Background: There are significant psychological challenges faced by people throughout their lives and many of these challenges can be readily understood from a contextual behavioural science perspective, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) shows promise as a theoretically and practically relevant intervention. Some problems faced in delivering such an intervention are volume and access to healthcare. A potential solution to this is to design theoretically driven interventions which can be delivered through technology. These need to be interactive, individually shaped and will combine mindfulness, acceptance and values. Such interventions need to be evaluated scientifically according to acceptability, quality, safety and effectiveness. Aims: This thesis has two sections. Firstly, a systematic review aiming to assess the acceptability and effectiveness of using technology to deliver ACT. Secondly, an empirical research study aiming to analyse the experiences of using an ACT based app for young people with type 1 diabetes (TD1). Methods: The review searched 11 databases, and a related website. Included studies were required to use a form of technology to deliver ACT, with no real-time therapist. Two independent researchers determined inclusion of articles into the review and rated the studies according to the quality criteria. Where there was uncertainty a third reviewer was used. For the empirical study, individual interviews of 9 young people aged 13-22 years with TD1 were asked about their experiences of using the ACT based app. Framework analysis was used to determine themes. Results: The review search yielded 18 studies which met inclusion criteria. Findings highlighted that generally these interventions were seen as acceptable and satisfactory. All of these interventions were conducted in an adult population, and qualitative data was not robustly accounted for. The empirical research found two main themes: ‘Desire for apps to represent my needs’ and ‘How diabetes impacts me and how this could potentially be addressed in an app’. Discussion: Both the review and empirical study found that participants were positive about the use of technology to deliver ACT. Developmental progress needs to be made in the app to truly represent the needs of young people with TD1. These interventions could enhance the availability of psychological therapies. This has been highlighted as a government objective in several countries. Methodological weaknesses limit conclusions, such as underpowered studies. As this is a fast growing body of research it is hoped that future studies could be more similar methodologically. It would still be interesting to determine whether asynchronous contact enhances the cost-effectiveness of this form treatment. This thesis has provided me with the opportunity to design an ACT protocol for young people with type 1 diabetes (TD1). It has helped me to fully understand the undertaking which goes into designing apps and the scope of how responsive apps can be. It has given me the chance to communicate with people from different professional backgrounds to create a shared language, an opportunity to lead and manage a project and much more. With the help of my supervisor in my first year of training, we established links with the informatics department to see if students would be able to help with the programming of such an app. We had to create a synopsis of the proposed study to entice students to undertake the project as part of their degree. An interested student was assigned the project and meetings were held to determine our expectations and to establish the scope of what could be created. A second student took on the project during my second year or training. During this time my supervisor and I created a protocol of the content for the app. This was based on previous ACT protocols and tools we were aware of, which we thought might be helpful. A lot of thought had to go into trying to keep the content concise, including different modes of delivery (MP3s, video, animation etc), making the content applicable to young people with TD1 based on previous literature, and thinking about how interactive the app could be. Friends were also relied on to create graphics for the app. I went to different health boards across Scotland to meet with Diabetes teams to inform them about the project and to gather advice on the appropriateness of the diabetes information within the content of the app, and to determine whether they were interested in taking part in the study. I tested the initial prototype and glitches were ironed out. The next stage was to test the app on professionals working in the field, and to gather their feedback through focus groups. Adaptations to the app were made based on this. The app was initially made for Android phone devices based on general market research indicating that there was little evidence that one platform was more popular in adolescents. The diabetes teams and I tried to recruit young people with TD1 from their usual diabetes clinics. Initial barriers to recruitment were that at least 50% of young people had iPhones so could not download the app, and others did not seem interested in downloading the app to take part in the study. Funding of 10 Android tablets was agreed by the University. I attended the usual diabetes clinics in NHS Lothian and young people with TD1 started to volunteer to take part in the study. Originally it was hoped a trial of the effectiveness of the app would be carried out, but the difficulties in recruitment meant that instead I decided to use a qualitative methodology to explore young people’s experiences of using the app.

A Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) system is a cloud-based system that is accessed by the users through their own mobile devices. MCC systems are emerging as the product of two technology trends: 1) the migration of personal computing from desktop to mobile devices and 2) the growing integration of large-scale computing environments into cloud systems. Designers are developing a variety of new mobile cloud computing systems. Each of these systems is developed with different goals and under the influence of different design constraints, such as high network latency or limited energy supply. The current MCC systems rely heavily on Computation Offloading, which however incurs new problems such as scalability of the cloud, privacy concerns due to storing personal information on the cloud, and high energy consumption on the cloud data centers. In this dissertation, I address these problems by exploring different options in the distribution of computation across different computing nodes in MCC systems. My thesis is that "the use of design and simulation tools optimized for design space exploration of the MCC systems is the key to optimize the distribution of computation in MCC." For a quantitative analysis of mobile cloud computing systems through design space exploration, I have developed netShip, the first generation of an innovative design and simulation tool, that offers large scalability and heterogeneity support. With this tool system designers and software programmers can efficiently develop, optimize, and validate large-scale, heterogeneous MCC systems. I have enhanced netShip to support the development of ever-evolving MCC applications with a variety of emerging needs including the fast simulation of new devices, e.g., Internet-of-Things devices, and accelerators, e.g., mobile GPUs. Leveraging netShip, I developed three new MCC systems where I applied three variations of a new computation distributing technique, called Reverse Offloading. By more actively leveraging the computational power on mobile devices, the MCC systems can reduce the total execution times, the burden of concentrated computations on the cloud, and the privacy concerns about storing personal information available in the cloud. This approach also creates opportunities for new services by utilizing the information available on the mobile device instead of accessing the cloud. Throughout my research I have enabled the design optimization of mobile applications and cloud-computing platforms. In particular, my design tool for MCC systems becomes a vehicle to optimize not only the performance but also the energy dissipation, an aspect of critical importance for any computing system.

Advances in sensor technology and computer science in the last three decades have boosted the importance of system identification and vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) in civil infrastructure safety and integrity assessment. On the other hand, practical and financial issues in system instrumentation, maintenance, and operation have remained as fundamental problems obstructing the widespread use of SHM applications. For this reason, to reduce system costs and improve practicality as well as sustainability, researchers have been working on emerging methods such as wireless, distributed, mobile, remote, smart, multisensory, and heterogeneous sensing systems. Smartphones with built-in batteries, processor units, and a variety of sensors, have stood as a promising hardware and software environment that can be used as SHM components. Communication capabilities with the web, enable them to compose a smart and participatory sensor network of outnumbered individuals. Besides, crowdsourcing power offered by citizens, sets a decentralized and self-governing SHM framework which can even be pertained by very limited equipment and labor resources. Yet, citizen engagement in an SHM framework brings numerous challenges as well as opportunities. In a citizen-induced SHM scenario, the system administrators have limited or no control over the sensor instrumentation and the operation schedule, and the acquired data is subjected change depending on the measurement conditions. The citizen-induced errors can stem from spatial, temporal, and directional uncertainties since the sensor configuration relies on smartphone users’ decisions and actions. Moreover, the sensor-structure coupling may be unavailable where the smartphone is carried by the user, and as a consequence, the vibration features measured by smartphones can be modified due to the human biomechanical system. In addition, in contrast with the conventional high fidelity sensors, smartphone sensors are of limited quality and are subjected to high noise levels. This dissertation utilizes multisensory smartphone features to solve citizen-induced uncertainties and develops a smartphone-based SHM methodology which enables a cyber-physical system through mobile crowdsourcing. Using smartphone computational and communicational power, combined with a variety of embedded sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and camera, spatiotemporal and biomechanical citizen-induced uncertainties can be eliminated from the crowdsourced smartphone data, and eventually, structural vibrations collected from numerous buildings and bridges can be collected on a single cloud server. Therefore, unlike the conventional platforms designed and implemented for a particular structure, citizen-engaged and