Developing Usability Heuristics for Recommendation Systems Within the Mobile Context

Recently, smart phones such as the Galaxy S and IPhone, and tablet PCs such as the Galaxy Tab have been introduced and become widespread in the market, thus the environment for wireless Internet services has been improving. As the market has improved, consumer preferences for mobile devices and the relationship between these devices and wireless Internet services regarding consumer preferences have become a very important issue. However, although there have been a considerable number of studies on the demand for mobile devices, it is not easy to find previous studies on the relationship between consumer preferences for specific attributes of wireless Internet services and the demand for mobile devices. The main purpose of this study is to analyze which mobile device is more likely to be preferred or become the main channel for wireless Internet services and how the demand for each mobile device is influenced by consumer preferences for specific attributes of wireless broadband Internet services used on it, and to induce managerial implications based on the main findings. To derive the results on consumer preferences, conjoint analysis is used. The survey was conducted using 1,000 Korean consumers. In the survey, respondents are allowed to choose more than one hypothetical alternative representing a mobile device combined with a certain type of wireless broadband Internet service if they desired. To estimate the consumer preferences quantitatively, a multivariate probit model is used. According to the estimation results, owing to their portability, smart phones are more likely to become a major channel for wireless Internet services despite their drawbacks in terms of display size and performance. Portability is the most important factor affecting the choice of a mobile device when using wireless Internet services. Therefore, manufacturers of mobile devices for wireless Internet services should improve the overall functionality and performances of mobile devices without negatively affecting portability. However, at the same time, consumer preferences for specific attributes of wireless Internet services are found to affect the demand of each mobile device much differently. Therefore, the prediction that smart phones will be the prevalent mobile device for use of wireless Internet services can be somewhat changed, depending on which and how wireless Internet services are provided to each mobile device and how they affect the demand for each mobile device. As mentioned above, there are significant differences between mobile devices with regard to the effects of mobility, data transfer speed, type of contents or Internet interface for wireless Internet services. It is found that the mobility of wireless Internet service is highly valued for smaller devices, but not much for notebook PCs. In contrast, data transfer speed and similarities in the type of contents or Internet interface to those provided by fixed broadband Internet services become more important for larger mobile devices. Thus, it is necessary for wireless Internet service providers to differentiate and optimize their contents and Internet interfaces properly for various mobile devices. Additionally, it is reasonable that manufacturers of smart phones focus on mobility and portability (or convenience) rather than adding sophisticated functions or pursuing higher-level specifications. Further, for smart phones, for which mobility and convenience are important, wireless Internet service providers should develop and provide easy and convenient programs, rather than advanced programs that require high device performance. Lastly, with respect to individual demographics, young and highly educated people are more likely to be consumers of newly introduced mobile devices for using wireless Internet services. Therefore, these young and highly educated consumers should be considered a major target for manufacturers of mobile devices for wireless Internet services.

From fundamental concepts and theories to implementation protocols and cutting-edge applications, the Handbook of Mobile Systems Applications and Services supplies a complete examination of the evolution of mobile services technologies. It examines service-oriented architecture (SOA) and explains why SOA and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) will play key roles in the development of future mobile services. Investigating current service discovery frameworks, the book covers the basics of mobile services and applications developed in various contexts. The first section provides readers with the required background in mobile services architecture. Next, it details of middleware support for mobile services. The final section discusses security and applications of mobile services. Containing the contributions of leading researchers and academics from around the world, the book: Introduces a new location-based access control model Unveils a simple yet powerful enhancement that enables Web services to locally manage workflow dependencies and handle messages resulting from multiple workflows Examines an event-based location aware query model that continuously aggregates data in specific areas around mobile sensors of interest Addresses the problem of location-based access control in the context of privacy protection Presents a layered architecture of context-aware middleware Considers the development of assistive technology solutions for the blind or visually impaired Discussing architecture for supporting multi-mode terminals in integrated heterogeneous wireless networks, this book addresses the network availability constraint to serve all mobile services originating from a single-user terminal. It examines QoS protocols and their enhancements in supporting user mobility. Analyzing mobile services security vulnerabilities, it details security design best practices that mobile service developers can use to improve the security of their mobile systems.

