There is an increasing need for personalised and context-aware services in our everyday lives and we rely on mobile and wearable devices to provide such services. Data collected from these devices includes important information about users’ movements, locations, physiological status, and environment. This data can be analysed in order to recognise users’ activities and thus provide contextual information for services. Such activity recognition is an important tool for personalising and adapting assistive services and thereby increasing the usefulness of them.This licentiate thesis focuses on three important aspects for activity recognition usingwearable, resource constrained, devices in pervasive services. Firstly, it is investigated how to perform activity recognition unobtrusively by using a single tri-axial accelerometer. This involves finding the best combination of sensor placement and machine learning algorithm for the activities to be recognized. The best overall placement was found to be on the wrist using the random forest algorithm for detecting Strong-Light, Free-Bound and Sudden-Sustained movement activities belonging to the Laban Effort Framework.Secondly, this thesis proposes a novel machine learning algorithm suitable for resource-constrained devices commonly found in wearable and pervasive systems. The proposed algorithm is computationally inexpensive, parallelizable, has a small memory footprint, and is suitable for implementation in hardware. Due to this, it can reduce battery usage, increase responsiveness, and also make it possible to distribute the machine learning task, which enables balancing computational costs against data traffic costs. The proposed algorithm is shown to have a comparable accuracy to that of more advanced machine learning algorithms mainly for datasets with two classes.Thirdly, activity recognition is applied in a personalised and pervasive service for im-proving health and wellbeing. Two monitoring prototypes and one coaching prototype were proposed for achieving positive behaviour change. The three prototypes were evaluated in a user workshop with 12 users aging between 20 and 60. Participants of the workshop believed that the proposed health and wellbeing app is something people are likely to use on a permanent basis.By applying results from this thesis, systems can be made more energy efficient andless obtrusive while still maintaining a high activity recognition accuracy. It also shows that pervasive and wearable systems using activity recognition have the potential of relieving some problems in health and wellbeing that society face today.

Background: Digital education provides lifelong learning opportunities and acquisition of new skills and the importance of developing flexible e-learning platforms, taking into account the end- users’ needs and experiences, is high. People with intellectual disabilities are the most likely group to encounter challenges related to school while they are underrepresented in studies in web accessibility and digital education. DigiJag project in Sweden aims to the development of an e-learning and social platform accessible to users with moderate intellectual disabilities. Purpose: The purpose of this exploratory research study was to define the user’s needs and identify the key features used in the design of an e-learning and social platform accessible to users with moderate ID. Methods: Participatory methods were used to provide all stakeholders an influence on the final design. Qualitative data was collected from two focus groups with professional experts. Qualitative data was also collected from a series of processes together with students with ID including three voting sessions, individual observation barrier walkthroughs and two cognitive walkthroughs for heuristic evaluation of DigiJag platform’s Hi-Fi interactive prototype. Qualitative content theme analysis was used, and an iterative prototype design process was applied. Results: The study revealed themes related to direct and indirect stakeholders, values that reflect user needs, key features to be supported by the platform and suggestions for data collection methods from students with intellectual disabilities using participatory design processes. Additionally, aesthetic elements, social themes for the platform, information regarding the user experience of students with intellectual disabilities with existing interactive digital tools as well as results from heuristic evaluation of an interactive Hi-Fi prototype were also part of the study’s findings. Discussion: By involving people with intellectual disabilities in different stages of this study, we managed to give them voice in the design process and also to distribute power from designers and experts to users with intellectual disabilities. / Bakgrund: Digital utbildning ger möjligheter till livslångt lärande och nya färdigheter därför är vikten av att utveckla flexibla plattformar för e-learning, med hänsyn till slutanvändarnas behov och erfarenheter, hög. Personer med intellektuella funktionsnedsättningar är den grupp som möter störst utmaningar relaterade till skolan samtidigt som de är underrepresenterade i studier inom webbtillgänglighet och digital utbildning. DigiJag-projektet syfte är att utveckla en elearning och social plattform som är tillgänglig för användare med måttliga intellektuella funktionsnedsättning (IF). Syfte: Syftet med den här undersökande forskningsstudien var att definiera användarens behov och identifiera nyckelfunktioner som används vid utformningen av en e-learning och social plattform som är tillgänglig för användare med måttligt IF. Metoder: Deltagande metoder användes för att ge alla intressenter ett inflytande på den slutliga designen. Kvalitativa data samlades in från två fokusgrupper med professionella experter. Kvalitativa data samlades också in från en serie processer tillsammans med studenter med IF inklusive tre omröstningssessioner, individuella genomgångar för observationsbarriär och två kognitiva genomgångar för heuristisk utvärdering av DigiJag-plattformens interaktiva prototyp Hi-Fi. Kvalitativt innehållsanalys användes och en iterativ prototypdesignprocess tillämpades. Resultat: Studien visade teman relaterade till direkta och indirekta intressenter, värden som återspeglar användarnas behov, nyckelfunktioner som stöds av plattformen och förslag till datainsamlingsmetoder från studenter med intellektuella funktionsnedsättningar med deltagande designprocesser. Dessutom var estetiska element, sociala teman för plattformen, information om användarupplevelsen för studenter med intellektuella funktionsnedsättningar med befintliga interaktiva digitala verktyg samt resultat från heuristisk utvärdering av en interaktiv Hi-Fi-prototyp också en del av studiens resultat. Diskussion: Genom att involvera personer med intellektuella funktionsnedsättningar i olika stadier av denna studie lyckades vi ge dem röst i designprocessen och också att omfördela makt från designers och experter till användare med intellektuella funktionsnedsättningar.

