Science and Industry

After attending the Mobile HCI 2011, it is time to summarize some of the experiences I had there — and let’s start with the most interesting paper I listened: Falling Asleep with Angry Birds, Facebook and Kindle — A Large Scale Study on Mobile Application Usage by Böhmer et al. (2011).

As we all know, the mobile application market has boomed, mainly due to iOS and Anrdoid-systems and the online market places they have. However, what I haven’t seen yet is a study on the application use and lifetime in a more broad manner. I remember seeing in an paper in the Pervasive 2010 about one game and the usage patterns of it. But, we don’t know so much on how the applications are used, in what situations they are used and more focused, why are they used. We know… they are used.

Böhmer et al. suggest a new sensor type called appsensor, only to focus on application and use of them. This allows us to go deeper in the use, just seeing what applications are popular at what time and what places — like done in the paper. Naturally, one can figure out more uses for appsensors — self organizing maps, data mining, … all the cool applications. Maybe I briefly highlight some aspects observed in this study to demonstrate the value.

Firstly, the sample is based on 4 000 something Android users, mostly from the states. They use all applications about one hour per day, and an average time application is opend… is 72 seconds. Short time… The core functionalities of traditional phones are used even more shortly: communication 47 seconds, maps 45 seconds, productivity — like calender — 61 secs. The “new” emerging things, multimedia, browsers, games, lifestyle apps, clearly are in the better side: 83 secs, 74 secs, 114 secs and 168 secs.

There are spikes when specific application categories become more important: tools category is popular around 6 am to 8 am, communication apps dominate the use 11 am till 8 pm and games are played during the evening. And location affects this too, some apps are popular in airports, and there are differences between Europeans and US users.

In general, what the results indicate is that we can build smarter smartphones. Instead of being a multipurpose device, it seems that certain patterns exists and the next step would be to facilitate these. And, for science — now this data was anonymized, can more data of users make us see even more. Especially this data is important, as similar kind of data surely exists in the HQs of Apple, Google and Nokia: we need to understand what that means as a privacy question.

I will start soon my summer job at Helsinki institute of Information Technology (or, HIIT) in Networked Society research program. My area will be inside OtaSizzle-project, mostly doing something that could be called QA and developer QA — so, checking documentations and doing tests.

About the OtaSizzle (for those who didn’t click the above link): the idea is allow easy creation of context aware social media services, which means in reality building an infrastructure of some core enablers, like user management and context collection, and then building some lead services on top of that. The coolness is, that the core enablers are just easy to use rest-apis, meaning that you can use e.g. common web technologies to build new services around them — making the application writing more fun, hopefully.

I’m now planing to build my first tiny application, for demonstration purposes, using this core enablers, called cos. Still need to developed an idea for simple but nice application, but I’ll get back to this topic when the application is ready and out there for comments and more input.

One of my colleagues asked me to write a quick review on Happy Wake Up-application. It’s idea is to check out when at you’re best to be waken up and then wake at that moment. It uses recorder to listen how you behave 20 minutes before you’re planed time and if you sound not-so-deep-sleeping then you’re waken up at that moment. In every case the clock phone will wake you at goven time.

The application is rather easy to use. Sadly, the alarm time is set in the S60 clock and then start up the application. I would have liked to see these both integrated together — especially as I tent to forget to start the application. And it’s rather expensive also; full licence costs something like 50 € in Finland; I don’t pay for regular desktop programs that much (as I use Ubuntu).

The important thing is if it works. I’ve been testing this for few times and it’s woken me up while I’ve been turning in my bed; something like 10 minutes before actual time. So, it works – it wakes me up while I’m doing something more like day dreaming. So, yes: one could say it works rather well. But — I was so tired in the morning and my clock alarms me so early that I just continued sleeping after waking up… My boss thanked me for linking this to him — he has more regular life rhythm at the moment and might be more in the target group.

To broader this discussion more (and make it sound less like an ad which this is not) I could say some words of sensors that mobile phones provide. I’m not the lead researcher in this, but still I see this power: as mobile phone is more daily tool it allows us to use these smart sensors in a new innovative way.

Like the application presented: as mobile phone slowly replaces alarm clocks it becomes possible to use these sensors creates new capabilities to every day life. Really powerful and using the technology that devices has allready is also intresting. As a pointer, there is a project called SensorPlanet.