found evidence of the wearable’s use while engaged in another primary task. Furthermore, we discuss the intricate strategies developed by the participant that enable him to utilize the wearable in these roles.

Mobile devices are often used in busy contexts, where the operation takes place – at least temporarily – with limited visual information. In such ‘blind use’, the passive tactile properties of the device become crucial. Two mobile keypads with very different tactile properties were tested in an experiment with twelve experienced mobile phone users. Results highlight the importance of passive tactile feel. Most clear differences were seen in errors: while the keypad with high tactile cues could be used even in total absence of visual information, the performance with low tactility keypad collapsed. This underlines the importance of the industrial design in creating mobile devices that are accessible by anyone, in any context. Wearable keypads may also benefit from indirect visual feedback shown on the display. In this study, simple indirect feedback increased subjective ease, although only moderate effects were found in performance. Also more sophisticated feedback types need to be studied.

In many user interfaces with restricted input/output capabilities, a time-out is used to automatically change the UI from one mode into another. In this paper we studied the learning of time-outs and the effect of feedback on it in mobile phone text entry. The effects of three different feedback schemes (auditory/visual/no feedback) on learning of two different time-out lengths were compared. We measured the response time from the time-out occurrence to the time of user’s reaction. Error rates and the development of the response times in different schemes were used as measures of learning. We also studied if the users learned to estimate the time-out lengths, or if they just reacted to the available feedback. There were three main findings. Without feedback, response times had great variation. Auditory feedback enabled faster response times than visual. Finally, we found evidence of short-term learning, but not as much of a lasting effect.

This paper introduces “SyncTap”, a user interface technique for making a network connection between digital devices. When a user wants to connect two devices, he or she synchronously presses and releases the “connection” buttons on both devices. Then, multicast packets that contain press and release timing are sent to the network. By comparing this timing with locally recorded one, both devices correctly identify each other. This scheme is simple but scalable because it can detect and handle simultaneous overlapping connection requests. It can also be used for making secure connections by exchanging public keys. This paper describes the principle, the protocol, and applications of SyncTap.

In recent years there has been considerable research into the development of mobile context-aware applications. The canonical example of such an application is the context-aware tour-guide that offers city visitors information tailored to their preferences and environment. The nature of the user interface for these applications is critical to their success. Moreover, the user interface and the nature and modality of information presented to the user impacts on many aspects of the system’s overall requirements, such as screen size and network provision. Current prototypes have used a range of different interfaces developed in a largely ad-hoc fashion and there has been no systematic exploration of user preferences for information modality in mobile context-aware applications. In this paper we describe a series of experiments with multi-modal interfaces for context-aware city guides. The experiments build on our earlier research into the GUIDE system and include a series of field trials involving members of the general public. We report on the results of these experiments and extract design guidelines for the developers of future mobile context-aware applications.

The design of interactive systems has to take into account the context of use. In this paper we discuss the design criteria to use when developing location-aware, indoor, PDA applications. We analyse some of the technologies currently available for this purpose and examine how to provide users with location-dependent information. The discussion of such criteria is based on our experience in the development of an interactive guide for museum visitors.

The problem of designing and evaluating mobile computing applications is of growing concern in the HCI community, due in part to the difficulty of applying traditional design and evaluation methods to increasingly informal and unstructured usage contexts. We describe the design and evaluation of an integrated location-aware event and meeting planner built to work in a PDA form factor. We discuss the limitations and possibilities of location technology on mobile devices and how it can be used to create useful, usable, and elegant applications. We outline major design decisions, the results of qualitative formative evaluation performed with a small number of participants, and the second iteration of the design. Finally, we offer a number of general considerations on the design process and on specific issues related to mobile handheld applications, including reference metrics for design assessment, user training and cross-over effects from desktop systems.

