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Batteryless wearables use energy harvested from the environment, eliminating the burden of charging or replacing batteries. This makes them convenient and environmentally friendly. However, these benefits come at a price. Batteryless wearables operate intermittently (based on energy availability), which adds complexity to their design and introduces usability limitations not present in their battery-powered counterparts. In this paper, we conduct a scenario-based study with 400 wearable users to explore how users perceive the inherent trade-offs of batteryless wearable devices. Our results reveal users’ concerns, expectations, and preferences when transitioning from battery-powered to batteryless wearable use. We discuss how the findings of this study can inform the design of usable batteryless wearables. 

Walking through immersive virtual environments is one of the important parts of Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Prior research has established that users’ gait in virtual and real environments differs; however, little research has evaluated how users’ gait differs as users gain more experience with VR. We conducted experiments measuring novice and experienced subjects’ gait parameters in VR and real environments. Results showed that subjects’ performance in VR and Real World was more similar in the last trials than in the first trials; their walking dissimilarity in the start trials diminished by walking more trials. We found trial as a significant variable affecting the walking speed, step length, and trunk angle for both groups of users. While the main effect of expertise was not observed, an interaction effect between expertise and the trial number was shown. Trunk angle increased over time for novices but decreased for experts. 

The prevalence of smartphones in our society warrants more research on understanding the characteristics of users and their information privacy behaviors when using mobile apps. This paper investigates the antecedents and consequences of “power use” (i.e., the competence and desire to use technology to its fullest) in the context of informational privacy. In a study with 380 Android users, we examined how gender and users’ education level influence power use, how power use affects users’ intention to install apps and share information with them versus their actual privacy behaviors (i.e., based on the number of apps installed and the total number of “dangerous permission” requests granted to those apps). Our findings revealed an inconsistency in the effect of power use on users’ information privacy behaviors: While the intention to install apps and to share information with them increased with power use, the actual number of installed apps and dangerous permissions ultimately granted decreased with power use. In other words, although the self-reported intentions suggested the opposite, people who scored higher on the power use scale seemed to be more prudent about their informational privacy than people who scored lower on the power use scale. We discuss the implications of this inconsistency and make recommendations for reconciling smartphone users’ informational privacy intentions and behaviors.