smartphone-based SHM can serve as intelligent, scalable, fully autonomous, cost-free, and durable cyber-physical systems drastically changing the forthcoming trends in civil infrastructure monitoring. In this dissertation, iOS is used as the application development platform to produce a smartphone-based SHM prototype, namely Citizen Sensors for SHM. In addition, a web-based software is developed and cloud services are implemented to connect individual smartphones to an administrator base and automate data submission and processing procedure accordingly. Finally, solutions to citizen-induced problems are provided through numerous laboratory and field test applications to prove the feasibility of smartphone-based SHM with real life examples. Through collaborative use of the software, principles and methodologies presented in this dissertation, smartphones can be the core component of futuristic smart, resilient, and sustainable city and infrastructure systems. And this study lays down an innovative and integrated foundation empowering citizens to achieve these goals.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Cortat Coelho.pdf: 8574730 bytes, checksum: faa2981774cc2e7dd5a9eea8ecc35623 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-05-29 / Since Web 2.0 has been created, the users role has faced massive changes, leading to a type of user experience characterized by the content generation and collaboration. Supported by modern mobile devices powered with advanced functions, collaboration became a reality in several segments of society, which now takes advantage of the new opportunities brought by mobile applications. In this context, a strong demand for geolocalization feature can be observed, as the practice characterized by the interaction of groups that share even temporally the same geographical region continuously grows. Thereby, the triad SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) is inserted into the scenario and becomes the main topic of this research. In addition to this, we can detect the growth of the incorporation of game mechanics into digital environments, a characteristic called gamification , which derives from the word game . This enhancement is relevant since it is an artifice able to motivate users to interact more and better with the environment and with other users. Among the applications that exploit all these features, Foursquare, which is a social network that allows users to indicate where they are at a certain moment, deserves full attention. Thus, it s relevant for this research to include an analysis of this tool, given its importance to the market. Therefore, the purpose of this research, which has a descriptive exploratory methodology, is to evidence how this scenario affects and encourages the development of mobile applications. In order to accomplish this, the research was conducted based on the contributions of Pierre Levy, André Lemos and Lucia Santaella on collaboration, social networking and collective intelligence. Further, the contributions of Martha Gabriel, Rachel Rechuero and the duos Hugo Fuks & Mariano Pimentel and Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham on more specific topics complemented the theoretical foundation / Desde que a Web 2.0 foi criada, o papel do internauta sofreu fortes mudanças, culminando na experiência do usuário marcada pela produção de conteúdo e pela colaboração. Com o suporte de dispositivos móveis dotados de cada vez mais recursos, a colaboração se tornou uma realidade nos mais variados segmentos da sociedade, que passaram a se valer das novas possibilidades trazidas pelas aplicações móveis. Nota-se, nesse contexto, uma forte demanda pelo recurso da geolocalização, uma vez que cresce a prática caracterizada pela interação de grupos que dividem mesmo que temporariamente uma mesma região geográfica. Dessa forma, surge a tríade SoLoMo (social, local, móvel), assunto central deste trabalho. Em complemento, percebe-se o crescimento da incorporação de elementos de jogos nos ambientes digitais, característica chamada de gameficação , termo advindo de game (jogo). Esse reforço se justifica pelo fato de se tratar de um artifício capaz de motivar os usuários a interagir mais e melhor com o ambiente e com outros usuários. Dentre as aplicações que exploram todas essas características, destaca-se o Foursquare, rede social que permite ao usuário indicar sua localização em tempo real. Dessa forma, tornou-se pertinente ao trabalho, também, a análise dessa ferramenta, dada a sua importância para o mercado. O objetivo desta pesquisa, de metodologia exploratória descritiva, pauta-se, pois, em evidenciar de que forma esse cenário interfere e incentiva o desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis. Para isso, a dissertação foi conduzida, inicialmente, com base nas contribuições de Pierre Levy, André Lemos e Lucia Santaella sobre colaboração, redes sociais e inteligência coletiva. E num momento posterior, as contribuições de Martha Gabriel, Raquel Recuero e das duplas Hugo Fuks & Mariano Pimentel e Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham, sobre temas mais específicos complementaram a fundamentação teórica