This paper presents results from a research project aiming at developing an architecture supporting local mobility within hospitals. The architecture is based on fieldwork and design workshops within a large Danish hospital and it has been implemented and evaluated after a pilot phase. Our fieldwork has emphasised the differences between remote mobility, where users travel over long distances, and local mobility, where users walk around within a fixed set of buildings and/or places. Based on our field studies and our design work, we conclude that local mobility puts up three requirements for computer support; (i) it should integrate into the existing infrastructure, (ii) it should support the use of various heterogeneous devices, and (iii) it should enable seamless application roaming between these devices. The paper describes how these requirements were realized in an architecture for local mobility, and how this architecture was implemented in the healthcare domain.

Supporting mobile collaborative work over wide areas is challenging due to the limitations and unreliability of wide area wireless networks. However, variations in patterns of collaboration require different levels of timeliness and synchrony, and place different demands on groupware and its supporting technologies. In this paper, we argue that groupware supported by wide area mobile networks strongly favors loosely coupled work, where workers are autonomous and require a reduced level of communication. We examine the relationship between loosely coupled group characteristics and wide area mobile groupware by considering one particular loosely coupled group-teams of home care workers. Over a two-year period, we analyzed home care work practices, and designed and field tested Mohoc, a mobile groupware application to support home care work. From this experience, we identified four characteristics of loosely coupled groups that enable workers to accommodate the uncertainty of wide area mobile groupware: autonomy and the partitioning of work, clear ownership of data and artifacts, asynchronous awareness, and explicit asynchronous communication.

To achieve the maximum benefit, a collaborative learning activity in the classroom requires effective coordination, synchronization, face-to-face communication, negotiation, interactivity, and participant mobility conditions. In this paper, we perform a usability analysis on a specific collaborative learning activity and identify several problems with fulfilling these conditions. A second usability analysis shows how these problems can be solved with a Mobile Computer Supported Collaborative Learning activity, using wirelessly networked Handhelds. A controlled experiment was run to asses the learning benefit of using Handhelds to support a math-based collaborative learning exercise with seven year old children. Statistically significant results were observed showing that the experimental collaborative learning group using the Handhelds learned more than the control group which had no technological support.

Human Pacman is an interactive role-playing game that envisions to bring the computer gaming experience to a new level of emotional and sensory gratification by setting the real world as a playground. This is a physical fantasy game integrated with human-social and mobile-gaming that emphasizes on collaboration and competition between players. By setting the game in a wide outdoor area, natural human-physical movements have become an integral part of the game. Pacmen and Ghosts are now human players in the real world experiencing mixed reality visualization from the wearable computers on them. Virtual cookies and actual physical objects are incorporated to provide novel experiences of seamless transitions between real and virtual worlds and tangible human computer interface respectively. We believe Human Pacman is pioneering a new form of gaming that anchors on physicality, mobility, social interaction, and ubiquitous computing.

Programming interactive networking applications for mobile devices is currently a laborious process, due to the lack of standardized development support. We introduce a new software platform, {ıt OpenTrek, }primarily intended to assist the development of multiplayer networked games on Pocket PC devices. OpenTrek is similar to game development environments on stationary PCs, such as DirectX, but is fully optimized to work with mobile devices. It is a freely downloadable package with a fast learning curve, which includes support for ad hoc networking and efficient graphics. We successfully deployed OpenTrek in a course at a local university. 28 students with no previous experience in Pocket PC programming were able to create 12 different advanced multiplayer networked games in only five weeks (which included introduction to the platform). By easing the development of advanced interactive applications on Pocket PC, OpenTrek can lower the hurdle for researchers who wish to prototype and test novel user interfaces for mobile devices.

Recent advances in mobile computing and communication technologies have spurred nomadic use of computers. In order to support HCI design for new mobile services, we have developed the MADE (Mobile Applications Development Environment) software development kit. MADE includes M3P (MicroMultiMedia Player), a network-enabled multimedia player easily programmable through the Micromultimedia Services Language (MSL). MSL provides high-level components encapsulating advanced services (e.g. positioning, database query, path search, games, etc.), that can be easily integrated in multimedia presentations. This allows building modular applications that provide information-rich services to the general public through a coherent and homogeneous multimedia HCI, that can be learned with low mental workload. On the other hand, MADE hides the low-level aspects of multimedia and service management, allowing designers to focus on the modalities of presentation of information and on user interaction. The paper describes MADE and briefly sketches some tour guide applications we developed using the tool.

