Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientÃfico e TecnolÃgico / Location-based mobile games are a special type of game where location technologies are employed to track players and to alter the rules of the games. Such games are a subclass of pervasive games whose playability advances according to the location of players. This work proposes an authoring tool to develop location-based mobile games enhances with augmented reality features. This tool was conceived from research studies on authoring tools and pervasive games. By analysing the related works, we have compiled the most common features of location-based mobile games and the main aspects presented in authoring tools for developing these games. Moreover, we have used focus groups to both enhance the creation of new scenarios for location-based mobile games and improve the usage of augmented reality in such games. Ultimately, we have compiled a set of requirements to design a software architecture for the development of an authoring tool. The designed architecture is composed of a server to manage running games, a web based system for developing these games, and a mobile application in which the games are executed. The main goal of this work is to provide a software solution that allows non-programmers to design, build and execute location-based mobile games. To assess the proposed work, we have designed and implemented a game called "Battle for Fortaleza" using the authoring tool. Besides, we have conducted interviews with users to validate the utility and the easiness of the tool to develop location-based mobile games. / Jogos mÃveis baseados em localizaÃÃo sÃo aqueles que fazem uso de tecnologias de localizaÃÃo e que agregam a posiÃÃo de seus jogadores nas regras do jogo. Estes jogos sÃo uma subclasse de jogos pervasivos em que a jogabilidade progride de acordo com a localizaÃÃo do jogador. Neste trabalho à proposta uma ferramenta de autoria para a criaÃÃo de jogos mÃveis baseados em localizaÃÃo, acrescidos com recursos de realidade aumentada. A concepÃÃo desta ferramenta foi feita com base em uma revisÃo da literatura sobre ferramentas de autoria e jogos pervasivos. A partir de trabalhos relacionados, buscou-se recolher as caracterÃsticas comuns de jogos mÃveis baseados em localizaÃÃo e caracterÃsticas de ferramentas de autoria para estes jogos. AlÃm disso, utilizou-se grupos focais para refinar os novos cenÃrios para jogos mÃveis baseados em localizaÃÃo, em particular a respeito de como a realidade aumentada pode ser utilizada nestes jogos. Com o estudo de ambos, na revisÃo da literatura e nos grupos focais foi produzido um conjunto de requisitos para projetar uma arquitetura de software para o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de criaÃÃo. Esta arquitetura à composta de um servidor para gerenciar os jogos em execuÃÃo, uma aplicaÃÃo baseada na web que permite a autoria dos jogos e um aplicativo para dispositivos mÃveis onde sÃo executados os jogos desenvolvidos. Nosso principal objetivo à fornecer uma soluÃÃo de software para permitir que usuÃrios nÃo-programadores possam projetar, construir e executar jogos mÃveis baseados em localizaÃÃo. A fim de avaliar a nossa ferramenta, foi projetado e implementado um jogo chamado âBatalha por Fortalezaâ, em que as funcionalidades da ferramentas sÃo demonstradas. AlÃm disso, buscou-se validar, com usuÃrios, se a ferramenta proposta consegue auxiliar na criaÃÃo de jogos de maneira fÃcil e intuitiva.

Communication is a fundamental social component of human life and constitutes an indispensable factor in the learning process as it allows the transfer of information between people. Communication supports the interactions that take place in different learning stages and settings and can encourage involvement and cooperation. The "Treasure-HIT" platform, a dedicated environment for designing pedagogical mobile location-based games, encourages social interaction and collaborative learning. This platform, which is social at its base, has limited communication capabilities. Adding such capabilities can overcome this difficulty by providing a more supportive and interpersonal interaction among the involved stakeholders. This thesis explores the users' communication needs for the preparation and enactment of "Treasure-HIT" activities. A design based research was used to analyze the needs in terms of design and technological specifications and develop and implement communication features. Three such features were developed in the course of this thesis: (1) Activities based map, (2) Social media sharing feature (Facebook tasks) and (3) Image gallery. All of those aimed at supporting communication between learners, instructors and their community, before, during and after the activities. Findings show that the developed capabilities enabled new means of communication and contributed to the user experience and learning process. Users appreciated the functionality and ease of use and positively adopted the new features.

