Presenting a Submenu Window for Menu Search on a Cellular Phone

In recent years, small screen devices, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy phenomenal popularity. PDAs can be used to complement traditional computing systems to access personal multimedia information beyond the usage as digital organizers. However, due to the physical limitations accessing rich multimedia contents and diverse services using a single PDA is more difficult. Hence, the Situated Computing Framework (SCF) research project at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) aims to develop a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that facilitates nomadic users to access rich multimedia contents using small screen devices. This paper describes a new distributed computing concept, the Small Screen/Composite Device (SS/CD) framework, which offers mobile users new classes of ubiquitous and mobile multimedia services without to limit the diversity and the richness of the provided services.

Today, the average consumer is comfortable browsing a web site using a desktop, laptop or kiosk computer. However, this is changing a rapid rate as more and more consumers access the same web content using a small screen device such as a mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA). Regardless of the consumers’ expertise with the mobile device, the experience is becoming frustrating as they try to navigate their way through web content that has been designed for a large screen; a design that results in cumbersome layout, slow-loading images and ‘off-screen’ navigation points when viewed on a small screen device. The result is dissatisfaction on part of the consumer, and possible loss of revenue for an e-business enterprise. The main objective of this paper is to highlight several techniques and technologies that are currently available that can assist in displaying ‘user-friendly’ web pages regardless of the screen size of the device.

Small screen appliances, such as cellular phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), enjoy enormous popularity as is evidenced by the tremendous commercial success. One focus of the ubiquitous research community is the potential utility of this class of devices beyond that of a basic organizer or communication device. The pocket-sized requirement imposes constraints upon the computational power and user interface of these small screen devices. This paper describes the Composite Device Computing Environment (CDCE) that offers a framework for supporting nomadic users with small screen devices for the retrieval of rich contents and the access of diverse services. CDCE provides a communication network infrastructure for seeking, unifying and exploiting any surrounding devices as a means to overcome the small screen client constraints. This paper describes the architecture and reports the current status of the ongoing realization of CDCE.

In this study we focused on the social representations of digital teaching among Higher Education agents, considering their reported experience (more or less diversified) and type of access (mobile devices or not, large-screen devices or small screen-devices). The context of the study was a public Higher Education institution in the North of Portugal in which the Moodle was adopted years-ago to support learning activities. The participants were 36 teachers (39% males, 61% females), aged between 25 and 55 years-old, and 144 freshmen students (20% males, 80% females), aged between 18 and 57 years-old, enrolled in different programs in the area of Health care. They answered to a questionnaire that consisted of: free association tasks around stimuli such as digital teaching and Moodle; a semantic differentiation scale on the attitudes towards Moodle; multiple choice questions about the levels of use and type of access to the platform; and demographic questions, including age and sex. A content-analysis of the qualitative data was conducted, using a macro developed in Excel. Words evoked by the participants were reduced to their most common form and phases rewritten to their common theme. Words and themes were then grouped under overarching categories. A descriptive analysis of the quantitative data was also performed. Results revealed that whereas for the teachers the semantic field of digital teaching consisted of the categories accessibility (47%), evolution (42%), and distance (39%); for the students it consisted of technology (97%), evolution (59%), and easiness (37%). The Moodle was seen as a kind of repository by the majority of the students (89%). Such image is shared by less than one half of teachers (36%) and it was more common among those who declared to use more functionalities of the learning management system (LMS). It is worth mentioning that almost one half of students associated the Moodle with knowledge (49%). Errors and the dependency on the Internet were pointed out as the main constrains of the LMS, while accessibility and easiness of use were the main advantages. With respect to access, the portable computer was the device most used by both teachers and students (90%). Desktops were used by more than 80% of teachers and by less than 20% of students, while the reverse picture was found in the access by mobile phone (around 20% of teachers and around 70% of students). This study provides interesting clues about the relation between the social position of the agents and their representations. The social representations seem to be more homogeneous among students than among teachers, suggesting that there is a relation with practices. The fact that the image of the Moodle as a repository is more present among the teachers who reported having used more functionalities of the Moodle is somewhat counter-intuitive and urges for more studies. It is also very suggestive that the agents use different anchors to represent digital teaching: distance in the case of the teachers and technology in the case of the students, though they converge in seeing it as a sign of evolution. Although mobile access seems to be more frequent among students, big screen devices are more used than small screen devices. These results do not support the idea of a screen-device gap among the participants, but should nevertheless open a discussion about what kind of affordances are being explored in digital teaching.