Constructing multi-device interfaces still presents major challenges, despite all efforts of the industry and several academic initiatives to develop usable solutions. One approach which is finding its way into general use, is XML-based User Interface descriptions to generate suitable User Interfaces for embedded systems and mobile computing devices. Another important solution is Model-based User Interface design, which evolved into a very suitable but academic approach for designing multi-device interfaces. We introduce a framework, Dygimes, which uses XML-based User Interface descriptions in combination with selected models, to generate User Interfaces for different kinds of devices at runtime. With this framework task specifications are combined with XML-based User Interface building blocks to generate User Interfaces that can adapt to the context of use. The design of the User Interface and the implementation of the application code can be separated, while smooth integration of the functionality and the User Interface is supported. The resulting interface is location independent: it can migrate over devices while invoking functionality using standard protocols.

Accessing Internet from mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones is becoming widespread. Since these devices do not have the same rendering capabilities as desktop computers, it is necessary for web contents to be transcoded for proper presentation on these types of devices. In this paper we propose an architecture for online transcoding of web documents. In the proposed system, a proxy fetches web pages on the client’s behalf, categorizes the contents into predefined domain-specific categories, and dynamically generates a hierarchical summary view of the relevant topics of the page based on domain specific knowledge. This hierarchical summary of information is then transmitted to the client. The architecture uses domain specific knowledge, but allows easy adaptation to different domains by plugging in rule sets specific to the domain. The system does not expect any adjustment in the existing WWW contents. Results for one test domain, News, are shown. The results indicate that the system can produce high precision transcoded pages online using domain specific knowledge with very little performance penalty.

A framework that provides means for users with special needs to interact with otherwise not accessible public kiosk systems is being introduced. On terminals extended by this framework users can interact with kiosk systems through their own mobile device permitting them customized means for interaction. Additionally personal information stored on the mobile device can be used to provide further assistance to the user. Several psychological studies have been conducted in order to evaluate this approach.

This paper discusses three example studies, that informed user interface guidelines, developed for a set of different classes of mobile devices. The results of these studies show answers to typical design problems arising during the development of mobile applications. Furthermore the studies are meant to be examples showing which kind of studies are required in order to develop a sufficient pool of user interface guidelines covering almost all sorts of mobile devices.

This paper examines and reviews research methods applied within the field of mobile human-computer interaction. The purpose is to provide a snapshot of current practice for studying mobile HCI to identify shortcomings in the way research is conducted and to propose opportunities for future approaches. 102 publications on mobile human-computer interaction research were categorized in a matrix relating their research methods and purpose. The matrix revealed a number of significant trends with a clear bias towards building systems and evaluating them only in laboratory settings, if at all. Also, gaps in the distribution of research approaches and purposes were identified; action research, case studies, field studies and basic research being applied very infrequently. Consequently, we argue that the bias towards building systems and a lack of research for understanding design and use limits the development of cumulative knowledge on mobile human computer interaction. This in turn inhibits future development of the research field as a whole.

In recent years, the proliferation in use of the GSM short message service (or SMS) has prompted numerous studies into person to person messaging via mobile devices. However, to date, there has been relatively little exploration of systems that enable mobile messaging to (potentially ubiquitous) situated displays rather than the mobile devices of particular individuals. In this paper, we describe the results of an ongoing trial to explore the utility of a system that enables lecturers in a computing department to use their mobile phones to send messages to digital displays situated outside their offices.

The use of architectural and historical information in a mobile environment is investigated in this paper. We have created a system for dynamic creation of spatio-temporal VRML-models for context aware clients in a mobile cultural setting. The user can interact and query objects using standard web interfaces as well interaction in the 3D environment. We perform a preliminary user evaluation for iterative design of future versions of the mobile service.

