Project Highlight: UbiGreen

The UbiGreen Mobile Transportation display was recently presented at CHI2009 in Boston, MA and is built off of the MyExperience tool. The UbiGreen Transportation Display is a prototype mobile phone application that semi-automatically senses and feeds back information about transportation behavior using the background (wallpaper) of the mobile phone (see screenshots below). In this way, the transit information is always available in a fairly casual manner so the user can see it as they use the phone for everyday purposes such as making a phone call or sending a text message. The full research paper is available here and the talk slides are available here.

The MyExperience.xml that powered it all is available for download here. Note that this file is rather large and complex as it illustrates an advanced use of MyExperience, but still could be educational for some (e.g., how the download and set wall paper actions were used).

The UbiGreen Mobile Transportation display used a variety of MyExperience Sensors, including:

• the GsmMotionSensor to sense user movement and automatically trigger a survey after this movement subsides (e.g., when the user transitions from being mobile to being stationary).
  
• UbiGreen also used MyExperience to interface with a wearable sensor (the MspSensor) that could automatically detect when the user was walking, running, or bicycling.
  
• the DesktopVisibleSensor to track how often the participant could see the wallpaper
• the DeviceIdleSensor to determine when the device was not being used by the user so we could run certain computations therby not affecting the interactivity of the device
• a host of sensors that tracked how the participants were using their phones
  

UbiGreen used multiple MyExperience Actions as well:

• the HttpPostAction was used to post sensor and ESM self-report data back to a server
• the DownloadAction was used to download appropriate wallpaper for the participant's phones
• the SetWallPaperAction was used to change the wallpaper of the user's phone (e.g., to a different tree or polar bear design)--remember, this was the main way that UbiGreen interfaced with its users, simply by changing the user's wallpaper
  
• the SendSmsAction was used to inform the research team when an emergency was occuring with a participant's device or wearable sensor (e.g., we would receive an SMS message if it appeared that our participant was not wearing their sensors that day)
• the RestartDeviceAction was used to force restart the device if a critical, unrecoverable error occurred
• the SurveyAction was used to contextually-prompt the user about trip information whenever vehicle travel was inferred but could not automatically be determined (e.g., we could not automatically disambiguate car from bus travel)
• the NotificationAction was used to alert the user that they had a self-report ESM survey waiting

Please email myexperience-users@lists.sourceforge.net or add a comment to this post if you would like more information.