Navigation techniques for small-screen devices: An evaluation on maps and web pages

The mobile phone industry has experienced an explosive growth in recent years. Mobile phone subscriber numbers have passed the 1.6 billion mark at the end of 2004. The emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil contribute this growth. In China, the number of mobile subscribers has already surpassed the number of fixed landline phone subscribers. In Korea, the number of mobile phone Internet subscribers is 34.53 million people or 72% of the population in June 2004 (APEC, 2005). Mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) makes business mobility a reality. Mobile users can access the Internet at anytime and anywhere with ubiquitous, inexpensive computing infrastructure. Mobile wireless services are ranging from mobile phone networks to wireless local area networks. The service provided by mobile phone systems has achieved huge success. Mobile phone users originate from all walks of life and include almost all age groups—from teenagers to retired people. It creates a new method of personal communication without location constraints. As telecommunication technologies are converging at fast speed. We will study mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) related to mobile and wireless telecommunication. Hence, m-commerce is defined as electronic commerce carried out in handheld devices such as mobile phone and PDA through mobile and wireless telecommunication networks.

The incredibly fast pace of technological development was up until recently the key growth factor in the mobile communications industry. Recently, however, as the market for the mobile communications equipment became saturated and competitive pressure intensified, the demand-side growth factor grew in importance. As a consequence, consumer preferences are likely to play the key role in determining the direction in which the mobile communications technology will develop. At present, multimedia services are the priority areas of the mobile communications technological progress. The multimedia services such as VOD (video on demand), video telephony services using streaming video technology as well as technological fusion with the other digital appliances like PDAs (personal digital assistant) and digital cameras, will attract more consumer's attention when the next generation of mobile communication services reaches the market. For example, color displays in cellular phones are one of the most important milestones in the path to the new paradigm of the multimedia technology. In this study, we analyzed consumer's valuation of color displays in cellular phones. At the time of the survey implementation, the market data was not available because it was a very early stage of adopting the color displays in cellular phones. Instead of adopting the revealed preference approach, a conjoint experiment was conducted where respondents were asked to rank cellular phone specification alternatives differing in the following attributes: the type of display, brand, and price. The ordered logic model applied to the survey data allowed us to decompose the cellular phones' values by the attributes, additional profit due to color display and the brand value, among others. Using our empirical estimates we also derived several implications for the competition strategy in the cellular phone market.

BackgroundThe commercial development and expansion of mobile phone networks has led to the creation of devices combining mobile phones and personal digital assistants, which could prove invaluable in a clinical setting. This pilot study aimed to look at how one such device compared with the current pager system in facilitating inter-professional communication in a hospital clinical team.MethodsThe study looked at a heterogeneous team of doctors (n = 9) working in a busy surgical setting at St. Mary's Hospital in London and compared the use of a personal digital assistant with mobile phone and web-browsing facilities to the existing pager system. The primary feature of this device being compared to the conventional pager was its use as a mobile phone, but other features evaluated included the ability to access the internet, and reference data on the device. A crossover study was carried out for 6 weeks in 2004, with the team having access to the personal digital assistant every alternate week. The primary outcome measure for assessing efficiency of communication was the length of time it took for clinicians to respond to a call. We also sought to assess the ease of adoption of new technology by evaluating the perceptions of the team (n = 9) to personal digital assistants, by administering a questionnaire.ResultsDoctors equipped with a personal digital assistant rather than a pager, responded more quickly to a call and had a lower of failure to respond rate (RR: 0.44; 95%CI 0.20–0.93). Clinicians also found this technology easy to adopt as seen by a significant reduction in perceptions of nervousness to the technology over the six-week study period (mean (SD) week 1: 4.10 (SD 1.69) vs. mean (SD) week 6: 2.20 (1.99); p = 0.04).ConclusionThe results of this pilot study show the possible effects of replacing the current hospital pager with a newer, more technologically advanced device, and suggest that a combined personal digital assistant and mobile phone device may improve communication between doctors. In the light of these encouraging preliminary findings, we propose a large-scale clinical trial of the use of these devices in facilitating inter-professional communication in a hospital setting.