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andre Luis Dal Santo Kadow.pdf: 10906966 bytes, checksum: f2074dfcf9f800daa95f3ba5d4e259e3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-21 / The concept of gamification applied to mobile devices is extremely new, in view that cell phones began to offer the necessary characteristics to an effective project since the second half of last decade through a major interactivity, new interfaces and communication performed through the principle of location due to the arrival of 3G. The main idea of this work is the design and the concepts of gamification, its similarities and differences comparing to electronic games and its applicability through mobile devices. The result will be a study of the current conditions and the future of gamification. This research is based on a methodology that analyzes application data and performs field surveys. Among the mobile devices applications that use gamification effectively, Zombies, Run!, Foursquare, FuelGood, Waze and Nike+ Running can be mentioned. The latter two will be the objects of study of this essay since they are applications with a big and extremely active users base, facilitating data collection in several layers. This analysis was held based on contributions from Henry Jenkins, Lucia Santaella, Werbach and Pierre Levy about social networking, participative culture and collective intelligence and takes into consideration the from Paul Schuytema about the concept of electronic games and Johan Huizinga about the psychology of games, among other authors / O conceito de gamificação aplicada aos dispositivos móveis é extremamente novo, tendo em vista que os celulares passaram a oferecer as características necessárias para um projeto efetivo a partir da segunda metade da década passada através de maior interatividade, novas interfaces e comunicação realizadas através do princípio da localização com a chegada do 3G. A ideia central desse estudo é o design e os conceitos da gamificação, suas semelhanças e diferenças com jogos eletrônicos e sua aplicabilidade através de dispositivos móveis. O resultado será um estudo sobre as condições atuais e o futuro da gamificação. Este estudo está baseado em uma metodologia que analisa dados de aplicativos e realiza pesquisas de campo. Entre os aplicativos para dispositivos móveis que usam de maneira efetiva a gamificação podemos citar Zombies, Run!, Foursquare, FuelGood, Waze e o Nike+ Running. Estes dois últimos serão objetos de estudo dessa dissertação por se tratarem de aplicativos com uma grande base de usuários grande e extremamente ativa, facilitando a coleta de dados em diversas camadas. Essa análise foi conduzida a partir das contribuições de Henry Jenkins, Lucia Santaella, Werbach e Pierre Levy a respeito de redes sociais, cultura participativa e inteligência coletiva e leva em consideração as observações de Paul Schuytema, sobre o conceito de jogos eletrônicos e Johan Huizinga sobre a psicologia dos jogos; entre outros autores

Thesis (DTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2018. / The central thesis of this study is that a multi-factorial strategy model can be evolved to enable development agency to be an augmenter in the commercialisation of the mobile applications development SME sector through business model innovation in response to disruptive innovation. The concept of augmentation in the context of this study acknowledges that disruptive innovation is ubiquitous and that development agencies can help these SMEs to succeed through business model innovation. This can be achieved through the implementation of a multi-factorial strategy model. A multi-factorial strategy model in this context is regarded as a method or plan having stemmed or stemming from a number of different causes or influences detailing the logic and the key considerations on the path to defining an organisation’s strategy. The development agency can utilise it to determine the state of the business and what the appropriate response should be, by way of business model innovation in response to disruptive innovation. This study rests on three tenets, namely, the uncovering of the dimensions of business model innovation; the nature of disruption; and finally, the potential role of the development agency in supporting SMEs in the technology sector. The mobile application (app) economy has presented business potential for SMEs and this sector of the economy can be facilitated by development agencies. Governments make use of development agencies to assist, develop and support growth within a region through the provision of resources and assistance, usually from state organisations. The enterprise development strategy should ensure the viability of the business idea, which should lead to the creation of new business value. The fieldwork for this critical realist study consisted of five phases. Phase 1 involved interviews with academics from the four higher education institutions in the Western Cape; Phase 2 involved an interview with mobile application development SMEs; Phase 3 comprised a focused interview consisting of members from industry and the development agency; Phase 4 involved interviews with entrepreneurs within the innovation and technology sector; and Phase 5 involved interviews with development agencies supporting the development of SMEs. Despite their potential, mobile app development businesses in the Western Cape face difficulties in commercialising their applications. The study suggested that research is warranted around the establishment of a multi-factorial strategy model which could provide a strategy for enhanced commercialisation of mobile app development. This model would have to address a number of concerns, depending on the propensity of the business towards