This chapter seeks opportunities to use mobile technology to improve human mobility. To this end, the chapter reports a diary study of university students’ use of mobile telephones for rendezvousing—arranging, and traveling to, informal meetings with friends and family. This diary study reveals, and suggests explanations for, a number of deficits in user performance: (1) rendezvousers occasiona...

This paper presents findings of a study, which was carried out in Dar es Salaam city to assess postprivatisation of solid waste collection and disposal. Prior to the assessment, fieldwork studies indicated that current solid waste generation rate in the city is 0.4 kg/cap/day and total waste generation is within the range of 2425 tons/day. This study also indicated that out of the total waste g...

Sound is an important medium in our lives, but its ephemeral nature can be problematic when people cannot recall something they heard in the past. Motivated by everyday conversational breakdowns, we present the design of a continuous, near-term audio buffering application: the Personal Audio Loop (PAL). PAL was designed as a truly ubiquitous service to recover audio content from a person’s rece...

The observational data relating salt and blood pressure (excluding ENTERS ALT) are reviewed. Important methodological difficulties and biases are inherent to both acrossand withinpopulation studies and confuse their interpretation. Across-population studies are positive but rely on data drawn from the international literature based on a variety of unstandardized field methods; they are prone to...

We present a web-based diary study on location-based search behavior using a mobile search engine. To capture users' location-based search behavior in a ubiquitous setting, we use a web-based diary tool that collects users' detailed mobile search activity, their location and diary entries. This method enables us to capture users' explicit behavior (query made), their implicit intention (motivat...

This paper reports an initial analysis of a diary study of rendezvousing as performed by university students. The study’s tentative findings are: (i) usability ratings for communication services are a little worse during a rendezvous (when at least one person is en route) than before (when none have yet departed); (ii) problems rendezvousing caused more stress when the rendezvousing group was l...

Sally Reyes-Morales is a mathematical statistician in the Division of Price Statistical Methods, Branch of Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Diary surveys are often used to collect information on daily activities such as consumer spending. They are particularly useful for collecting daily records of small frequently purchased items, which are normally difficult to recall...

The rapid growth of mobile devices has made it challenging for users to maintain a consistent digital history among all their personal devices. Even with a variety of cloud computing solutions, users continue to redo web searches and reaccess web content that they already interacted with on another device. This paper presents insights into the cross-device reaccess habits of 15 smartphone users...

To cope with possible stressful events after colorectal cancer surgery, patients need to be prepared for the early postoperative phase. Complementary written information is often used, but requires improvement. The overall aim for this thesis was to describe patient reported stressful events and coping strategies and with a person-centred approach characterize existing and co-design new patient...

Location discourse involves the active or passive sharing of location information between individuals. Related applications include mobile friend locators, and location-dependent messaging. Privacy issues pertaining to location disclosure have been considered in research and relevant design guidelines are emerging, however what location information a user actually “needs to know” has received l...