: With touchscreen-enabled devices becoming more prevalent throughout military applications, it is important to create a standardized set of touchscreen gestures for military purposes. This standardized set must easily transfer among devices military personnel use for operations. The authors describe the identification of common gestures using mockups of large-screen and small-screen devices. Results show the majority of gestures were similar among participants, concluding that establishing military gesture standardization is very possible and could be put into practice throughout the military population, with training for less common gestures, and buttons or menu items used for very uncommon gestures. Through this research, the authors provide a beneficial first step in evaluating the set of gestures currently under development, and suggest further research with military personnel as a necessary next step for the development of a standardized gesture set for use in military purposes.

Mobile internet access using such devices as PDAs and cellular phones becomes popular as mobile technologies grow. However, the characteristics of small screen devices such as small screen size and pen-based input cause many usability problems. In this study, a human factors experiment was conducted to identify the factors affecting the usability of information search on a PDA. Factors manipulated in the experiment included use of wheel equipment, scroll dimension, and screen orientation. Task completion time, error frequency, and subjective satisfaction level were measured. In addition, various users' behavioral patterns such as scanning routes and mainly used scrolling methods were analyzed. Scroll dimension has a significant effect on task completion time. Scroll equipment and screen orientation affect subjective satisfaction level. The results could be applied to designing information structure of web sites for mobile use by providing vertical scroll and using external scroll equipments.

There are many websites specially designed for mobile phones. Some hackers write automated programs to abuse these website services and waste the website resources. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between human users and computer programs. Methods known for achieving this are known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart). CAPTCHA methods are mainly based on the weaknesses of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems and ask the user to type a word. So using them is difficult in tools such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) or mobile phones that lack a complete keyboard. In this paper, a new CAPTCHA system is proposed for touch-screen devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. In this system, a word is drawn in a random place on the screen and a number of arcs are drawn on the screen. Then the user is asked to highlight the word by the stylus. Due to the limitations of the PDA and mobile phone, OCR programs on these devices cannot recognize the shown word, while a human user can easily highlight the word. The proposed method is implemented by the JavaME (Java Platform Micro Edition) language and tested on a Sony Ericsson P990i mobile phone.

Chapter 4 - PDA, Blackberry, and iPod Forensic Analysis

Often mobile devices like mobile phones or personal digital assistants (PDA) are equipped with IEEE 802.11 WLAN adapters. Furthermore, within many buildings a WLAN infrastructure is available. The aim of this work is to investigate the quality of different indoor positioning methods based on values of WLAN received signal strength index (RSSI) using commercially available devices (mobile phones, PDA). Three positioning algorithms were considered: minimal Euclidian distance, intersections of RSSI-Isolines and a stochastic model based on Bayes' theorem. Two measuring testbeds, a museum's exhibition room and an empty seminar room, four different types of PDA (Dell, Fujitsu, HP, T-Mobile) and two types of access points (Netgear, Lancom) were used. Results show that positioning can be achieved with an average accuracy of approx. 2-3 metres. WLAN capable mobile devices behave differently in receiving RSSI values of a base station. For reasons of standardization a linear correlation between different receiving levels of PDA was investigated.

Lessons not learned on data disposal

Purpose Basic capturing of emotion on user experience of web applications and browsing is important in many ways. Quite often, online user experience is studied via tangible measures such as task completion time, surveys and comprehensive tests from which data attributes are generated. Prediction of users’ emotion and behaviour in some of these cases depends mostly on task completion time and number of clicks per given time interval. However, such approaches are generally subjective and rely heavily on distributional assumptions making the results prone to recording errors. This paper aims to propose a novel method – a window dynamic control system – that addresses the foregoing issues. Design/methodology/approach Primary data were obtained from laboratory experiments during which 44 volunteers had their synchronized physiological readings – skin conductance response, skin temperature, eye movement behaviour and users activity attributes taken by biosensors. The window-based dynamic control system (PHYCOB I) is integrated to the biosensor which collects secondary data attributes from these synchronized physiological readings and uses them for two purposes: for detection of both optimal emotional responses and users’ stress levels. The method’s novelty derives from its ability to integrate physiological readings and eye movement records to identify hidden correlates on a webpage. Findings The results from the analyses show that the control system detects basic emotions and outperforms other conventional models in terms of both accuracy and reliability, when subjected to model comparison – that is, the average recoverable natural structures for the three models with respect to accuracy and reliability are more consistent within the window-based control system environment than with the conventional methods. Research limitations/implications Graphical simulation and an example scenario are only provided for the control’s system design. Originality/value The novelty of the proposed model is its strained resistance to overfitting and its ability to automatically assess user emotion while dealing with specific web contents. The procedure can be used to predict which contents of webpages cause stress-induced emotions to users.