Abstract
Implicit in much research and application development for mobile phones is the assumption that the mobile phone is a suitable proxy for its owner’s location. We report an in-depth empirical investigation of this assumption in which we measured proximity of the phone to its owner over several weeks of continual observation. Our findings, summarizing results over 16 different subjects of a variety of ages and occupations, establish baseline statistics for the proximity relationship in a typical US metropolitan market. Supplemental interviews help us to establish reasons why the phone and owner are separated, leading to guidelines for developing mobile phone applications that can be smart with respect to the proximity assumption. We show it is possible to predict the proximity relationship with 86% confidence using simple parameters of the phone, such as current cell ID, current date and time, signal status, charger status and ring/vibrate mode.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cohen, J.: A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20, 37–48 (1960)
Consolvo, S., Walker, M.: Using the experience sampling method to evalute ubicomp applications. In: IEEE Pervasive Computing, pp. 24–31 (2003)
Corner, M.D., Noble, B.D.: Zero-Interaction Authentication. In: Mobicom 2002. ACM, Atlanta (2002)
Davis, M., Good, N., Sarvas, R.: From Context to Content: Leveraging Context for Mobile Media Metadata. In: International Multimedia Conference: 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, New York, NY, USA (2004)
Demumieux, R., Losquin, P.: Gather customer’s real usage on mobile phones. In: Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services (2005)
Eagle, N., Pentland, A.: Reality Mining: Sensing Complex Social Systems. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10(4), 255–268 (2005)
Hayes, G.R., Patel, S.N., Truong, K.N., Iachello, G., Kientz, J.A., Farmer, R., Abowd, G.D.: The personal audio loop: Designing a ubiquitous audio-based memory aid. In: Dunlop, M.D. (ed.) Mobile HCI 2004. LNCS, vol. 3160, pp. 168–179. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Helal, S., Giraldo, C., Kaddoura, Y., Lee, C., Zabadani, H.e., Mann, W.: Smart phone based cognitive assistant. In: UbiHealth 2003: The 2nd International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing for Pervasive Healthcare Applications, Seattle, Washington (2003)
Hightower, J., Borriello, G.: A Survey and Taxonomy of Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Washington (2001)
Kahneman, D., Krueger, A.B., Schkade, D.A., Schwarz, N., Stone, A.A.: A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method. Science, 1776–1780 (2004)
Laasonen, K.: Clustering and Prediction of Mobile User Routes from Cellular Data. In: Jorge, A.M., Torgo, L., Brazdil, P.B., Camacho, R., Gama, J. (eds.) PKDD 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3721, pp. 569–576. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
LaMarca, A., et al.: Place lab: Device positioning using radio beacons in the wild. In: Gellersen, H.-W., Want, R., Schmidt, A. (eds.) PERVASIVE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3468, pp. 116–133. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Lamming, M.: SPECs: Another approach to human context and activity sensing research, using tiny peer-to-peer wireless computers. In: Dey, A.K., Schmidt, A., McCarthy, J.F. (eds.) UbiComp 2003. LNCS, vol. 2864, pp. 192–199. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
McGuigan, J.: Towards a Sociology of the Mobile Phone. Human Technology (2005)
Mitchell, T.: Machine Learning. McGraw-Hill, New York (1996)
Otsason, V., Varshavsky, A., LaMarca, A., de Lara, E.: Accurate GSM indoor localization. In: Beigl, M., Intille, S.S., Rekimoto, J., Tokuda, H. (eds.) UbiComp 2005. LNCS, vol. 3660, pp. 141–158. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Oulasvirta, A., Raento, M., Tiitta, S.: ContextContacts: Re-Designing SmartPhone’s Contact Book to Support Mobile Awareness and Collaboration. In: MobileHCI 2005 (2005)
Palen, L., Salzman, M.: Beyond the handset: designing for wireless communications usability. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 9(2), 125–151 (2002)
Palen, L., Salzman, M., Youngs, E.: Going Wireless: Behavior & Practice of New Mobile Phone Users. In: CSCW 2000: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2000)
Patel, S.N., Pierce, J.S., Abowd, G.D.: A gesture-based authentication scheme for untrusted public terminals. In: 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology 2004. ACM Press, Santa Fe (2004)
Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H.: Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chichester (2002)
Raento, M., Oulasvirta, A., Petit, R., Toivonen, H.: ContextPhone - A prototyping platform for context-aware mobile applications. In: IEEE Pervasive Computing (2005)
Satyanarayanan, M.: Swiss Army Knife or Wallet? In: IEEE Pervasive Computing (2005)
Schlosser, F.K.: So, how do people really use their handheld devices? An interactive study of wireless technology use. Journal of Organizational Behavior 23(4), 401–423 (2002)
Sullivan, J., Fischer, G.: Mobile Architectures and Prototypes to Assist Persons with Cognitive Disabilities using Public Transportation. In: 26th International Conference on Technology and Rehabilitation, Atlanta GA, USA (2003)
Vaananen-Vainio-Mattila, K., Ruuska, S.: User Needs for Mobile Communication Devices: Requirements Gathering and Analysis through Contextual Inquiry. In: First Workshop on HCI and Mobile Devices (1998)
Wang, X.H., Istepanian, R.S.H., Song, Y.H.: Mobile e-Health: The Unwired Evolution of Telemedicine. Telemedicine Journal and e-Health (2003)
Want, R., Pering, T., Danneels, G., Kumar, M., Sundar, M., Light, J.: The Personal Server: Changing the Way We Think about Ubiquitous Computing. In: Borriello, G., Holmquist, L.E. (eds.) UbiComp 2002. LNCS, vol. 2498, p. 194. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Patel, S.N., Kientz, J.A., Hayes, G.R., Bhat, S., Abowd, G.D. (2006). Farther Than You May Think: An Empirical Investigation of the Proximity of Users to Their Mobile Phones. In: Dourish, P., Friday, A. (eds) UbiComp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4206. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-39634-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39635-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)