Few researchers have addressed the important issue of three-dimensional multiple object selection (MOS) in immersive Virtual Environments (VEs). We have developed a taxonomy of the MOS task as a framework for exploring the design space of these techniques. In this thesis, we describe four techniques for selecting multiple objects in immersive VEs. Of the four techniques, two are serial (where only one object can be indicated per operation), and two are parallel (where one or more objects may be indicated per operation). Within each of the two categories we also investigated two metaphors of interaction: a 3D spatial metaphor and the pen and tablet metaphor. Two usability studies were used to evaluate the four techniques, iterate their designs, and gain a deeper understanding of the design space of MOS techniques. The results from our studies show that parallel MOS techniques can select objects faster than serial techniques as the number of target objects increase. We also show that effective techniques for MOS in immersive VEs can be created using both pen and tablet and 3D metaphors. / Master of Science

Augmented reality (AR) gaming, where the real world is overlaid with objects or information to create new gaming experiences, is one of the latest trending technologies. This is due to increases in development tools, mobile device availability and mobile device performance. This thesis compared an existing augmented reality treasure hunt game, based on image tracking, with a prototype based on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to find differences and improvements in this genre. It was found that the SLAM based prototype that drew treasure hunt hints into the world using AR was significantly more fun to use and also more challenging than the game based on image tracking. This could be used to create AR games for broader demographics as well as make existing experiences more immersive and engaging. More studies could be conducted in this area. Both to find more differences between the technologies in different circumstances and also to investigate other AR navigation systems.

Background: Physical inactivity of the general population is a major public health concern in the US and around the world. Community-based interventions that include evidence-based principles of group dynamics are effective at improving individual-level physical activity behaviors as well as changing social norms for health behaviors. The use of technologies such as smartwatches has a potential to channel and amplify underlying group dynamics principles in such interventions. In order to explore the use of smartwatches for group dynamics-based physical activity interventions, a smartwatch centered system was designed and deployed as part of an eight-week pilot study. Objectives: The primary goal of this study was to explore the degree to which smartwatches effectively channel group dynamics strategies in the context of an eight-week community based physical activity intervention. Methods: In this explanatory mixed-methods study, system usage data were analyzed (e.g., frequency of interaction with smartwatch and smartphone) and participant physical activity (e.g., participant steps tracked by the system). To provide a richer picture of the user experience, use of features, and impact of group dynamics, participants were invited to participate in one-on-one interviews after the pilot program. The group dynamics-based questions centered on the individual’s attraction to the group task and socially as well as the individual’s perception of group integration around the task and as a social unit (i.e., the four dimensions of cohesion). The interview recordings were transcribed verbatim and analyzed via an abbreviated grounded theory approach. The system usage data was visually and numerically summarized. Results: Five of the seven participants completed interviews. The interview analysis resulted in 365 meaning units representing 2 themes (related to user experience with devices and manifestations of group dynamic principles), 4 sub-themes and 23 categories. The participants completed 31.3 (SD=2.91) miles per week and engaged with the smartwatch and the Android app 2.6 and 1.5 times a day, respectively. Analysis of interviews and the system usage logs from five participants, reveal sustained engagement with the smartwatch and the smartphone app. The system facilitated self-reflection and awareness in terms of physical activity levels, encouraged interactions with the team members and helped them to stay aware of the daily goals. Additionally, the participants reported habit formation in terms of wearing and using the smartwatch on the daily basis. Implications: This study provides preliminary support that accessible information via the custom smartwatch watchface can be a viable solution for retaining higher participant engagement during group dynamics-based community interventions. Such devices can help expand group-dynamics interventions by making them less depended on in-person delivery methods. / Master of Science / Physical inactivity of the general population is a major public health concern in the US and around the world. Community-based interventions, with group dynamics strategies at the core, are effective at improving individual physical activity behaviors. The use of technologies such as smartwatches has potential to channel and amplify the underlying program principles in such interventions. This work presents a smartwatch-centered system to encourage group cohesion in physical activity interventions, exploring it as part of an eight-week study that revealed participant awareness of group performance through smartwatch interactions.