mobile app development. Research into what adjustments to the current business models of these businesses are required to enter into mobile app development was also recommended. The findings and interpretations of this critical realist study revealed a structured real world of the landscape of mobile application development in the Western Cape, South Africa, by identifying its key constructs. It then revealed that knowledge is socially produced by identifying the salient imperatives that inform the role of the development agent with respect to business model innovation and disruptive innovation. By means of critical discourse analysis of the views expressed by the respondents, it revealed the emancipation agenda of mobile application development in the Western Cape, South Africa. In doing so it also ultimately uncovered the generative mechanisms in understanding, amongst others, what the critical performance underpinnings are. It is recommended that the SME sector implement business model innovation to respond to disruptive innovation, defined as “emerging technology whose arrival in the marketplace signifies the eventual displacement of the dominant technology in that sector” (Ganguly, Nilchiani & Farr, 2010, p. 35). The proliferation of disruptive innovation has led to technological innovation and such innovation will impact on SMEs in South Africa. The concept of business model innovation suggests that SMEs should move to a progressive interdependent modality where they participate through their shared strengths. The collaboration with other mobile app development SMEs would allow for their independent weaknesses to be moderated. Through business model innovation, mobile app development SMEs should be able to respond to the disruptive innovation and ensure success and sustainability. The antidote to disruption should be progressive management by way of business model innovation. In this sense then, the antidote to disruptive innovation is a management response that should be understood across the sector in which the study is undertaken.

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearable devices, have become a popular platform to deliver recommendations and interact with users. To learn the decision rule of assigning recommendations, i.e. policy, neither one homogeneous policy for all users nor completely heterogeneous policy for each user is appropriate. Many attempts have been made to learn a policy for making recommendations using observational mobile health (mHealth) data. The majority of them focuses on a homogeneous policy, that is a one-fit-to-all policy for all users. It is a fair starting point for mHealth study, but it ignores the underlying user heterogeneity. Users with similar behavior pattern may have unobservable underlying heterogeneity. To solve this problem, we develop a personalized learning framework that models both population and personalized effect simultaneously. In the first part of this dissertation, we address the personalized policy learning problem using longitudinal mHealth application usage data. Personalized policy represents a paradigm shift from developing a single policy that may prescribe personalized decisions by tailoring. Specifically, we aim to develop the best policy, one per user, based on estimating random effects under generalized linear mixed model. With many random effects, we consider new estimation method and penalized objective to circumvent high-dimensional integrals for marginal likelihood approximation. We establish consistency and optimality of our method with endogenous application usage. We apply our method to develop personalized prompt schedules in 294 application users, with a goal to maximize the prompt response rate given past application usage and other contextual factors. We found the best push schedule given the same covariates varied among the users, thus calling for personalized policies. Using the estimated personalized policies would have achieved a mean prompt response rate of 23% in these users at 16 weeks or later: this is a remarkable improvement on the observed rate (11%), while the literature suggests 3%-15% user engagement at 3 months after download. The proposed method compares favorably to existing estimation methods including using the R function glmer in a simulation study. In the second part of this dissertation, we aim to solve a practical problem in the mHealth area. Low response rate has been a major issue that blocks researchers from collecting high quality mHealth data. Therefore, developing a prompting system is important to keep user engagement and increase response rate. We aim to learn personalized prompting time for users in order to gain a high response rate. An extension of the personalized learning algorithm is applied on the Intellicare data that incorporates penalties of the population effect parameters and personalized effect parameters into learning the personalized decision rule of sending prompts. The number of personalized policy parameters increases with sample size. Since there is a large number of users in the Intellicare data, it is challenging to estimate such high dimensional parameters. To solve the computational issue, we employ a bagging method that first bootstraps subsamples and then ensembles parameters learned from each subsample. The analysis of Intellicare data shows that sending prompts at a personalized hour helps achieve a higher response rate compared to a one-fit-to-all prompting hour.