There is a trade-off between security and usability in user authentication for mobile phones. Since such devices have a poor input interfaces, 4-digit number passwords are widely used at present. Therefore, a more secure and user friendly authentication is needed. This paper proposes a novel authentication method called “Awase-E”. The system uses image passwords. It, moreover, integrates image registration and notification interfaces. Image registration enables users to use their favorite image instead of a text password. Notification gives users a trigger to take action against a threat when it happens. Awase-E is implemented so that it has a higher usability even when it is used through a mobile phone.

It is important that studies are carried out to enable developers of new products and services to take into consideration the requirements of the older population and work towards an inclusive design. This paper presents two studies carried out to determine the attitudes and requirements of older users towards location based services and their needs for mobile phone functions and features. The resulting implications and benefits for the developers of future products and services are briefly discussed.

This paper describes an investigation into how haptic output can be used to deliver guidance to pedestrians, who do not have any particular disability, to find their way to a particular destination indoors, e.g., a room in a hospital. A prototype device called GentleGuide was designed iteratively, resolving several design issues for the use of haptic output. GentleGuide has been assessed experimentally. Our conclusion is that haptic output offers significant promise both in improving performance and in reducing the disruptiveness of technology. A negative aspect of exclusively relying on a device like GentleGuide is the reduced location and orientation awareness by some participants.

In this paper, we propose a system to support equipment check patrol. One of the most difficult tasks for patrol worker is discriminating the difference of equipment sound in the check spot. The main purpose of our system is to support human hearing by automatic segmentation, visualization and retrieval of equipment sound. Automatic segmentation function is realized using a new video shot segmentation method. The method uses fluctuating thresholds according to time transition of visual changes, and performs automatic segmentation of recorded sound according to the step of check work. The visualization and the retrieval functions are based on the spectrum subtraction method and analyzing technology of the temporal frequency map. This paper shows the evaluation result of the segmentation method using equipment check video. And it also shows the effectiveness of the proposed visualizing and retrieval method through an example of electric discharge sound.

We are interested in how individuals and communities develop opinions as they design and use new mobile, public-sphere technologies. We situate our work among new considerations of ethnography, mobile technologies and rhetoric and describe the design and pilot installation of a new technology called TexTales designed to support mobile public discourse.

This study established a mobile Internet customer satisfaction (CS) evaluation model using the structural equation model. The factors affecting the CS were identified, and grouped into three constructs. Field experts participated in a brainstorming process to extract the factors affecting the CS. Through experiments, it was shown that CS of the mobile Internet service was influenced by information quality, system quality, along with interface quality. For each construct, major factors were again extracted with their importance. The results would be of help for strategic improvement of mobile Internet services and user interface.

Current commercial software frameworks for the development of mobile applications targeted at heterogeneous devices are based on a paradigm of abstract user interface components (or ‘controls’) that change its rendering depending on device characteristics. In this paper, we approach the problem of extending that paradigm to handle adaptiveness to user models for the purpose of improving usability. A generic approach along with its concrete realization on ASP.NET technology is described. The approach is centered on the notion of componentized adaptive behaviors, that can be easily added to user controls by designers. These components can also be chained to come up with more complex behaviors. In addition, some experiences on the automatic, rule-based dynamic addition of such behaviors to concrete controls based on usage data are described. Keywords: Heterogeneous mobile devices, abstract user interface components, adaptive hypermedia.

This work is about the use of dynamically produced video clips to present information on the small screen of a PDA. These video clips are part of a museum guide and are built as sequences of pictures synchronized with a dynamic audio commentary. The transitions among the pictures are planned according to cinematic techniques. The theoretical background is presented, discussing the language of cinematography and the Rhetorical Structure Theory to analyze dependency relationships inside a text. The results of a preliminary evaluation are also presented and discussed.

Although online, handheld, mobile computers offer new possibilities in searching and retrieving information on-the-go, the fast-paced, “sit-forward” style of interaction may not be appropriate for all user search needs. In this paper, we explore how a handheld computer can be used to enable interactive search experiences that vary in pace from fast and immediate through to reflective and delayed. We describe a system that asynchronously combines an offline handheld computer and an online desktop Personal Computer, and discuss some results of an initial user evaluation.

