Three of the Center for Ubiquitous Computing members were awarded the Walter Ahlström Foundation (WAF) scholarship for this year. WAF focuses on supporting doctoral dissertations with incentive grants, based on their impact in research, industry and in the lives of the general population.
Niels van Berkel: Longitudinal Human and Digital Sensing Using Mobile Devices (5000€)
van Berkel’s research seeks to recast smartphones as valuable scientific instruments for studying human behaviour. The main reason behind this identified paradigm shift is the capability of modern smartphones to provide unprecedented access to longitudinal and large-scale data on human behaviour through large-scale sensor data. Furthermore, the data can be collected in a real-world setting – resulting in a more realistic data collection process when compared to studies ran in a laboratory environment.
Aku Tapio Visuri: Adaptive Quantified-Self Infrastructure for Improving Human Wellbeing (4000€)
Visuri’s research aims to make users of quantified-self more self-aware, more likely to remain using their applications, and increase the benefits they gain from such applications long term. The research outcomes of this work are increased understanding of users – results that will be shared openly and can be leveraged by both research and industry, novel evaluated methods of interaction that can be leveraged by both existing devices and device prototypes, and finally an open infrastructure for quantified-self applications that enables sharing and understanding personal information across devices and applications.
Simon Klakegg: CARE: Wellbeing & Social Engagement for Elderly Care (4000€)
Klakegg’s research leverages the widespread availability of smartphone and wearable sensors to create innovative elderly care technology solutions. By equipping patients with sensors, it is possible to capture fine-grained data of non-critical, non-intrusive health-related physiological measurements (e.g. fever, sleep quality, physical activity, pain, stress and social interactions). By collecting this data, it is possible to develop preventive elderly care protocols. If caregivers and family members are informed of noncritical wellbeing and social measures, this may encourage increased quality time with the elders and can be useful to further improve elderly care.