The aim of this programme of research was to build upon prior work regarding the heuristic evaluation of mobile applications in two important areas. A mixed methods approach was taken to address the research questions using questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, document analysis and statistical analyses. The first contribution of this programme of research was to adapt traditional usability heuristics, so they could be used to more effectively evaluate the usability of mobile applications. The resulting set of mobile application usability heuristics uncovered the highest number of usability issues in absolute terms, as well as the most critical issues within a well-known travel mobile application when compared to two other sets of usability heuristics. In addition, the set of mobile application usability heuristics defined within this programme of research was ranked as the most useful set by participants knowledgeable in the field of human-computer interaction when compared to two other sets of usability heuristics. The second contribution of this programme of research was to extend the set of mobile application heuristics allowing human-computer interaction researchers and practitioners to more effectively consider the potential impact of context of use on the usability of mobile applications. This addressed a gap in the literature as few effective methods existed for this purpose. The protocol was deemed easy to use, easy to understand and easy to learn by participants knowledgeable in the field of human-computer interaction. The beneficiaries of this programme of research are human-computer interaction researchers and practitioners, as well as mobile application users.

Today’s mobile devices and networks enable the development of novel mobile service applications. Developing such applications raises many challenges including heterogeneity in terms of mobile operating systems and APIs, service availability and scalability, and providing for the diverse communication needs of different applications. In this paper, we present an overview of the Odin middleware platform whose aim is to address these challenges. Odin utilises a surrogate-based architectural model to promote a mobile service’s scalability and availability. The middleware is reconfigurable, allowing mobile applications to adapt to changing operating conditions and minimise resource consumption. It also includes an optimised communication channel that masks the complexity of interacting with mobile services over mobile telecommunications networks. Using Odin’s interfaces and standards compliance, mobile applications and services with consistent communication behaviour can be easily implemented on heterogeneous platforms. Through quantitative evaluation, Odin’s message-based communication primitives have been demonstrated to perform favourably with leading industry push messaging providers.

The accelerated development of new technology, particularly on mobile application has increased teacher’s responsibility as a learning facilitator. Since technology is improving, many applications keep on coming into the market to fulfill user demands. Mobile learning application is very useful in enriching the mobile learning experience of children. However, some applications fail to assist and increase children knowledge on the subject they studied. Moreover, some children are not interested in mobile applications due to issues such as poor interfaces. In this paper, some previous studies on quality attributes used to evaluate mobile learning applications were reviewed. A systematic literature review approach was employed to search previous papers and studies on usability quality attributes, particularly for mobile learning applications. The search strategy identified numerous studies on usability for mobile learning applications for children. The result showed that the top four usability quality attributes are efficiency, effectiveness; learnability and user satisfaction. The studies reviewed showed that usability evaluations were conducted during implementation phase only, and evaluation is often built as a description of the case study. This study explored the current literatures on the subject matter and stimulates further studies that will lead to improved usability and design of mobile learning applications for children.

The 'MySuara' app is a personalised augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) mobile application designed for Malaysian special education classrooms, offering multilingual support and a unique dual-screen modelling feature to enhance teacher-student communication. Besides, it allows the customisation of symbol sets to meet individual student needs, providing a personalised solution for teachers and caregivers. This study aims to assess the usability of the 'MySuara' mobile app using a developed questionnaire, as usability is quantifiable and crucial for user satisfaction. Conducting such evaluations can unveil flaws in the system and reveal user demands, which is vital for successful app development. Usability testing is essential during development to ensure high user satisfaction and successful app usage. However, limited usability models exist for assessing mobile application features. Therefore, 'MySuara' was evaluated using a questionnaire developed based on the Mobile Learning Application Usability model and the People at the Centre of Mobile Application Development (PACMAD) model. Two questionnaires adapted from Parsazadeh et al. (2018) and Marcial et al. (2018), were combined to create the augmentative and alternative communication usability questionnaire (AACUQ) for 'MySuara' app. The PACMAD was deemed the most suitable for evaluating 'MySuara' due to its tailored focus on mobile application usability, encompassing attributes identified as crucial factors impacting usability. The AACUQ usability questionnaire comprised eight attributes: effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, learnability, memorability, error handling, cognitive load, and timeliness. Permissions were secured from the authors before integrating the questionnaires, with adjustments made by removing unsuitable items and modifying others. The AACUQ, comprising 40 items on a five-point Likert scale, was administered via Google Forms, including a consent form, demographic section, and questionnaire for participant response. Fourteen participants, 12 special education teachers and two speech therapists, voluntarily participated in the survey. Data collection occurred after participants tested the 'MySuara' app. Overall, participants expressed satisfaction with the app, with mean values for each attribute above average. The study discusses limitations and implications, concluding 'MySuara' is suitable for its intended purpose.