Email has become deeply embedded in many users' daily lives. To investigate how email features in users lives, particularly how users attend to email and get lost within it, I ran five studies that probed how users determined relevancy of messages, logged interactions with email, gathered diary entries related to individual sessions, and investigated the gratifications sought from email use. For the first study, I performed an exploratory experiment in the laboratory to determine how participants assessed the importance of individual emails (N=10). The next investigation I undertook involved three different studies, which I detail individually: a survey on email usage (N=54); a two-week study of email usage (N=20); and finally, the application of Attentional Network Test (N=9). My final study was to validate my findings around the reasons for attending to email, this was done through deploying a survey that followed the Uses and Gratification Theory tradition (N=52) In my studies I found that the majority of attentional effort is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management. I also found that participants attended to email primarily based on notifications, instead of the number of unread messages in their inbox. I present my results through answering several research questions, and leverage Conversation Analysis (CA), particularly conversation openings, to explicate several problematic aspects around email use. My findings point to inefficiencies in email as a communication medium, mainly, around how summons are (or are not) issued. This results in an increased burden on email users to maintain engagement and determine (or construct) the appropriate moment for interruption. My findings have several implications: email triage does not seem to be problematic for the participants in my studies, somewhat in contrast to previous research; much of the problem around email, particularly emph{getting lost in email} is in managing the tension between promptly responding to messages while limiting engagement with email; due to the social nature of the problems with email, modifications to the email client are limited in their potential effectiveness to prevent getting lost and reduce email related anxiety. / Ph. D.

Modern operating systems allow users to organize and refind information using many contextual keys such as timestamps, content, custom tags, origin and even location. As humans naturally engage in activities with people and groups of people, we want to investigate how we can use the context of people's social interactions to support information archiving and refinding. Past research has tracked and used remote, social interactions through email communication; this work will concentrate on using physical, social interactions (i.e., face-to-face) to support information archiving and refinding. Research questions include: (1) How do we effectively associate one's information with one's social world? (2) How do we design a user interface that supports refinding information based on social contexts? and (3) How does our approach (i.e., system) affect the users information archiving and refinding practices? This dissertation presents results from two user studies, exploring two refinding systems. The first, longitudinal study examines three participants using a custom refinding tool that tags information based on the people physically present with the user. Our second, diary-driven study examines a refinding tool that integrates information activity with a person's calendar. Our contributions are threefold: (1) an exploration of adding physical social interactions as contextual keys for information archiving and refinding (2), an examination of two user interface designs that enable users to refind information through their physical-social interactions (i.e., people and groups), and (3), a diary-driven methodology for studying realistic refinding behaviors while reducing participant interruptions. / Ph. D.

Before the recent advances in sensing, actuation, computing and communication technologies, the integration between the digital and the physical environment was limited. Humans linked those two worlds by collecting data about the physical environment before feeding it into the digital environment, and by changing the state of the physical environment based on the state of the digital environment. The incorporation of computing, communication, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday physical objects has empowered the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). Things can autonomously collect data about the physical environment, exchange information with other things, and take actions on behalf of humans. Application domains that can benefit from IoT include smart buildings, smart cities, smart water, smart agriculture, smart animal farming, smart metering, security and emergencies, retail, logistics, industrial control, and health care. For decades, building automation, intelligent buildings, and more recently smart buildings have received a considerable attention in both academia and industry. We use the term smart built environments (SBE) to describe smart, intelligent, physical, built, architectural spaces ranging from a single room to a whole city. Legacy SBEs were often closed systems operating their own standards and custom protocols. SBEs evolved to Internet-connected systems leveraging the Internet technologies and services (e.g., cloud services) to unleash new capabilities. IoT-enabled SBEs, as one of the various applications of the IoT, can change the way we experience our homes and workplaces significantly and make interacting with technology almost inevitable. This can provide several benefits to modern society and help to make our life easier. Meanwhile, security, privacy, and safety concerns should be addressed appropriately. Unlike traditional computing devices, things usually have no or limited input/output (I/O) capabilities. Leveraging the ubiquity of general-purpose computing devices (e.g., smartphones), thing vendors usually provide interfaces for their products in the form of mobile apps or web-based portals. Interacting with different things using different mobile apps or web-based portals does not scale well. Requiring the user to switch between tens or hundreds of mobile apps and web-based portals to interact with different things in different smart spaces may not be feasible. Moreover, it can be tricky for non-domestic users (e.g., visitors) of a given SBE to figure out, without guidance, what mobile apps or web-based portals they need to use to interact with the surrounding. While there has been a considerable research effort to address a variety of challenges associated with the thing-to-thing interaction, human-to-thing interaction related research is limited. Many of the proposed approaches and industry-adopted techniques rely on more traditional, well understood and widely used Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methods and techniques to support interaction between humans and things. Such techniques have mostly originated in a world of desktop computers that have a screen, mouse, and keyboard. However, SBEs introduce a radically different interaction context where there are no centralized, easily identifiable input and output devices. A desktop computer of the past is being replaced with the whole SBE. Depending on the task at hand and personal preferences, a user may prefer to use one interaction modality over another. For instance, turning lights on/off using an app may be more cumbersome or time-consuming compared to using a simple physical switch. This research focuses on leveraging the recent advances in IoT and related technologies to support user interactions with SBEs. We explore how to support flexible and adaptive multimodal interfaces and interactions while providing a consistent user experience in an SBE based on the current context and the available user interface and interaction capabilities. / PHD / The recent advances in sensing, actuation, computing, and communication technologies have brought several rewards to modern society. The incorporation of those technologies into everyday physical objects (or things) has empowered the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). Things can autonomously collect data about the physical environment, exchange information with other things, and take actions on behalf of humans. Several application domains can benefit from the IoT such as smart buildings, smart cities, security and emergencies, retail, logistics, industrial control, and health care. For decades, building automation, intelligent buildings, and more recently smart buildings have received considerable attention in both academia and industry. We use the term smart built environments (SBE) to describe smart, intelligent, physical, built, architectural spaces ranging from a single room to a whole city. SBEs, as one of the various applications of the IoT, can change the way we experience our homes and workplaces significantly and make interacting with technology almost inevitable. While there has been a considerable research effort to address a variety of challenges associated with the thing-to-thing interaction, human-to-thing interaction related research is limited. Many of the proposed approaches and industry-adopted techniques to support human-to-thing interaction rely on traditional methods. However, SBEs introduce a radically different interaction context. Therefore, adapting the current interaction techniques and/or adopting new ones is crucial for the success and wide adoption of SBEs. This research focuses on leveraging the recent advances in the IoT and related technologies to support user interactions with SBEs. We explore how to support a flexible, adaptive, and multimodal interaction experience between users and SBEs using a variety of user interfaces and proposed interaction techniques.