This paper shows applied usability rules and guidelines by means of a UMTS trial application. The application was designed for the PocketPC environment, running within its own full screen user interface. All user interface elements were designed completely new to provide the necessary added value for the end user that 3G is promising.

In this paper, we introduce a mobile communication tool which uses location and schedule information. From the lessons learned by conducting user studies on our previous system, we made improvements by implementing the use of mobile phones equipped with a GPS and a J2ME. We conducted user studies for this new system, and the results showed that differences in the size of the area in which users move about as they conduct their daily activities might account for their different preferences.

This paper describes ongoing research into the understanding and modeling of physical environments for the development of mobile location aware information services. The value of a location aware information service relies fundamentally on the relations to its physical surroundings within the context of the social settings of its users. Based on methods developed within architecture proposing the use of ethnographic field studies for acquiring insight into people’s use of physical environments, a research design is proposed for describing and analyzing the relations between architectural, social and informational space of the recently built Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia. Preliminary outcomes of this study indicate that the proposed research design assists in understanding and modeling a physical environment and identifying a number of shortcomings valuable for the development of location aware information services for such environments.

Searching books in large libraries can be a difficult task for novice library users. This paper presents SmartLibrary, a location-aware mobile library service demonstrated in the main library of the University of Oulu. The service provides map-based guidance to books and collections on a PDA. SmartLibrary is a completely software-based solution, which can be provisioned atop a WLAN installed for wireless Internet access, without any additional hardware. In a user evaluation conducted with over 30 patrons SmartLibrary was preferred over traditional shelf classification for finding books. After user evaluation the main library added SmartLibrary into their standard customer service.

This paper describes a new type of application, which we foresee will be available on mobile devices in the future. In this paper we describe how we designed the application. The application is a parking ticket application (V-Ticket) for use on mobile devices. The application tries to match the needs of the user whilst taking into account the problems inherent in small wireless handheld devices such as limited network bandwidth, limited processing power and display dimensions.

In this paper we propose a wearable vision interface system named “I’m Here!” to support a user’s remembrance of object location in everyday life. The system enables users to retrieve certain information from a video database that has recorded a set of the latest scenes of target objects which were held by the user and were observed from the users’ viewpoint. We propose the object recognition method to associate the video database with the name of objects observed in the video. The offline experiments demonstrate that the system is useful enough to recognize the objects.

In previous works we have been developing a tourism support prototype that offers a proven solution for aspects of multi-platform, personalization and spatial-awareness. The aim of this paper is to analyze its drawbacks and to propose a framework and the underlying architecture, inspired by the model-based approach, to solve those relying on the principle of abstraction. It consists of a reflexive architecture that allows specifying a generic user interface (UI) independently of the rest of the implementation, fulfilling the plasticity property. Developers only have to focus on modelling the functionality of the application -residing at a base level-, leaving the interface to a meta level, constructing thereby {ıt interfaces “on the fly”}. The generation of the UI is not carried out until run-time, translating automatically abstract interaction components to concrete ones according to the device, the user’s features and the current context, accordingly reusable in other applications.

This paper addresses context awareness of user interaction in real spaces where a number of places devoted to interaction are defined, following a concept called interaction locus (IL). In the IL a coordinated set of information notifies the user about the specific nature of the place he/she has currently entered. The interaction takes place through mobile devices which manage the context of the user, and is mediated by two agents that are called the genius loci and the numen of the user. Context awareness is achieved by cooperation between the two agents, which interact according to the user history and the place interaction opportunities. An implementation architecture is described, suited for mixed reality environments. A case study related to cultural heritage is presented.

The goal of this work is the design of an environment for supporting run time migration of Web applications among different platforms. This allows users interacting with a Web application to change device and continue their interaction from the same point. The migration takes into account the runtime state of the interactive application and the different features of the devices involved. We consider Web applications developed through a multiple-level approach using: the definition of the tasks to support, the abstract description of the user interface, and the actual code. The runtime migration engine exploits information regarding the application runtime state and higher level information on the available target platforms. Runtime application data are used to achieve interaction continuity, while information on the different platform types involved are deployed to adapt the application’s appearance and behaviour to the specific device.

