Sustainable work aims at improving working conditions to allow workers to effectively extend their working life. In this context, occupational safety and well-being are major concerns, especially in labor-intensive fields, such as construction-related work. Internet of Things and wearable sensors provide for unobtrusive technology that could enhance safety using human activity recognition techniques, and has the potential of improving work conditions and health. However, the research community lacks commonly used standard datasets that provide for realistic and variating activities from multiple users. In this article, our contributions are threefold. First, we present VTT-ConIoT, a new publicly available dataset for the evaluation of HAR from inertial sensors in professional construction settings. The dataset, which contains data from 13 users and 16 different activities, is collected from three different wearable sensor locations.Second, we provide a benchmark baseline for human activity recognition that shows a classification accuracy of up to 89% for a six class setup and up to 78% for a sixteen class more granular one. Finally, we show an analysis of the representativity and usefulness of the dataset by comparing it with data collected in a pilot study made in a real construction environment with real workers.

Data is becoming a more and more important resource for future innovations. Companies are currently considering how to leverage personal data in preventive healthcare and in other sectors. However, there are many challenges hindering the development of data-driven businesses in extant business networks. The purpose of this paper is to explore the success factors of data-driven service delivery networks in the context of preventive healthcare. The results are examples of the benefits and challenges of data availability and usage, based on a qualitative case study, in which a network of actors is integrating resources to solve the needs of their end customers. The results underline the success factors for service delivery networks, creating a baseline for human-centric, personalized and preventive healthcare solutions. The study enriches the theoretical perspective of data, services and service delivery networks by continuing discussion on how big data resources become cooperative assets not only in a firm but also on the network level. This study has multiple implications for practitioners trying to navigate the turbulent waters of the changing business environment and evolving service delivery network of preventive healthcare. Especially small and medium size of firms could use the identified success factors when planning new data-driven services in their networks. Our analysis brings new perspective between a firm and the actors in its network, particularly in the preventive healthcare sector wherein data needs to be shared between actors via consent of the individuals.

Occupational safety and health is traditionally a challenging area in the labor-intensive construction industry as accidents at work and non-ergonomic work conditions lead to absences and premature retirement of construction workers. Recently, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its accompanying technologies (e.g. wearable technologies) has enhanced interest in the occupational safety and health of construction work. The level of technology acceptance among construction workers is a crucial element in the adoption of these technologies. The main objectives of this study are to enhance understanding about construction workers’ attitudes towards IoT-based data-intensive work safety and wellbeing solutions and to identify factors that can promote technology adoption. Data for the study was collected through an online survey of 4385 construction workers. Based on the survey data it seems that construction workers would accept the sharing and utilizing data collected from them in the worksite environment if it could help identify employee personal health risks or promote personal and colleagues' occupational safety. Respondents were most concerned about privacy and security regarding wearables in the workplace. It can be concluded that user acceptance and trust building are key components in the adoption of IoT-based occupational safety and health solutions. Future studies should investigate methods for actively involving construction workers in the design and development process of IoT-based work safety solutions and examine technological solutions that promote trust building among construction workers.

The healthcare and wellness sector currently attempts to provide more proactive service models with data-driven solutions. This study examines the expectations and values related to personal data i.e. data valences from the perspective of service providers and individual users. The study is based on the analysis of extensive empirical material collected through interviews and a collaborative workshop. The data was collected in one cultural context, Finland. The results suggest that the potential service providers and users have similar expectations regarding self-evidence of data while the main differences concern the expectations of transparency. The results of the study propose some basic requirements for the development of personalised data-driven services in future. The study suggests that basic requirements for the development of future data driven services concern expectations to usable data visualisations, data as a motivator, data accuracy and data transparency. Even though there are varying expectations to personal health data and even some concerns, it can be seen that here different ecosystem actors primarily perceived the wider use of personal health and wellness data as a positive trend. It can be concluded that collaborative personal data-driven service ecosystems are an integral part of development towards proactive service models in healthcare.

Combining gym exercising and mobile gaming is bringing together two global trends. In this research, it has been studied how a gym-themed mobile game can be connected to a real gym setting by bringing personal exercising data from wearable sensors and gym equipment to the game. It is also studied how the gym goers see the gaming when combined to their exercising routines.

Weak security, excessive personal data collection for user profiling, and a poor user experience are just a few of the many problems that mobile authentication solutions suffer from. Despite being an interesting platform, mobile devices are still not being used to their full potential for authentication. n-Auth is a firm step in unlocking the full potential of mobile devices in authentication, by improving both security and usability whilst respecting the privacy of the user. Our focus is on the combined usage of several strong cryptographic techniques with secure HCI design principles to achieve a better user experience. We specified and built n-Auth, for which robust Android and iOS apps are openly available through the official stores.

In an ideal gadget-free environment the user is interacting with the environment and the services through only "natural" means. This imposes restrictions on many aspects of the interaction. One key element in this is user authentication, because it assures the environment and related services of the legitimacy of user's actions and empowers the user to carry out his tasks. We present five high-level categories of features of user authentication in the gadget-free world including security, privacy and usability aspects. These are adapted and extended from earlier research on web authentication methods. We survey existing authentication methods together with some emerging technologies and evaluate these according to the features in our categories. Our results show, that no single authentication method can realise all these requirements for authentication. In conclusion, we give future research directions and open problems that stem from our observations. Especially, finding combinations of authentication factors and methods that achieve all requirements is an interesting problem in the gadget-free scenario.

