Milestone 1: Scoping and Preliminary Concepts

Scoping

Our group was assigned to develop a ubicomp app based on wearables and location-awareness. We began our scoping process by considering the capabilities that wearable-based technology enabled and the domains within which these capabilities might best be utilized.

Type	Capabilities
Biological	Step-tracking, heart rate, galvanic skin response, temperature, blood pressure, posture, calories
Location	GPS/ Bluetooth
Notification	Alerts, reminders, alarms, timekeeping
Activity Tracking	Sitting, standing, walking, running, sleeping, moving, typing
Communication	Between people, between devices
Information	Augmented reality: people, places
Other	Fashion statements

Domains

Transportation

Tourism/Travel

Daily Routine

Health

Discovery

Social

Gameplay

We then set out to brainstorm individually the problems which could be solved and the activities that could be supported through the conjunction of wearable and location-aware technology. We drafted up a list of our best ideas and discussed them together. Out of that discussion emerged three ideas we thought held the greatest potential and created a chart that displayed the target audience, environment, and supported activities for each idea.

Idea	Smart Bag	Augmented Reality Tourism App	Bus Notifier
Users	College Students	Tourists	Bus riders (all riders and visually-impaired riders)
Physical Environment	Campus; the bag itself also forms an environment	Anywhere	Bus stops, bus, and bus station
Activities	Tracking possessions, remembering items, anti-theft protection, maintaining healthy posture.	Learning about tourist sites, communicating with tourists and local residents, discovering new sites of interest.	Notification of bus arrival time (at bus stop) and upcoming bus stops (on bus), with an emphasis of accessible notifications (both visual and audio).

Motivation and Preliminary Observations

Concept 1: Smart Bag

Our preliminary motivation for designing a smart bag is to enable tracking of contents in the bag and the total weight of the bag in order to ensure that users have everything needed in the bag before they leave, but won’t have the bag so heavy that they end up hurting their shoulders or having a bad posture. Besides our observation of UM students with their bags in public study areas, we also drew points from our personal experiences and from interviews with our friends. Some of the key takeaways from these observations and interviews are:

Students usually have to carry big and heavy bags with personal laptops and study materials inside. Their shoulders hurt and they have bad postures as a result.
People usually carry irrelevant items in their bags. Some just don’t realize they are carrying unnecessary things because they don’t organize their bags. Some others are not sure whether they should bring something, for example, an umbrella, and they just carry them everyday.
People sometimes forget to carry with them important items (phones, keys, chargers, documents, etc.) when they are headed out to school, their office, an airport, etc..
Students study alone in a pubic area and can’t leave their belongings too far away, which is annoying when they want to go to the restroom or take a phone call
Students sometimes forget their belongings in study rooms or classrooms, e.g. phones, charges, or notebooks. Sometimes they can get them back through the school’s lost & found email. But sometimes the stuff could be taken by others.

Concept 2: Augmented Reality Tourism App

The coming of wearable devices like Google Glass will augment human’s spatial and temporal perceptions: people will be able to understand sounds that they can’t recognize without the device (e.g. a foreign language), to access invisible information from what they see (e.g. users’ review of an item in the grocery store), or even to communicate with people in the past and future. Our motivation for this augmented reality tourism app is to explore the possibility of creating an experience of a “parallel universe” for users, especially travelers, to discover the informational world behind the physical places they visit.

Although we don’t have much of an opportunity to observe tourists, our team members’ observation during the Auto Show at Detroit can provide some insights about how users interact with technology in an entertainment context and how they seek information, which include the following:

Kids present in the event were fascinated by modern interactive displays. This shows how younger audiences are drawn to novel media of information displays.
Locations with advanced interactive displays like virtual reality and 3D immersive experience were busier and more popular than locations with regular posters and banners.
Some interactive technologies were hard to figure out by adults. Interactions should be intuitive to the targeted audience.
Regular touch screens are the simplest form of interaction and everyone found them easy to use. However, they weren’t very popular.

Other insights from our team members’ previous experiences as tourists include:

People would like to leave a message on a message board (or book) in a coffee shop, restaurant, or tourist site.
Without a local guide, tourists found it hard to access the cultural or historical information regarding a site. They would rely on the introductory texts retrieved from a magazine or the Internet (if it was accessible), or talk to local residents, if they could speak the language, to get a deeper understanding of the place.
Before traveling to a new place, people have to search on the Internet for directions, transportation, accommodation and other information to get prepared for the trip. After arriving at the place, they would still have to rely on Google Maps to get directions or transportation information, or Yelp to find good restaurants.
Tourist find it hard to know the recent events in the place they visited, like shops’ opening hours, or safety alerts, etc.