This paper investigates user engagement in online communities using design provocations. These provocations aimed to stimulate feedback and gather discussion from members of the online community, Upbeater society. The design process consisted of preliminary interviews which gathered user insights, after which five design provocations following a Research through Design methodology were created using the insights and related work, and these provocations were used to provoke discussions and insights from the members. The discussions from the study indicated the possibility to move beyond the online space of the community, a need to examine power dynamics existing in the communities and the potential of the provocations to study attributes that could act as facilitators or constraints of the online communities. This study also suggested that design fictions could be a useful tool for researchers analysing engagement in online communities. / Denna uppsats undersöker användarengagemang i online communities, eller på svenska online-gemenskaper, med hjälp av designprovokationer. Syftet med provokationerna var att uppmuntra feedback och samla diskussionspunkter från medlemmar i online-gemenskapen Upbeater Society. Designprocessen bestod av preliminära intervjuer för att samla insikter om användarna, varefter fem designprovokationer influerade av insikterna samt tidigare studier skapades med hjälp av en Research through Design-metodik. Dessa provokationer användes sedan för att uppmana diskussion och nya insikter från medlemmarna. Diskussionerna från studien pekar på möjligheten att gå bortom gemenskapens online-miljö, behovet av att undersöka maktdynamik som finns i online communities samt potentialen hos designprovokationer för att studera attribut som antingen kan underlätta eller begränsa för online-gemenskaper. Studien föreslår också att designfiktioner kan vara ett användbart verktyg för att analysera användareengagemang i online-communities.

This research article explores the potential of AI as a collaborative tool in graphic design, investigating designers’ perceptions and concerns regarding its integration. A preliminary study identifies current challenges faced by designers, leading to the development of three scenarios envisioning the future of AI-powered tools. A prototype tool called “Desain” with advanced AI features is created. User study and interviews uncover designers’ perspectives and ethical concerns. AI is valued as a collaborative tool, but its limitations in capturing human creativity are emphasized. Ethical concerns include lazy design, accountability, and data privacy. The study emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical guidelines, and responsible decision-making for the future of AI in graphic design.

In an increasingly applied domain of pervasive computing, sensing devices are being deployed progressively for data acquisition from various systems through the use of technologies such as wireless sensor networks. Data obtained from such systems are used analytically to advance or improve system performance or efficiency. The possibility to acquire an enormous amount of data from any target system has made machine learning a useful approach for several large-scale analytical solutions. Machine learning has proved viable in the area of the energy sector, where the global demand for energy and the increasingly accepted need for green energy is gradually challenging energy supplies and the efficiency in its consumption. This research, carried out within the area of pervasive computing, aims to explore the application of machine learning and its effectiveness in the energy sector with dependency on sensing devices. The target application area readily falls under a multi-domain energy grid which provides a system across two energy utility grids as a combined heat and power system. The multi-domain aspect of the target system links to a district heating system network and electrical power from a combined heat and power plant. This thesis, however, focuses on the district heating system as the application area of interest while contributing towards a future goal of a multi-domain energy grid, where improved efficiency level, reduction of overall carbon dioxide footprint and enhanced interaction and synergy between the electricity and thermal grid are vital goals. This thesis explores research issues relating to the effectiveness of machine learning in forecasting heat demands at district heating substations, and the key factors affecting domestic heat load patterns in buildings. The key contribution of this thesis is the application of machine learning techniques in forecasting heat energy consumption in buildings, and our research outcome shows that supervised machine learning methods are suitable for domestic thermal load forecast. Among the examined machine learning methods which include multiple linear regression, support vector machine,  feed forward neural network, and regression tree, the support vector machine performed best with a normalized root mean square error of 0.07 for a 24-hour forecast horizon. In addition, weather and time information are observed to be the most influencing factors when forecasting heat load at heating network substations. Investigation on the effect of using substation's operational attributes, such as the supply and return temperatures, as additional input parameters when forecasting heat load shows that the use of substation's internal operational attributes has less impact.

