UBIGreen: Investigating a Mobile Tool for Tracking and Supporting Green Transportation Habits
Jon Froehlich et al.
Written in 2009, this paper aims to investigate the tracking of transportation habits and how mobile devices can be used to support green transportation. Mobile devices are carried around wherever people go so using these devices was a good choice. The displays on these devices are used to give user feedback about their transportation behaviours. The hope was that feedback on how a user was doing would help cause habitual change; favouring green transportation rather than environmentally unfriendly transportation. In America, 26% of an individual’s contribution to CO2 emissions is due to personal transportation.
The paper is split up into three main sections. The first evaluates tracking transportation behaviours and providing feedback on a mobile ambient display. This was a form of formative research to increase the authors’ understanding of current transportation behaviours. An online survey and an experience sampling study were used and the design implications of these results are discussed. These implications are then used for the next section of the paper.
The second section of the paper focuses on the design of their system, UbiGreen, which has the goal of engaging users and increasing their green transportation. Incentives, in the form of graphical rewards, are shown to the user when they take green transport. Three sources were used to semi-automatically infer transportation mode: GSM data from the mobile device; an MSP (Mobile Sensing Platform) sensor containing among other sensors, an accelerometer and barometer; the participants who would be asked which mode of transport they are currently using.
Finally, there is a qualitative analysis of UbiGreen which was deployed over a 3-week period. The authors conclude that there is evidence to suggest that participants did start having new behaviours but further study is required to confirm this hypothesis.
The ideas used in this paper are now seen in areas other than personal transportation. A good example of this is the Fitbit. This is a wearable device that tracks a user’s activity and provides user feedback trough a simple LED interface.
1 thing I liked about the paper:
- The formative work before the field study
1 thing I disliked about the paper:
- The use of the participant as a form of data acquisition – This could lead to unreliable results as participants could misinform UbiGreen of how long they were using a certain mode of transport, as an example.
Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518861
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