Internet and mobile communications have had a profound effect on today’s society. New services are constantly being deployed, in which an increasing amount of personal data is being processed in return for personally tailored services. Further, the use of electronic surveillance is increasing. There is the risk that honest citizens will have their privacy invaded for “the greater good”. We argue that it is of uttermost importance to retain the individuals’ control over their personal spheres. One approach for enhancing the users’ privacy is to deploy technical measures for safeguarding privacy, so-called Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This thesis examines a set of PETs for enabling anonymous communication, so-called anonymous overlay networks,which eliminate the processing of personal data altogether by allowing the users act anonymously when communicating in a networked environment. This thesis focuses mainly on mobile networks. These are of great interest because on the one hand they lay the groundwork for new innovative applications, but on the other hand they pose numerous novel challenges to privacy. This thesis describes the implementation and performance evaluation of mCrowds – an anonymous overlay network for mobile Internet that enables anonymous browsing. It also describes the ongoing investigation on how to design anonymous overlay networks in order to make them suitable for mobile ad hoc networks, a required building block for ambient intelligence.

Dagens smartphones är utrustade med GPS, vilket har blivit en användbar information för externa aktörer. Detta har skapat möjligheter för företag att kommunicera med sina användare, bland annat med hjälp av mobila kuponger. Det har tidigare funnits hinder för att utveckla mobila kuponger, som tekniska begränsningar, men nu är utmaningen att få förståelse för sina användare. Den här uppsatsen har undersökt hur användningen och uppfattningen av mobila kuponger ser ut idag, vilka faktorer som kan påverka användningen, samt hur dessa faktorer skulle kunna förbättras för att fler börjar använda tjänsten. Frågorna har besvarats med en enkätundersökning av 50 respondenter, samt en fokusgrupp med 6 deltagare. Resultatet visade att användningen av tjänsten inte är särskilt hög, men detta berodde främst på att man inte kände till att mobila kuponger fanns. Några viktiga faktorer som påverkade användningen var att man glömde bort att utnyttja kupongerna, en större ansträngning kändes mer pinsamt, samt att det kunde kränka integriteten. / The smartphones of today are provided with GPS’, which has created valuable opportunities for external actors. This in turn has created opportunities for companies to communicate with their consumers, by the use of mobile coupons for example. There have previously been technical obstacles for these kind of services, but now the challenge is to understand the consumer. This paper investigates the usage and the conceptions of mobile coupons at present, which elements that can affect the utilization and how these elements could be improved to spread the distribution of this service. The questions have been answered through a survey of 50 respondents and a focus group of 6 participants. The result proved that the usage of mobile coupons is not particularly high, however this was mainly due to bad awareness of the availability of the service. Some important factors affecting the utilization was forgetting to use the coupons, a bigger commitment was seen as awkward, or to intrude on the integrity.

Adoption of location-based services (LBS) was for a long time below expectations, and most of the studies attribute it to privacy concerns of users. However, many new LBS applications are currently among the most downloaded application for smartphones, particularly entertainment applications. Therefore, this research aims to find out whether privacy concerns still matter to users and to explore the role of the privacy in the adoption of LBS entertaining applications. The adopted methodology is qualitative research and data are collected through interviews and additional information from the smartphones ofparticipants. Ten individuals among university students at Linnaeus University in Sweden are selected for this research, and this sample choice is per their experience with two selected LBS entertaining applications, Pokémon Go and Tinder. As a result, six themes have been recognized to answer the research questions. Low privacy concerns about location information, especially in entertainment applications with negligible effect on adoption have been identified. However, author of this research suggests, that developers of LBS entertaining applications should care for retaining their credibility because it can have an impact on the adoption of their LBS services.

