Developing Attention-Aware and Context-Aware User Interfaces on Handheld Devices
Massimo Ancona, Betty Bronzini, Davide Conte, Gianluca Quercini · InTech eBooks · 2012
In today’s modern societies the lack of computers feared by Asimov is not an imminent danger thanks to the advance of mobile technology in the last two decades. According to several market surveys, sales of handheld devices, especially smartphones, are growing at an incredibly fast rate and are expected to exceed those of any other electronic device by the end of 2011 1. This success is far from surprising, as today’s handheld devices feature high computational power and provide a wide range of applications that go beyond the traditional use of a phone. Examples are mHealth, a term coined by Istepanian et al. (2005) that refers to the use of mobile applications in healthcare, and augmented reality, defined by Azuma (1997) as a variation of virtual reality that “allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world”. Essentially, handheld devices fit in a pocket and provide most of the functionalities of a bulky computer. Their small size, however, is a mixed blessing, as it imposes serious limitations on usability, which is the focus of this chapter. In particular, we discuss two important aspects of the interaction with handheld devices, namely context-awareness and text entry.