This work takes a look at how some of the challenges facing the African Continent can be tackled by the use of Mobile Phone Applications. Mobile phone penetration in Africa is very high, as indicated by statistics from South Africa in 2009 which showed that 70% of all South Africans owned a cell-phone. As such, the mobile phone is the ideal infrastructure platform to introduce technology applications that can be easily accessed by the general public. The paper briefly discusses the current state of mobile applications on the continent including some key applications presently deployed and how they are being used to meet some major social challenges faced. The work then proposes the creation of the Mobile Doctor Application, a tool that gives simple solutions to end-users in response to their health related text message queries. The key stakeholders for this application and their respective roles are then discussed. The paper then details the requirements for the application, separates them logically and represents them graphically for a clear understanding. Also put forth are two possible different sets of architecture for this application, one fully manual and the other using different sets of technologies. Finally, each architecture is evaluated using compliance metrics and the ATAM Quality Attribute Tree / text

Advertising through smart phone applications is one of the fastest growing categories in advertising nowadays. Branded game-apps on mobile phones have several very innovative and attractive aspects, they physically engage their customers into a game, creating on a first level an entertainment but mainly they are advertising their products and the brand’s name. Many studies have been written on gaming, customer engagement and marketing strategies, but only few studies has been written on the convergence of mobile phone technology, gaming and marketing. This research is investigating to which extend this innovative way of marketing can be considered as an efficient marketing strategy. In order to get an insight from both sides of the market, semi-structured interviews have been lead with phone-app experts and users. Similar answers were formulated by both the producers and the users, leading me to the conclusion that a game-app is engaging the users into an overall positive dialogue with the brand. The contribution of this exploratory study is a greater understanding of the phenomenon of branded game-apps, in relation to previous studies on marketing, game mechanisms and brand-consumer relationships.

This thesis discusses the future of smart business applications on mobile phones and the integration of voice interface across several business applications. It proposes a framework that provides speech processing support for business applications on mobile phones. The framework uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) for low-enrollment speaker recognition and limited vocabulary speech recognition. Algorithms are presented for pre-processing of audio signals into different categories and for start and end point detection. A method is proposed for speech processing that uses Mel Frequency Cepstral Coeffcients (MFCC) as primary feature for extraction. In addition, optimization schemes are developed to improve performance, and overcome constraints of a mobile phone. Experimental results are presented for some prototype applications that evaluate the performance of computationally expensive algorithms on constrained hardware. The thesis concludes by discussing the scope for improvement for the work done in this thesis and future directions in which this work could possibly be extended.

This thesis discusses the future of smart business applications on mobile phones and the integration of voice interface across several business applications. It proposes a framework that provides speech processing support for business applications on mobile phones. The framework uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) for low-enrollment speaker recognition and limited vocabulary speech recognition. Algorithms are presented for pre-processing of audio signals into different categories and for start and end point detection. A method is proposed for speech processing that uses Mel Frequency Cepstral Coeffcients (MFCC) as primary feature for extraction. In addition, optimization schemes are developed to improve performance, and overcome constraints of a mobile phone. Experimental results are presented for some prototype applications that evaluate the performance of computationally expensive algorithms on constrained hardware. The thesis concludes by discussing the scope for improvement for the work done in this thesis and future directions in which this work could possibly be extended.

Context: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is a phenomenon in which new-born-infants die, often during sleeping, and no cause of death is identified after the autopsy and examination. Assumptions can be made in order to understand what happened to the infant, e.g. heart failures and insufficient breathing rate due to the position of the infant, although deeper studies are hard to be performed, since recording real-cases of sudden infant death on camera is not so trivial. Objectives: Our main objective with the work hereby presented is to perform a study on practical issues that may arise when one is contemplating to build a mobile application for monitoring the heart rate of individuals. These issues may include the levels of accuracy of heart rate measurements that can be retrieved by the current technology, best room conditions for the application to work and positioning of the device in respect to the subject under monitoring. Our secondary objective with this work is to present a heart rate monitor prototype application at a conceptual level. Methods: We conducted a literature review and an analysis of the current available technology, approaches and applications for smart-phones. We conducted experiments on a controlled environment by taking heart rate measurements and comparing results obtained from one smart phone application with results obtained with one standard electrocardiogram tool. After gathering the outputs of the experiments, we analyzed the patterns with the ultimate goal to identify the best set of parameters for the application to work. Results: Our main achievements were obtained through the data that we collected. Although related this work with SIDS, we collected data from adults. The procedures for obtaining the Heart Rate with the application analyze the skin of an individual and, thus, it does not matter if it is an infant or adult. We identified relevant parameters that affect directly the performance of the application, leading it to malfunction. Finally, we proposed a prototype of a mobile heart rate monitoring, that we named The Mobile Heart Rate Monitoring System (MHRMS) at a conceptual level, adding-up functionality to the existing technology and also outlining the best conditions and positioning for it to work correctly. Conclusions: The main conclusion that we reached is that it is reasonable to make use of the current technology that are available in today’s smart phones for having a trustworthy heart rate monitoring tool.

Det här arbetet syftar till att genom design av en telefonapplikation undersöka hur ljud kan förstärkas av den omgivande miljön. Arbetet visar på hur miljöförstärkt ljud skiljer sig från ljudförstärkt miljö samt vilka begränsningar det innebär att använda en vanlig smartphone som plattform.  Ett långsiktigt mål är att genom en produkt som låter oetablerade ljudproducenter distribuera sina alster i den offentliga miljön främja fri kultur och kreativitet. Arbetet har följt principen för RtD (research through design), där designprocessen utgör det fall som studeras och dokumentationen av den utgör den bas av data som analyseras och leder till slutsatser kring ämnet. Designprocessen i detta arbete innebär en mindre omfattande användarstudie i enkätform för att identifiera målgrupp, krav och mål. Följd av en andra studie där en prototyp framtagen med grund i resultaten från användarstudien utvärderas av deltagare genom observation, intervju och reaktionskort.  De största utmaningarna för designen grundar sig i att ta fram en applikation som inte stör upplevelsen, men samtidigt kan instruera användaren i hur man använder applikationen. Utifrån arbetet dras slutsatsen att användarinstruktioner, såväl visuella som auditiva, löper större risk att störa upplevelsen i miljöförstärkt ljud än i ljudförstärkt miljö. Vidare konstateras att den största bristen i en lösning som bygger på standardutrustning i jämförelse med en lösning som nyttjar dedikerad utrustning utgörs av begränsningar när det kommer till att ange riktning med hjälp av ljudets rumslighet.