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

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Leandro da Conceicao Cardoso.pdf: 10444240 bytes, checksum: c91c9b722796c30dda9a7c7699d3517e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-19 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This study shows the relation between the importance of how digital designers practice their theoric knowledgments, nowadays people live technological changes and technologic inovations, mainly with smartphones, that are considered a technological revolution, the strongest impact of last times, after Internet advents and social medias. The interaction acts through of apps interfaces, there is a prevision that until 2016, 300 billions of apps will be developmented having a big research base. The goal of this study is helps Brazilian researches. The main of issues in health researches is people with cardiacs problems. The focus of this study was to show apps that describes characteristics of the people that want to have good health. Yet it is important show that this research has not relation to medical aspect. The methodology of this study establishes an analysis of many theoric thoughts about apps and its application for the designers that development interfaces of apps. The ideas of many authors are presented here and their studies about design and interaction. This study presents, moreover, some aspects that are not considered in a critical analysis for the reason that it was presently a short study that shows only the results and the importance that digital designer has in a academic knowledge to develops interfaces that not follow concepts of theoretic students. The main is to show how an app can be faster and more efficient than if it could not obey the rules, although in a specific objective / Esta dissertação é pautada na importância de como os designers digitais colocam em prática os seus conhecimentos teóricos, em um momento que estamos vivendo em constantes e aceleradas mudanças de inovações tecnológicas, especialmente com os smartphones, que é considerado como a revolução tecnológica de maior impacto nos últimos tempos, após a causada pela internet e pelas redes sociais. Nos smartphones a interação se dá através das interfaces dos aplicativos, que já podem estar instalados ou serem baixados pela internet. Existe uma previsão que até 2016, 300 bilhões de aplicativos serão desenvolvidos, tendo uma grande base de pesquisa. O objetivo deste trabalho é de também colaborar no que os brasileiros consideram que deva ser prioridade, que são os serviços de saúde, onde o mais grave do Brasil são os cardíacos. Assim, o foco foi em abordar os aplicativos que em sua descrição têm características que podem servir para o monitoramento da saúde cardíaca do usuário. É importante salientar que este estudo não tem nenhuma relação do aspecto médico. Esta pesquisa propõe a análise de como foi aplicado pelos designers que desenvolveram as interfaces dos aplicativos aqui apresentados, os conceitos de vários autores relacionados ao design, usabilidade e interação, como também um levantamento de alguns aspectos que não foram considerados através de uma análise crítica que foi curta, o que evidencia o resultado obtido, da relevância do designer digital ter o conhecimento acadêmico para o desenvolvimento de interfaces, não sendo possível imaginar como funcionaria interfaces que não obedecesse os conceitos dos estudiosos, que tornam o tempo de execução de uma tarefa muito mais rápida e eficiente do que se o aplicativo não obedecesse estas regras, salvo que seja um aplicativo experimental com este objetivo específico

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.

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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

This exploratory qualitative study investigated the presence of and relationships among constructs that contribute to children's interactions with educational technology, leading to the development of the modification of attributes, affordances, abilities, and distance (MAAAD) for Learning framework. For this study, each of 10 fifth-grade children participated in one individual video-recorded semistructured interview session, during which they interacted with two mathematics virtual manipulative iPad apps and responded to follow-up questions. Video recordings and observation field notes were analyzed for evidence of attributes, affordance-ability relationships, distance, and relationships among these constructs. Constant comparative data analysis using memoing and eclectic coding provided evidence of the presence of each focus construct. Further analysis and interpretation, including quantization of qualitative data for visualization using novel rhombus plots, also led to the identification of emergent themes related to each construct and revealed relationships among the constructs. Emergent themes included categorization, alignment, and modification of attributes, variations and interrelationships among affordance-ability relationships, and the identification of and interactions among mathematical and technological distance. Furthermore, each construct related to each other construct. The evidence and interpretations led to the development of the MAAAD for Learning framework. The results of the study suggest that the MAAAD for Learning framework models relationships among attributes, affordance-ability relationships, and distance in the context of user-app interactions. the framework could serve as a tool for app developers designing apps, educators using apps to support children's learning, and researchers characterizing user-app interactions and the outcomes of those interactions. The constructs, relationships, and framework identified in this study advance the literature on children's interactions with educational technology tools, in particular literature concerning children's interactions with mathematics virtual manipulative iPad apps.

This bachelor thesis has been performed at Combitech, a technology, development and management consultancy company. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate the possibilities for multi-platform development of applications for mobile devices, as well as actually developing a simpler application using multi-platform development. The application is supposed to have functionality for sending an expression of interest for work and thesis work at Combitech, and should be available both as a native application for the Android and iOS operating systems as well as in the form of a web application. The thesis begins with an investigation of the possibilities for multi-platform development of applications for mobile devices. It is concluded that there is a wide range of available development frameworks that target several mobile platforms. It is decided that an HTML/CSS/JavaScript-based framework is most suited for the application to be developed. Therefore four HTML/CSS/JavaScript-based multi-platform development frameworks targetting mobile devices are analyzed more closely, namely jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, Sencha Touch and Appcelerator Titanium. jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap are chosen to develop the application, and the thesis describes the development work as well as the resulting application. It is concluded that HTML/CSS/JavaScript-based frameworks can provide a nice touch screen optimized user interface that is consistent across platforms with e.g. jQuery Mobile, as well as access to native features and the possibility to package a web application as a native application with e.g. PhoneGap. It is also concluded that jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap can be used to create a modular application that, with well defined interfaces, can be run both as a web application and packaged as a native application on different mobile operating systems with no or minor changes to the code.

Circuit optimization is extremely important in order to design today's high performance integrated circuits. As systems become more and more complex, traditional optimization techniques are no longer viable due to the complex and simulation intensive nature of the optimization problem. Two examples of such problems include clock mesh skew reduction and optimization of large analog systems, for example Phase locked loops. Mesh-based clock distribution has been employed in many high-performance microprocessor designs due to its favorable properties such as low clock skew and robustness. However, such clock distributions can become quite complex and may consist of hundreds of nonlinear drivers strongly coupled via a large passive network. While the simulation of clock meshes is already very time consuming, tuning such networks under tight performance constraints is an even daunting task. Same is the case with the phase locked loop. Being composed of multiple individual analog blocks, it is an extremely challenging task to optimize the entire system considering all block level trade-offs. In this work, we address these two challenging optimization problems i.e.; clock mesh skew optimization and PLL locking time reduction. The expensive objective function evaluations and difficulty in getting explicit sensitivity information make these problems intractable to standard optimization methods. We propose to explore the recently developed asynchronous parallel pattern search (APPS) method for efficient driver size tuning. While being a search-based method, APPS not only provides the desirable derivative-free optimization capability, but also is amenable to parallelization and possesses appealing theoretically rigorous convergence properties. In this work it is shown how such a method can lead to powerful parallel optimization of these complex problems with significant runtime and quality advantages over the traditional sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. It is also shown how design-specific properties and speeding-up techniques can be exploited to make the optimization even more efficient while maintaining the convergence of APPS in a practical sense. In addition, the optimization technique is further enhanced by introducing the feature to handle non-linear constraints through the use of penalty functions. The enhanced method is used for optimizing phase locked loops at the system level.

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