Oct 2013: IEEE Healthcom Conference Tutorial

9 October 2013, Katarzyna Wac is giving a tutorial titled “Methodology for Evaluating Experience of Mobile (Healthcare) Applications Used in Different Contexts of Daily Life”, at the 15th Intl Conference on e-Health Networking, Application and Services (IEEE HealthCom’13) conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Abstract: Many attendees at IEEE HealthCom conferences deal on a growing scale with development and evaluation of the mobile applications and services, and they will agree that a rigorous methodological approach towards a user experience “in the wild” is missing. In this course the attendees will learn a design and execution of empirical experiments to evaluate experience of mobile applications used in different contexts of daily life, as opposite to (theoretical) application’s simulation or modeling. The methodology is based on a mixed methods approach: qualitative and quantitative methods. This course firstly presents a generic methodology for measurements-based performance evaluation of a mobile communication system and its service(s), and for evaluation of user experience, and second, it presents two case studies of application of this methodology. The performance evaluation aims at analysis of, for example, mobile system bottleneck or scalability characteristics, or at analysis of its application response time, as these metrics contribute to the overall experience of the mobile service use. The presented methodology has been derived from previous studies on performance of communication networks and QoE/QoS evaluation in a large-scale user studies using Experience Sampling Method and Day Reconstruction Methods. The methodology includes detailed steps for objectives determination, system instrumentation, and measurements execution and performance evaluation activities. The course illustrates use of the methodology for a performance evaluation of MobiHealth system and its vital sign tele-monitoring service provided to a mobile patient wearing a Wireless Body Area Network, and for entertainment, information and communication applications evaluated in a large-scale Android users study.