Indoor positioning is an enabling technology primed to impact the indoor application space as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) did for the outdoor space. Amongst the competing positioning technologies are methods of different mediums: light, radio frequency and ultra-wideband, ultrasonic, and imaging; methods of different modalities: received signal strength, angle-of-arrival, time-of-flight; and methods of different mathematics: trilateration, triangulation, machine learning, and signal processing. Light-based positioning compared to other positioning schemes exploits fixed-location directional luminaires placed regularly throughout a space as anchor points -- there is an efficiency argument for multi-purpose lighting and a cost-share argument for infrastructure-based positioning. Similar to the satellite infrastructure with GNSS, with anchor points and models for light propagation and construction, position is estimated based on received signals at active photodiode-equipped target devices. Received signal strength, a common first order attribute, alone is not noise resilient enough for centimeter-level 3D positioning. Methods using angle diversity produce better results particularly in 3D but with more complex hardware. For this dissertation, we exploit angle diversity and modulated optical sources in light-based positioning systems to estimate position to centimeter-level accuracy in 3D. We propose, analyze, and contribute two novel positioning schemes that use these concepts. One of the proposed schemes is a new hybrid 3D indoor positioning technique, Ray-Surface Positioning (RSP), which incorporates a narrow field-of-view (FOV) optical source (Ray) with wide diffuse optical sources (Surfaces) to position active devices in 3D. The second scheme, a Zone-based Positioning Service (ZPS), is a positioning scheme and architecture that incorporates an angle diverse narrow FOV optical source at the positioned device. This unique design decision allows the active device to position itself directly with respect to photovoltaic anchor points but also to position other devices in its FOV called transitive positioning. Along with these contributions, we also investigate several other related topics. Concisely, as part of the dissertation, we contribute (a) review of the state-of-the-art, (b) analysis for steering Lambertian sources, (c) method of creating angle diversity from a narrow FOV optical source, (d) novel positioning approaches in (1) RSP and (2) ZPS, (e) proof of concept prototypes for (1) RSP and (2) ZPS, and (f) architectures for indoor positioning applications.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The importance of mobile technology in improving the quality of life is not restricted to only a Hearing person, and the use of mobile devices among Deaf people is no longer limited, due to the advancements in technology Hearing loss cannot be seen but its effect is clearly visible to the persons suffering the loss. This results in a limited ability to communicate with the large world of hearing people. This research effort aims to design a SignSupport for emergency mobile application for Deaf people in Cape Town, empowering them with the same access to emergency service resources as hearing people. The proposed approach is to use a mobile application to contact standard emergency services on behalf of a Deaf person to a representative. The app will use a phone's GPS module to share the location of the victim and contact the nearest emergency service provider to attend to the Deaf victim; as well as keep the victim’s circle of family and friends informed. The app design is intuitive, simply requiring the Deaf victim to launch the app and choose an emergency type from the available options.

The aim of this thesis is to define human urban mobility patterns using modern tools and find out what influence human migration. First part deals with history of research and introduces different methods of modeling. Second part consists of own research based on data from application Foursquare and project Rekola. This data is processed using gravitation model and theory of intervening opportunities.

The aim of this thesis is to find methodology or theory to define human urban mobility patterns using modern tools and to find out what influences human mobility. The first part deals with history of research and introduces different methods of modeling. The second part consists of own research based on data from Foursquare application and project called Rekola. These data are processed using gravitation model and theory of intervening opportunities.

Many modern mobile communication devices are equipped with a GPS receiver and anavigation tool. These devices are useful when a user seeks to reach a specified destinationas soon as possible, but may not be so when he/she only needs to arrive at thedestination in time and wants to focus on some activities on the way. To deal with thislatter situation, a method and device called “Space Time Alarm Clock” is presented forhelping the user reach the destination by a specified deadline and inform the user aboutthe consequences of his/her decisions. It does so by continuously and efficiently computinghow much more time the user may stay at his/her current location without failing toreach the destination by the deadline. Furthermore, it determines the possible movementchoices that a user can make with regards to an underlying road network, it computesthe shortest travel time associated with each choice and informs the user about the consequencesof his/her decisions. Advantage of this approach is that it works completelyin the background so that the user‘s en-route activities will never be interfered with. The“Space Time Alarm Clock” was implemented for Stockholm, where it was tested.