<p>Examensarbetet är utfört vid Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap (ITN) vid Tekniska fakulteten, Linköpings universitet</p>

This thesis proposes and discusses solutions to enable network-layer mobility in wireless ad hoc access networks. The deployment of wireless access networks has made them ubiquitous and current research strives to make them pervasive. Users having wireless access to wired IP networks and the Internet are driving the demand for mobile and heterogeneous solutions. To enable all kinds of mobility in heterogeneous All-IP networks there are many issues to be solved. This thesis focuses on network-layer mobility and connectivity of wireless multi-hop ad hoc networks to the Internet. In a wireless environment with overlapping service areas, mobile hosts need to select which gateway(s) to use to access the wireless infrastructure. The signal-to-noise ratio of an access point, which is part of a wireless LAN, does not reflect the number of attached hosts or the traffic between them. The throughput of the access point could be low while the signal is strong. At the same time an access point with weaker signal could allow higher throughput. In ad hoc routing, hop count is the most common metric and the selection of a route to a gateway is affected by the same utilization problem. This could lead to a situation where a short route is used by more hosts and performing worse than a longer route serving fewer hosts. This thesis proposes and discusses solutions to calculating network-layer metrics and using them in gateway selection and handover decisions. To enable connectivity of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to the Internet, a gateway must support the wired single-hop and wireless multi-hop approaches. To deploy network-layer mobility in a MANET, the Mobile IP protocol needs to be adapted for the multi-hop environment. A MANET enables connectivity to more than one gateway at a time and combined with multihoming it provides seamless handover between subnets. The gateway selection and handover decisions are complicated by the multihoming capabilities. This thesis proposes and discusses solutions to deploying multihomed mobility into MANETs and thereby handling multi-hop gateway discovery, registration of multiple gateways and tunneling to selected gateway(s). Traffic patterns in wired LANs generally follow the 80/20 ratio of Internet destined vs. local traffic. The same traffic patterns generally hold true for wireless hosts. Therefore it is important to maintain the route to the gateway for the Internet destined traffic. This thesis proposes and discusses a solution to maintaining gateway connectivity in MANETs by installing routes to gateways using advertisements. Deciding the locality of a peer and setting up the forwarding route differs between single-hop and multi-hop networks. In single-hop networks a source matches the destination prefix with its own to decide what forwarding policy to use. Local traffic is sent directly to the destination with the link- layer protocol while global traffic is forwarded to a default gateway. In multi-hop networks the ad hoc routing protocol finds the route to a destination either proactively or on-demand. This thesis proposes and discusses a solution to deciding on the mobile host destination locality in a MANET. / Godkänd; 2005; 20060916 (ysko)

Many synthesizers are designed to emulate other instruments. Recently, progress has been made in using neural audio generation models to create synthesizers which can efficiently learn from data. However, these past approaches compromise either inter-note timbre dependencies or ease of use. This work addresses this issue with the control-synthesis approach, a method for turning audio generation models into easily controllable synthesizers. In this approach, a control model transforms user input into a set of intermediate features with which we condition a synthesis model. This approach is demonstrated through the implementation of a MIDI-controllable synthesizer which can be trained to emulate a target instrument from unannotated audio. / Många syntar är utformade för att emulera andra instrument. Nyligen har framsteg gjorts med att använda neurala nätverk för att skapa syntar som effektivt kan lära av data. Dessa tillvägagångssätt har dock offrat uttrycksfullhet eller användarvänlighet. I detta arbete så introducerar jag control-synthesis, en metod för att förvandla neurala ljudgenereringsmodeller till kontrollerbara och utrycksfulla syntar. Jag demonstrerar detta tillvägagångssätt genom att implementera en MIDIkontrollerbar synt som kan emulera akustiska instrument utifrån ljudinspelningar utan annotering.