Orientador: João Carlos da Rocha / Coorientador: Fellippo Ramos Verri / Coorientador : Estevão Tomomitsu Kimpara / Banca: Symone Cristina Teixeira / Banca: Carolina Judica Ramos / Resumo: O uso de tecnologias digitais interativas está altamente inserido na sociedade contemporânea e pode ser de grande valia para educação em saúde e melhoria do relacionamento do profissional com paciente e seu responsável/cuidador. O objetivo deste estudo foi desenvolver um aplicativo com funcionalidades tanto para o profissional quanto para o responsável/cuidador do paciente, onde será realizado o preenchimento do diário alimentar e realizada a avaliação do risco de cárie. Para isso, o projeto foi divido em etapas: pesquisa na literatura para a determinação de um método de avaliação do risco de cárie, desenvolvimento do aplicativo e avaliação do mesmo por dentistas especialistas ou com atuação em odontopediatria. O aplicativo desenvolvido, através de design participativo, denominado CarieHelp, mostrou-se eficiente em suas funcionalidades, tendo sido bem avaliado pelos profissionais que o testaram, onde 100% dos voluntários participantes consideraram a linguagem clara e objetiva e afirmaram acreditar que o aplicativo pode influenciar na percepção dos responsáveis quanto a prevenção da doença cárie e 66,7% consideraram o aplicativo altamente útil. Futuramente aperfeiçoamentos podem ser realizados com a intenção inserir de outras funcionalidades que reflitam em ações de educação em saúde / Abstract : The use of interactive digital technologies is highly inserted in contemporary society and can be of great value for health education and improving the relationship of the professional with the patient and their caregiver. The aim of this study was to develop an application with functionalities for both the professional and the patient's parents / caregiver, where the food diary will be filled and the caries risk assessment will be performed. For this, the project was divided into stages: research in the literature to determine a method of caries risk assessment, application development and evaluation by dentists specializing in or acting in pediatric dentistry. The application developed through participatory design, called CarieHelp, proved to be efficient in its functionalities, having been well evaluated by the professionals who tested it, where 100% of the participating volunteers considered the language clear and objective and said they believed the application could influence in the perception of those responsible for the prevention of caries disease and 66.7% considered the application highly useful. Future improvements can be made with the intention of inserting other functionalities that reflect in health education actions / Mestre

The mobile application (App) industry has grown tremendously over the past five years, primarily fueled by small App development businesses. Lacking advertising budgets, these relatively unknown, small businesses often offer free versions of their paid Apps to reduce customer uncertainty about App quality and get noticed in the crowded App industry. In this research I investigate the implications of offering free versions on the adoption speed of paid Apps by building on the existing marketing and information systems literature on sampling and versioning. Using a unique dataset of 2.82 million observations from 4,180 Apps and accounting for endogeneity, I find that while the strategy of offering free versions of paid Apps is popular, it impacts the adoption speed of paid Apps negatively. I also find that the presence of free versions has a larger negative impact on the adoption speed of Apps bought for fun and pleasure (hedonic Apps) and in the later life stages of paid Apps. I expect that the results of my study will enable App developers to make informed decisions about offering free versions of paid Apps and prompt academicians to produce more work focusing on this industry. / text

Advertising is moving from a more traditional, paid placement into a new digital and mobile era. Companies are trying to figure out how to reach consumers in new ways, and emerging technologies are assisting. Branded mobile applications are one way that companies are working to build brand image and advertise in an innovative way. In this research, twelve in-depth interviews were conducted to find out what consumers may want, look for, and expect from a branded mobile application. Secondary research was also conducted to find out how brands are leveraging these new technologies and what consumers can look for in the future of mobile advertising. After reading this paper, the reader will have further knowledge of what consumers are seeking in mobile branded applications and how to obtain and keep their attention with a mobile application. / text