Hand gesture recognition (HGR) is the process of identifying and interpreting hand gestures to control or interact with electronic devices. In this project, a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar-based HGR is developed utilising Range-Doppler maps (RDMs). For this purpose, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is implemented to classify different hand gestures. Each gesture that is fed to the network, contains a maximum of 12 frames, merged into a single image with a duration of 3 seconds. The dataset for training, validation, and offline test contains five different hand gestures along with Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples, totalling 3235 data. The dataset was gathered in a confined environment with two participants, within a distance ranging from 0.2 m to 0.5 m. During training, the proposed system attained an accuracy of 95.91%, and 95.83% during training and validation, respectively. The system was also evaluated offline, achieving an accuracy of 96.99%.  One objective of this project was to incorporate real-time functionality. In real-time testing, the system achieved 95% accuracy with a prediction time of 25 ms.

A large part of the injuries that occur in healthcare are medication-related injuries. This mainlyaffects individual patients, but it also constitutes a major cost to society. At the UppsalaUniversity Hospital, there is currently a warning system in connection with the prescription ofmedicines. However, this system does not work optimally. The Uppsala Region therefore wantsto develop and implement a more advanced warning system, with the hope of reducing risksrelated to the use of medicines.In this thesis, a prototype for the new warning system is presented. It is based on the users'needs which have been identified by conducting interviews and observations in line with usercentered design. The prototype has been developed as part of an iterative process wheredifferent stages have been continuously evaluated for optimal user experience. The project hasalso identified many challenges, primarily related to current IT systems that are used at thehospital, but also laws and regulations that need to be considered when continuing to developthe system in the future.

This bachelor thesis investigates the development of a peer-to-peer web application thatfocuses on improving the secondhand book handle of course literature between students atLinköpings University. The focus is on usability such as navigability and user interface de-sign. Through a combination of surveys, prototypes, and user tests, this study investigatesthe preferences and behaviors of university students concerning buying and selling usedcourse literature. To discover insights and what strategies enhance a peer-to-peer webapplication for secondhand books, readers are invited to explore the extensive analysisand results detailed in this report. A prototype of the web application was developed and iteratively improved throughuser feedback, focusing on improving the user experience by optimizing the navigabilityand interface design to meet the users’ expectations. Key findings include the criticalrole of the navigation bar and drop-down menus in user navigability, and the importanceof clear, engaging introductory text on the landing page for user engagement. Designconsistency was notably improved through a simplified color scheme and well-integratedsearch functionalities, although suggestions for reducing the search feature’s sensitivity tospelling errors were highlighted as a potential improvement.

Given the persistence of gender inequality in the domestic sphere, family and household organization applications are positioned as tools to help partners share this work more equally. To find out whether these applications are designed to support an equal division, I conducted a comparative walkthrough analysis of ten applications. Employing a critical feminist perspective, I analyzed representations of families, gender and equality in the interaction design. The findings show a narrow conceptualization of family within a heteronormative nuclear ideal, the prevalence of gender roles and stereotypes in the design and a lack of features supporting gender equality. To move beyond critique, I developed four design suggestions based on the results from a participatory design workshop: 1) design for diverse families, 2) provide added value to users, 3) support reflection and behavior change and 4) consider alternative approaches.