Project Highlight: Studying Human Activities and the Environment

The College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington used the MyExperience tool to study the relationship between the built environment and human activities. They conducted a study using MyExperience, GPS, and a wearable sensing platform (the Intel MSP) to record the activities and locations of 53 subjects over one week. In particular, they explored:

• what associations exist between different types of activities and different kinds of urban environments;
• what characterizes the land use patterns where people spend long periods of time;
• and do the properties of origins and destinations differ between short and long trips or trips made by different modes of transportation

In all, they gathered approximately 2,900 hours of data and ~2,900 surveys via the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) using MyExperience to provide self-report data about activities. MyExperience would prompt participants for a survey approximately every hour. These surveys asked questions about activity type, duration, purpose, and location.

GPS trace showing the path a person followed over several days annotated with self-report data from MyExperience. Stationary GPS points are shown in red, moving points are shown in green.

For more information on this research, see MobileSense - Sensing Modes of Transportation in Studies of the Built Environment by Jonathan Lester et al.

Project Highlight: Mobile Heart Health

Dr. Margaret Morris and Farzin Guilak at the Digital Health Group at Intel used the MyExperience tool to explore heart health, the physiological indicators of stress, and "active" mobile therapy (e.g., using the mobile phone to intervene during inferred times of patient stress).

From the article, "Mobile therapy—just-in-time coaching that is triggered by physiological indicators of stress—is the objective of Mobile Heart Health, an exploratory research project at Intel. The project aims to help people tune in to early signs of stress and modulate reactivity that could potentially damage their relationships and long-term health."

MyExperience Sensors
Morris used a variety of contextual MyExperience sensors to automatically assess stress level including location sensing, synchronization with calendaring applications, and a wearable ECG monitor (to track heart rate variability). The mobile therapy feedback "appear on the cell phone in response to cardiovascular signals (see Figure 1) or when the system detects contextual shifts associated with stress."

MyExperience User Interface

Morris also developed a variety of touchscreen feedback interfaces that allowed individuals to report their emotional states throughout the day. "The main mood scale was the 'Mood Map,', based on the circumplex model of emotion invites users to quickly indicate mood states according to valence and arousal (see Figure 3). These subjective reporting techniques were desirable as checks on sensors, and in their own right as brief windows for self-awareness.

To read more about this work, download the article directly here or browse the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine that published it here.