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NavCog3 is a smartphone turn-by-turn navigation assistant system we developed specifically designed to enable independent navigation for people with visual impairments. Using off-the-shelf Bluetooth beacons installed in the surrounding environment and a commodity smartphone carried by the user, NavCog3 achieves unparalleled localization accuracy in real-world large-scale scenarios. By leveraging its accurate localization capabilities, NavCog3 guides the user through the environment and signals the presence of semantic features and points of interest in the vicinity (e.g., doorways, shops).To assess the capability of NavCog3 to promote independent mobility of individuals with visual impairments, we deployed and evaluated the system in two challenging real-world scenarios. The first scenario demonstrated the scalability of the system, which was permanently installed in a five-story shopping mall spanning three buildings and a public underground area. During the study, 10 participants traversed three fixed routes, and 43 participants traversed free-choice routes across the environment. The second scenario validated the system’s usability in the wild in a hotel complex temporarily equipped with NavCog3 during a conference for individuals with visual impairments. In the hotel, almost 14.2h of system usage data were collected from 37 unique users who performed 280 travels across the environment, for a total of 30,200m
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Selectively localized: Temporal and visual structure of smartphone screen activity across media environments
This study demonstrates how localization and homogenization can co-occur in different aspects of smartphone usage. Smartphones afford individualization of media behavior: users can begin, end, or switch between countless tasks anytime, but this individualization is shaped by shared environments such that smartphone usage may be similar among those who share such environments but contain differences, or localization, across environments or regions. Yet for all users, smartphone screen interactions are bounded and guided by nearly identical smartphone interfaces, suggesting that smartphone usage may be similar or homogenized across all individuals regardless of environment. We study homogenization and localization by comparing the temporal, visual, and experiential composition of screen activity among individuals in three dissimilar media environments—the United States, China, and Myanmar—using one week of screenshot data captured passively every 5 s by the novel Screenomics framework. We find that overall usage levels are consistently dissimilar across media environments, while metrics that depend more on moment-level decisions and user-interface design do not vary significantly across media environments. These results suggest that quantitative research on homogenization and localization should analyze behavior driven by user interfaces and by contextually determined parameters, respectively.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1831481
- PAR ID:
- 10379526
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mobile Media & Communication
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2050-1579
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 487 to 509
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579221080333