In today's rapidly advancing world, mobile health services have become influential in various aspects of our lives. It is anticipated that mobile applications, especially in rural areas, can play a significant role in the delivery of healthcare services. In this context, it is essential to examine the applications of mobile health services in rural areas and the education methods employed in these applications. The main objective of this study is to explore the contributions of mobile health services applications in rural areas to public health and to examine the education methods used in these services in light of current literature. The focus of this study is on how mobile health applications can be utilized in rural areas, the impact of this usage on public health, and the effectiveness of the education methods employed. The research was conducted through searches using key terms such as "mobile health" and "public health nursing" or "mobile health technologies" and "nursing" or "telehealth" on important academic databases like Google Scholar, PubMed free fulltext, Science Direct, Ebscohost, Sage, Scopus, and CINAHL. The information obtained from literature searches was analyzed to understand the impact of mobile health applications on public health in rural areas and the education methods employed. The study results indicate that the use of mobile health applications in rural areas can contribute significantly to public health. Advantages such as rapid diagnosis and treatment, effective monitoring of chronic diseases, and quick access to emergency services stand out among the potential impacts of mobile health applications. Mobile health applications can contribute significantly to public health in rural areas and increase their usage, particularly in primary healthcare services.

New mobile applications and services in the field of e.g. healthcare, transport and mobile work and business processes implies to manage huge amount of relevant information. In many cases involved people e.g. a patient or a worker are not aware of specific data or not able to take an active role in this managing process. The key to it is the development of Intelligent Wireless Sensor Networks for transferable applications. This is seen as the consequent next step forward within the field of mobile applications and services The upcoming new wireless technologies open the door to a wide field of new possibilities thereby creating the basis for a new approach to communication. This new approach will empower businesses to implement true mobile products and services in leisure, production and enterprise related contexts. Today we have high focus on new mobile services and applications using the existing technology. In the meanwhile the interoperability with other wireless technologies has become more and more important. Our goal is to design and construct a system that can be put into practical use and prove the benefits and potential of this vital data monitoring system. We describe an experimental system for measuring acceleration from which, we could evaluate the problems facing practical use.

The technology of airborne mobile communication and broadband wireless access aims to enable passengers to communication by using their mobile phone or wireless Internet service, and obtain aircraft health data in real time to improve operation efficiency, and the relay link is the transmission channel between aircraft and ground. This paper introduces the characteristics, function and performance of satellite relay link and air to ground relay link, and gives some suggestions on using satellite relay link or air to ground relay link in China through analysis and comparison.

This paper explores the design of mobile applications for supporting wellness activities. A cross-cultural user study was conducted in India and Finland. 16 participants used a technology probe (a mobile application called Wellness Diary) for the duration of two weeks. The focus of the study was to identify design factors that need to be considered when designing culturally sensitive mobile wellness applications. The findings are based on the subjective user experience reported by the participants, data collected with the technology probe, and ideas and needs of the participants that surfaced during the study. Results show that both cultural and environmental factors affect the needs towards the wellness application and usage of it. Differences were identified, for example, in how users defined wellness, what wellness concerns they had, attitudes towards setting goals, and how built and natural environments affected wellness activities.

PurposeCloud computing becomes mobile when a mobile device tries to access the shared pool of computing resources provided by the cloud, on demand. Mobile applications may enrich their functionality by delegating heavy tasks to the clouds as the remote processing and storage have become possible by adding asynchronous behavior in the communication. However, developing mobile cloud applications involves working with services and APIs from different cloud vendors, which mostly are not interoperable across clouds. Moreover, by adding asynchronicity, mobile applications must rely on push mechanisms which are considered to be moderately reliable, and thus not recommended in scenarios that require high scalability and quality of service (QoS). To counter these problems, and the purpose of this paper, is to design a middleware framework, Mobile Cloud Middleware (MCM), which handles the interoperability issues and eases the use of process‐intensive services from smartphones by extending the concept of mobile host.Design/methodology/approachMCM is developed as an intermediary between the mobile and the cloud, which hides the complexity of dealing with multiple cloud services from mobiles. Several applications are presented to show the benefits of mobiles going cloud‐aware. Moreover, to verify the scalability of MCM, load tests are performed on the hybrid cloud resources using well known load balancing mechanisms like HAProxy and Tsung.FindingsFrom the study it was found that it is possible to handle hybrid cloud services from mobiles by using MCM. The analysis demonstrated that the MCM shows reasonable performance levels of interaction with the user, thus validating the proof of concept. Moreover, MCM decreases the effort in developing mobile cloud applications and helps in keeping soft‐real time responses by using its asynchronous approach.Originality/valueMCM fosters the utilization of different types of cloud services rather than the traditional mobile cloud services based on data synchronization. By offloading heavy tasks to the clouds, the framework extends the processing power and storage space capabilities of the constrained smart phones. The applications mentioned in the paper bring an added value by being success stories for mobile cloud computing domain in general.