Interactions in virtual reality are mostly done using handheld controllers, but hand motion tracking is becoming popular as an alternative. This study explores different types of grasping techniques with hand motion tracking, for objects that should be held in a specific way in order to be used. Can the same techniques and interaction behaviors be used with hand motion tracking as with physical controllers, or will there need to be adjustments made? Do different grasping techniques change the sense of presence while interacting with objects through hand tracking in virtual reality environments, and which grasping technique is preferred for hand tracking in VR? A common grasping technique in games, using handheld controllers, is that objects automatically snap into the right grip when the user gets close enough. In this study, user tests were conducted to compare how this kind of assisted grasp compares to the user instead being visually guided to how to grasp the object, in the sense of feeling of presence, using hand motion tracking. The results suggest that an assisted snap grasp can be used with hand tracking in VR without too much impact on the sense of presence, as it was the preferred grasping technique in this study. The guided grasp was not as successful as the snap grasp, since it was perceived as too restricting. The results don’t necessarily mean that no kind of guided grasp would work, or even be preferred over an assisted snap grasp. A guided grasp might work well if it’s not too strict and the design accommodates the many different ways people usually interact with objects. / Interaktion i VR utförs ofta men hjälp av fysiska handkontroller, men handspårning börjar bli ett populärt alternativ. Den här studien utforskar olika typer av metoder för att greppa objekt med handspårning, för objekt som behöver hållas på ett specifikt sätt för att de ska gå att använda. Kan samma greppmetoder och interaktionsbeteenden användas med handspårning som med fysiska handkontroller, eller måste de justeras? Ändrar olika greppmetoder närvarokänslan vid interaktion med objekt med handspårning i VR och vilken greppmetod föredras för handspårning i VR? En vanlig greppmetod i spel, där fysiska handkontroller används, är att objekt automatiskt klickar in i rätt grepp i handen när användaren kommer till räckligt nära. I den här studien genonfördes användartester för att undersöka hur närvarokänslan påverkas vid den typen av automatiskt grepp, jämfört med att användaren istället får visuell hjälp med hur de ska greppa ett objekt, vid användning av handspårning. Resultatet föreslår att automatisk hjälp att greppa objekt kan användas med handspårning i VR utan större påverkan på närvarokänslan, eftersom det var den greppmetod som föredrogs i denna studie. Greppmetoden med visuell hjälp var inte lika omtyckt, eftersom den upplevdes som för strikt. Resultatet betyder nödvändigtvis inte att ingen liknande greppmetod med visuell hjälp skulle fungera, eller till och med vara den metod som föredras över ett grepp med automatisk hjälp. En greppmetod med visuell hjälp skulle eventuellt kunna fungera bra om den inte är för strikt och om den även tar hänsyn till de olika sätt som användare interagerar med objekt.

By their very nature, video games are designed to be engaging which has played a major factor in their commercial success. Reward systems are an important aspect when it comes to creating an engaging experience as they serve as motivators for the player. Many such reward systems incorporate varying degrees of randomness. This brings the question of how the implementation of random rewards affects the gameplay experience and in particular, how it affects the level of engagement with the player. To investigate this, two versions of a simple video game were created, one with a randomized rewards system and one with a non-random rewards system. The study was conducted with the help of 17 participants where 15 were from the Media technology program at kth and the other 3 had a similar background. Participants were divided into two groups where both groups got to play both versions of the game but one would start with the random version and one with the non random version. After playing both versions of the game participants got to fill in a questionnaire with questions about their experience with the game. The result of the study did not show a significant difference between the two versions in terms of player engagement. The non random version was however seen as more enjoyable as well as allowing significantly greater autonomy when playing the game. Overall the result indicated that a non random rewards system may result in players enjoying the game more as compared to randomized one. That said, because the reason for players enjoying the game was in large part due to how the rewards system affected the gameplay experience, the result might not be applicable to rewards systems which affect gameplay in different ways other than the one used for the study. / Datorspel är av sin natur designade för att vara engagerande vilket har spelat en viktig faktor i deras kommersiella framgång. Belöningssystem är en viktig aspekt när det gäller att skapa en engagerande spelupplevelse eftersom de motiverar spelaren. Många sådana belöningssystem innehåller olika grader av slumpmässighet. Detta väcker frågan om hur implementeringen av slumpmässiga belöningar påverkar spelupplevelsen och i synnerhet hur det påverkar nivån av engagemang hos spelaren. För att undersöka detta skapades två versioner av ett enkelt datorspel, en med ett slumpmässigt belöningssystem och en med ett icke-slumpmässigt belöningssystem. Studien genomfördes med hjälp av 17 deltagare där 15 var från medieteknikprogrammet på kth och de andra 3 hade en liknande bakgrund. Deltagarna delades in i två grupper där båda grupperna fick spela båda versionerna av spelet men ena gruppen började med den slumpmässiga versionen och den andra gruppen med den icke slumpmässiga versionen. Efter att ha spelat båda versionerna av spelet fick deltagarna fylla i ett frågeformulär med frågor om deras erfarenhet av spelet. Resultatet av studien visade ingen signifikant skillnad mellan de två versionerna när det gällde nivån av engagemang hos spelaren. Den icke slumpmässiga versionen sågs dock som mer underhållande samt ansågs också ge signifikant större autonomi när man spelade spelet. Sammantaget visade resultatet att ett icke-slumpmässigt belöningssystem kan leda till att spelare tycker om spelet mer jämfört med ett slumpmässigt. Med detta sagt, eftersom anledningen till att spelare gillade spelet till stor del berodde på hur belöningssystemet påverkade spelupplevelsen, är resultatet kanske inte tillämpligt på belöningssystem som påverkat spelet på andra sätt än det som användes för studien.