Mobile work situations within home care of the elderly require immediate and ubiquitous access to patient-oriented data. We intend to develop a mobile information system that provides correct information in a proper way to the right person in the appropriate occasion of care. This requires a thorough user needs analysis that so far often has been neglected during systems development in health care. We conducted the user needs analysis in interdisciplinary working groups in order to achieve a holistic view of the entire work process. This allows for the development of not only patient-oriented but care process oriented systems. In this paper, we describe how the user needs analysis was conducted, the impact of this work on the user group and some of the requirements found to be specific for mobile IT-support for home care of the elderly.

Most research in context-aware computing offers definitions of context that consist solely of measurable information. Using mobile telephony as an example of a computing area, we provide a set of context information relevant to the area drawn from a qualitative case study: identity, location, time and present activity. After arguing that these context measures are not the same for other areas of computing, three guidelines for designing context-aware features for mobile telephony are provided. We conclude that context information should be defined for the area in which the researcher is present instead of attempting to provide an overall definition of context.

In this paper we present our component architecture considering HCI as a technical service of a business component just like security or persistence. The dialog between UI and business components is managed by an interaction/coordination service that allows the reconfiguration of components without modifying them. Such a service has proved its interest in software engineering and we will show that it is well adapted to handle adaptation of HCI.

Augmented Reality technologies, which enable virtual object overlay on real images, are useful for interactive tele-instruction. Current advances in mobile computing and imaging technologies enabled image capture on small mobile devices (e.g., PDA’s) using micro cameras. However, this imaging capability is not being efficiently leveraged, not yielding many useful applications. In this paper, an interactive mobile tele-instruction technology is described where an on-site non-expert can be instructed using graphics and text annotations created by an off-site expert. For tracking and 3D visualization, augmented reality technologies are applied.

This study generally is purposed to develop a mobile augmentative and alternative communication system (hereinafter referred to as “a mobile AAC system”). Also the device is aimed as a mobile AAC system for HCI, allowing a handicapped person to make a general communication with others in a free and convenient manner. This study specifically presents a method of predicting predictions, which contributes to reducing the size of the mobile system. This method includes selecting vocabulary and classifying it by domains so as to meet the characteristics of the mobile AAC communication, using a noun thesaurus for semantic analysis, and building a sub-category dictionary. Predicting predicates by selecting symbols in accordance with this method is tested and the utility thereof is confirmed.

Navigation support will form a critical component of future mobile computing systems. However, the ability of people to navigate in unfamiliar environments can vary substantially. In this paper, it is argued that the current generation of mobile devices and associated software does not adequately support the navigational requirements of a broad segment of users and that alternative strategies and design criteria need to be considered.

The successful and effective mobile services of the future will be those that meet the needs of users. Therefore, any mobile service design project must have the needs of users paramount in its thinking. In order to keep the characteristics and needs of a user population to the fore throughout design and development, the technique of Personas is examined. This technique involves creating a set of composite characters to represent a target population. An obvious challenge is the choice of the set of Personas to represent a given population. This paper discusses how this choice might be made on the basis of a statistical analysis of a user population.

In this paper, we describe a near-complete Pocket PC implementation of a Mobile Multi-Modal Interaction (M3I) platform for pedestrian navigation. The platform is designed to easily support indoor and outdoor navigation tasks, and uses the combination of several modalities for presentation output and user input. Whereas 2D/3D-graphics and synthesized speech are used to present useful information on routes and places, fused input from embedded speech and gesture recognition engines allow for situated user interaction.

Breakthroughs in mobile and wireless technologies have revolutionized the world in virtually every aspect. While much work has been and is being done regarding the opportunities and challenges arising from these technologies, much less exists on the unique opportunities and implications the same devices present and raise to users with special needs. Furthermore, the existing little work is normally specific to only a certain type of disability or device. While addressing a specific type of disability or mobile device has its place, it is also significant to ensure that one is operating based on a holistic perspective/framework of the entire audience of the disabled mobile device users.