With the rapid development of mobile communication technology, wireless services and application scenarios are evolving toward diversification and intelligence. Large bandwidth, low latency, and massive connections are urgent needs for future network development, and traditional communication network architectures can no longer adapt. With the development of contemporary communication networks, the network architecture of C-RAN (Centralized, Cooperative, Cloud Radio Access Network) can concentrate base station processing resources, dynamically allocate transmitted signals, and have high spectrum utilization. In signal transmission, it also has the advantages of high efficiency, flexible scheduling and energy saving. However, the limited capacity of the fronthaul link under the C-RAN architecture makes signal compression and decompression especially important. This paper proposes an efficient and stable compressed sensing algorithm-a new stepwise orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm (NStOMP algorithm). First, the algorithm does not depend on the number of atoms selected in each iteration, S, and achieves stable compressed signal transmission. Secondly, it combines the idea of backtracking to filter the wrongly selected atoms in the first screening, and performs the second screening of atoms to reconstruct and restore the signal with a higher probability. This paper compares the proposed NStOMP algorithm with the improved StOMP algorithm and other common CS algorithms. The simulation results verify the stability of the proposed algorithm and its advantages compared with the reconstruction effect of common signal compression algorithms. It has better application value in the actual fronthaul network architecture.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify enablers and inhibitors to the adoption of mobile internet services by socioeconomically disadvantaged people: an understudied population adversely affected by digital inequality. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative study combining a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. In total, 32 socioeconomically disadvantaged people explored mobile lottery services and subsequently were asked a series of semi-structured questions about their perceptions of the technology. Findings Users’ attitudes toward mobile internet services were ambivalent. They experienced some advantages of smartphones (including escaping spatiotemporal constrains, fashionableness, privacy, and cost-effectiveness) and conceived of mobile internet services in terms of social advantages (including their ubiquitous nature, fitting in socially and fear of being “left behind”). However, they also experienced barriers and concerns, such as limited mobile data packages, external barriers from mobile services (including security concerns, complex online help tutorials, irrelevant pop-ups, and a lack of personalized services) and internal psychological barriers (including technophobia, self-concept, and habitus). Research limitations/implications The findings are of limited generalizability due to the small size of the sample. However, the study has implications for understanding the acceptance of technology among socioeconomically disadvantaged people. Social implications The study has social implications for bridging digital inequality in terms of socioeconomic status. Originality/value While previous studies have primarily focused on enablers of adopting mobile internet services by active users, this study reveals both the promise of and the barriers to the use of such services by inactive users who comprise an under-served population.

With the rapid development of mobile devices and Internet services, managing home security with these devices and services is gaining popularity. To expand the range of usability of conventional home surveillance cameras, we propose the UPnP-based Surveillance Camera System (USCS), which employs UPnP technology to search, control, and manage IP-based cameras. With UPnP, interconnected equipment and the control network inside the home can be accessed for data sharing, communication, and entertainment. However, the current UPnP was originally designed for local networks. Therefore, we integrated the UPnP control module into the Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework to access UPnP services from a remote network. The control point is an external network that can access the UPnP device, which is hosted in a home area network via USCS. Our system showed improved searching, management, discovery, and manipulation of IP-based cameras in a home network using our system, compared to a conventional system. Users can use a mobile device to monitor the home security status in real time by a remote access function provided by OSGi. Hence, users can monitor their homes more efficiently and instantly, ensuring the safety of house members and the property.

At present, the lack of adequate methods to test whether a mobile application is accessible has become a major challenge for accessibility experts. This study was applied to ten mobile applications, the most popular according to PCMAG. We propose to use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 through manual review and automatic review with the Google Play Store Accessibility Scanner validator for the Android. The evaluation results of the mobile applications indicate that the applications are not accessible because they do not comply with the minimum required level proposed by WCAG 2.1. The research proposes suggestions to improve and raise awareness among the designers of mobile applications, in such a way that more inclusive mobile applications accessible to all types of users are built.