Concept 3: Bus Notifier

The four of us all have a lot of experience riding buses and feel it mundane but important to have something wearable that can improve the current bus notification system, especially for visually impaired people, or those who live in some extremely cold areas. Our observations from personal experience and from observing other bus riders has generated the following insights:

There is no automatic way of being notified when a bus will arrive at a bus stop – riders must look up the information on their phone by selecting a bus line and then parsing the data provided back to them. A gentle vibrating alert on a smartwatch that automatically appears when you arrive at the bus stop would create a much better user experience.
While riding the bus, some bus stops are announced but not all of them. This is an inconvenience for riders who might be reading a book or otherwise not paying attention, but it is especially difficult for visually-impaired riders who rely on public transportation to move around the city independently.
In cold weather, it can be rather uncomfortable having to use a smartphone, and cold hands are much more likely to drop and damage a phone.

Account of Ideation Process

In our ideation process we followed an individual and collective approach. Initially we had an individual brainstorming session in which each member provided a list of ideas, with the goal that we would meet as a team to discuss the ideas. This approach helped each individual to come up with ideas without being influenced by the other team members. After that, we arranged a meeting as a group where each member of the team had an allotted time to share his/her ideas and discuss them. After sharing all of our ideas, we voted on our favorite three ideas and listed them on the board as shown in Figure 1. This helped us collectively think of our targeted users, the physical environment, and the activities for each idea. This also served as a communication tool for the team to stay on the same page when scoping the ideas.

Figure 1: The table showing the users, physical environment and activities for each idea.

In our meeting site, we took advantage of the different media types provided in the room. After outlining the scope of our project on the board, we took a photo and shared it through the screen to serve as a reminder of our scope when we moved to the sketching phase. This helped us ensure that we address all of the requirements and needs that we have listed in our initial step (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: A Screen, white board and laptops were used in the ideation process.

As a group of four designers, we split our roles in the sketching phase into sketchers and commenters. The commenter served as a storyteller reading out loud use cases and the sketcher would sketch out. For each activity mentioned in the table, we would sketch one scenario showing the context in which the technology is used.

Figure 3: A sketch of one of the three main ideas.

Concept Proposal

Concept 1: Smart Bag

College students have to go to lectures and they have to carry a lot of things with them in their bags. Items like their laptops, tablets, chargers, books, writing supplies and so on. Students live busy lives and many times they forget to carry all the necessary items they need when they leave their homes for either class or work. Sometimes people also carry too many items in their bag, which in the long term could result in back and shoulder problems and a bad posture. Another major concern is that we do not know exactly when something is missing or has been taken from the bag.

A smart bag is proposed here to solve the problems mentioned above. It is able to keep track of the items that go into the bag. It would be able to calculate the maximum comfortable weight that the user and the bag can hold and would warn the user if the bag is overweight. This will help the users maintain a good posture. Using the concept of nearables, the user can tag all his/her items that are in the bag and keep track of them. It will notify the user if the items are too far away from the bag and this will help protect against any possible theft. The bag itself will send a notification to the users’ smartphone or other wearable devices if it goes too far away from the user. This can be achieved using proximity sensing. It could also draw information from the user’s calendar and create profiles about what stuff to pack in or move out from the bag based on where the user is going, e.g. work, college or holiday. The weather could also be automatically checked and the user could be advised to bring or leave their umbrella

Concept 2: Augmented Reality Tourism App

When we travel to new places, we do not have many opportunities to communicate with other tourists or local residents. We may also lack real-time information about ongoing local events that can potentially be of interest to us. Or we may remain uninformed about the changing opening hours of the tourist spots we plan to go to. Another interesting thing is that as tourists we sometimes could find messages left by others doodling on the wall or somewhere else in a tourist spots, which will harm the locations in the long run. This shows that people like to leave traces but often they can’t find a proper approach.

To address those issues, creating an unobtrusive information discovery method would enhance the tourism experience. We propose to design a Google Glass application with which a tourist can get detailed information about what s/he is interested in (by looking at it) without being distracted. The information will stay in the periphery (the app) and only be retrieved when users call it. The app also allows users to leave messages and recommendations virtually in a spot which could be discovered and retrieved by other tourists who visit that place in the future. Last but not least, the app will provide real-time information, e.g. emergencies, security alerts or other local information to travelers once they arrive at their destination. This application would be of help from an educational, tourism and exploration point of view.

Concept 3: Bus Notifier

The existing mobile and web applications for the AATA and MBus do not notify the users at a particular bus stop about the exact time when their next bus is going to arrive. They just give estimates and most of the time, the users have to wait blindly at their bus stop. Another problem is that no feature is provided to help visually impaired people with an informative bus trip.

We envision putting iBeacons at bus stops and on the bus, so that the user can receive accurate information on their smartphones or watches about the parameters of the bus that they want to take, including its current location, expected arrival time, and whether it’s crowded or not. Based on the information, users can decide whether to wait there or go somewhere else first and come back later. When the user is on the bus, s/he can set the destination and the app will inform the driver and the user will receive an automatic notification when his or her stop is just ahead. Through the use of audio and haptic notifications, the system would improve accessibility for visually impaired people.