Peoples daily lives and experiences often contain memories and information that they may want to recall again at a later time. Human memory, however, has its limitations and many times it alone may not be sufficient. People sometimes have difficulty recalling salient information and can forget important details over time. To complement what they can remember naturally, people must expend much time and manual effort to record desired content from their lives for future retrieval. Unfortunately, manual methods for capturing information are far from ideal. Over the years, ubiquitous computing researchers have constructed devices and applications to support the automated capture of live experiences and access to those records. At Georgia Tech, we have also investigated the benefits of automated capture and access in over half a dozen projects since 1995. As we encountered challenges in developing these systems, we began to understand how the difficulty of building capture and access systems can prevent exploration of the hard issues intertwined with understanding how capture impacts our everyday lives. These challenges illustrate the need for support structures in building this class of ubiquitous computing systems. This dissertation presents a set of abstractions for a conceptual framework and a focused design process that encourages designers to decompose the design of capture and access applications into a set of concerns that will be easier to develop and to manage. In addition, an implementation of the framework called the INCA Toolkit is discussed, along with a number of capture and access applications that have been built with it. These applications illustrate how the toolkit is used in practice and supports explorations of the capture and access design space.

No description available.

Over the past several years, the press, trade publications and academic literature have reported with increasing frequency on the social concerns caused by ubiquitous computingInformation Technology (IT) embedded in artifacts, infrastructure and environments of daily life. Designers and researchers of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) technologies have spent considerable efforts to address these concerns, which include privacy and data protection issues, information security and personal safety. Yet, designing successful ubicomp applications is still an unreliable and expensive endeavor, in part due to imperfect understanding of how technology is appropriated, the lack of effective design tools and the challenges of prototyping these applications in realistic conditions. I introduce the concept of proportionality as a principle able to guide design of ubiquitous computing applications and specifically to attack privacy and security issues. Inspired by the principle, I propose a design process framework that assists the practitioner in making reasoned and documented design choices throughout the development process. I validate the design process framework through a quantitative design experiment vis--vis other design methods. Furthermore, I present several case studies and evaluations to demonstrate the design methods effectiveness and generality. I claim that the design method helps to identify some of the obstacles to the acceptance of ubiquitous computing applications and to translate security and privacy concerns into research questions in the design process. I further discuss some of the inquiry and validation techniques that are appropriate to answer these questions.

Mobile network equipments are widely popularized and advanced mobile communication services are provided increasingly such that ubiquitous computing environments will come true soon. It is a pleasure for mobile users to work or get recreations in the mobile network environments. However, just as the cases in wireline environments, there are a lot of security threats to mobile network systems and their impact on the security is more serious than that in wireline environments owing to the feature of wireless transmissions and the ubiquity property in mobile network systems. The secret personal information, important data, or classified missives which mobile users carry may be stolen by malicious entities. In order to guarantee the quality of the advanced communication services, the security and privacy would be the important issues when mobile users roam to the mobile networks. In this thesis, an anonymous authentication protocol will be proposed to protect both the security of the mobile network system and the privacy of mobile users. Not only does the proposed scheme provide mutual authentication between each user and the system, but also the identity of each user can be kept secret against anyone else including the system. Although the users are anonymously authenticated by the system, it can still make correct bills to charge these anonymous users. Finally, our protocol also achieves the goal of fair privacy which allows the judge to be able to revoke the anonymity and trace the illegal users when they misused the anonymity property such as they committed crimes.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) for chronic care are increasingly being researched in Human-Computer Interaction. One of the current health management areas where ICTs have been employed is in supporting communications between patients and physicians. This is particularly relevant for patients suffering from chronic diseases since there is evidence that better communication leads to better health outcomes. Researchers are investigating different chronic diseases to design and test technology interventions to promote better chronic disease care. However, few have investigated pediatric asthma as a case study for designing communication technologies. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in 2008 that 300 million people suffer from asthma, and that asthma is the most common chronic illness among children. Asthma interferes with breathing by preventing airflow into the lungs. It is difficult to determine the actual cause of asthma and to predict who will have asthma. These unique challenges provide opportunities to investigate pediatric asthma management. To address these challenges, I have conducted a series of studies with pediatric asthma patients, families, and healthcare providers to better understand their needs, challenges and strategies regarding the use of technologies. I have conducted interviews, a focus group, and a technology probe study to create and refine initial technology designs for children with asthma and their caregivers. Based on the Health Belief Model (HBM), patient-provider communications, and my findings in the prior studies, I designed a mobile and web service to increase asthma knowledge and symptom/management awareness in the child for better health outcomes, and to affect the perceived quality of interaction with healthcare providers. I show the results of my two field deployment studies with total 65 patients to learn how the system affected their practices and health outcomes. My contributions come from an increased understanding in three areas: physician-patient communication via a mobile and web services; ubiquitous communication technology designs to improve current pediatric asthma practices; and controlled evaluation of a ubiquitous communication technology, SMS, in the field.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004. Directed by Mustaque Ahamad. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-128).

Ubiquitous computing describes the aspirations of including information systems into the fabric of our daily lives. The emphasis of the user should be on what task needs to be achieved rather than how the system will do it. The interface of applications that are integrated into the home fabric needs to be delicate in the sense that it should give the feeling of being a part of the home rather than a piece of technology. The human computer interaction/interface needs to be cohesive with the environment people live in so as to maximise the interaction possibilities. Photographs are a very affective and efficient way of connecting people to each other. We should not forget the social role photographs have to play. The most important aspect of the picture is the story that it is trying to convey, the people in it, or the place it was taken. Emotions are a very private part of our personal life and how one displays it reflects one’s lifestyle. In recent years increasing efforts have been put into preserving emotions in photos particularly with the advent of digital cameras. Now photographs have become an important part of our lives and have significant social role as they provide an affective communication link between friends and families. This research will be looking at how people relate themselves to pictures and if we could capture their emotions and expressions to store them in a way that is representative of their feelings towards the picture. As emotions can be associated with pictures of family, friends, places, holidays, social gatherings or travel to mention some of the aspects, we will also be analysing as to how emotions change over a period of time and if it could be represented accordingly in association with digital photos. This will allow us to look into the factors, which can make digital photo sharing a more fun and enjoyable experience. This research will involve user based evaluations and a scenario based approach for modelling the photo sharing interface. The creation of photo sharing system, based on this approach, is then investigated using the method of prototyping. The research shows methods, architectures, and tools used to make the development process more efficient and help assess the viability of the system under conditions that simulate to everyday use of the photo sharing software. To generalise and communicate results, the project will seek to simulate the home environment in a laboratory setting, using prototypes based on current high-end computing devices. The .Net technologies used for rapid prototyping is introduced. The aim of this research is to provide a demonstration environment of a photo sharing software for the smart home, which will allow for Reception/Viewing/distribution of photos within the home environment. The data could incorporate Audio/Video/Text/Photos, and user input etc. The research will also help us understand various aspects of how people interact with Digital Photos, what they would like to do, how can storing photos be made simpler, annotation of pictures, how can sharing photo’s made simpler, and how we can design an application which would allow users to attach emotions to pictures. The photo sharing system will provide an effective means to receive and distribute emotional information based on personal and temporal relationships associated with photos. The research also analyses the role of human computer interaction when developing ubiquitous technologies for the smart homes where information is embedded in the environment people live in. The research will present an overview of how photo sharing systems can be developed and evaluated using prototypes and user evaluations.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

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