Value is generated through the whole service innovation process in a complex collaborative networked ecosystem. This study aims to enhance understanding of value generation in digital service innovation process with an emphasis on information technology by developing an extended value generation process framework and evaluating on how it is applicable in a real-life networked retail service innovation context. The findings of the study suggest that multiple information technology (IT), process and business related factors affect value creation during the digital service innovation process. The role of information technology is multifaceted, providing both new opportunities and challenges in the service innovation context. The extended framework for exploring the service innovation process provides a more structured way to examine the complex, networked, service innovation ecosystems.

In this paper, a gesture-based control system for smart lighting management is introduced. The system consists of multiple depth camera sensors that track the users’ positions, movements and gestures in real-time and forward the data to the main computer where the lighting control commands are generated. The implementation was built into the ‘ResponseRoom’ R&D environment, where two different lighting controls in a real-time installation were validated with the ability to dim and control colour by hand gestures. In order to study end user preference and to discover needs and guidelines for future development of the system, a user survey on gesture-based lighting control in a meeting room application was carried out. In the survey, no predetermined gesture vocabulary or real lighting control implementation were used. Instead, the respondents could freely develop their own gesture commands. Altogether 197 gained responses are analysed. The results reveal that generally intuitive control gestures are difficult to generate as there is a rather strong variability in personal preferences. The most popular gestures in the user survey were used by 25–30% of the respondents, 19% of all user responses in the test were multimodal combinations of different gestures, verbal expressions and sounds.

This paper presents results from a study on the effectiveness of digital signage in the retail environment. The goal of the study was to examine design parameters relevant to digital signage content design which could be used to create guidelines and templates for designing effective digital signage content. In this study, we focused on how video and animation affect the effectiveness of digital signage. When comparing still content with content enhanced with video or animation, no significant difference in effectiveness could be observed. This observation contradicts with earlier studies. Our study supports the views that the digital displays are currently most useful and effective to the younger generation, and that male customers consider digital displays in a store more useful than females do.

Creating and establishing a successful innovation is challenging and many attempts fail. Despite of the complex nature of the phenomenon, previous literature often tends to limit its focus on either to the technical elements or human elements related to an innovation. Current research-in-progress paper aims to avoid this ‘either-or’ thinking and rather examine the roles, impact and mutual interaction of both, technical and human elements, in order to further understand the successful emergence of a digital service innovation, i.e. a novel value co-creation practice enabled by a digital infrastructure. To achieve this we draw from three separate fields: service ecosystem perspective, information technology (IT) perspective and actor-network theory. The paper presents a plan for future empirical study and provides initial description of a case study about establishing a digital shopping solution in a small brick and mortar convenience store in Northern Finland.

During the last decades, both the public and private sectors have started adopting ICT not only for back office service management, but also for end-user service access. ICT-supported digitally-enhanced services can provide benefits both for service providers in the form of more efficient service delivery and management and for the customers in the form of better service access and availability. The research presented in this paper explores issues related to bringing digital service access points into the everyday lives of elderly users and examines the effects of digitally-enhanced services. The paper analyses two case studies exploring digitally-enhanced services that aim to help elderly people in their everyday lives. The results indicate that the analysed services can improve the efficiency of the service processes. However, service efficiency does not directly translate into a better service experience for the user. For achieving significant improvements in the lives of the elderly, other value measures and better understanding of service value potential from the viewpoint of elderly users are needed.

An emerging technology called Near Field Communication (NFC) is used to enable touch between mobile devices. This paper describes how a mobile social media system called 'Hot in the City' (HIC) enables people to make friend connections on the spot when they meet each other. We first describe the HIC system, and then explain how the visibility of friends is arranged in the system. The research focuses on the context during the action of friend connection and how context data should be taken into account in design. A use pilot was organized to study the use of HIC. Observations from the pilot lead us to reconsider the HIC mobile application logic, study location and status information, and plan to add event and time as useful contextual data to organize collected and generated mobile information. Finally, design issues for the next steps are delineated.

Linking things in the physical world with related digital resources and content in the virtual world is one of the visions of ubiquitous computing. Radio frequency identification tags, more specifically NFC tags, attached to the things and places in the physical world and using personal mobile devices equipped with readers to access the services and information associated to the tags, is studied in this paper. Eight trials representing different applications are described and the results of user experiments are reported. The main design findings are as follows: the standard size of the tag may be too limiting, we should allow tags of different visual appearance, form and size; the spatial positioning of tags in the physical interaction space gives a designer a lot of freedom but may also pose the risk of inconsistent and haphazard designs; complexity of the interaction task may be divided between using menus and keys of the personal device or using multiple tags; consistent and prompt feedback is important, feedback should use suitable modalities, including haptic feedback; the service or information provided should ex-ploit location information, i.e. the place of the specific tag, and finally fallback plans for unoperational or broken tags should exist.

Touch based interaction has been found out to provide fast and easy way to use mobile services. Near Field Communication technology (NFC) is one of the most promising ways to conduct touch based interaction with mobile phones. In this paper our aim is to identify challenges of the adoption of NFC related business to consumer services. The results of this study are based on three pilot cases conducted in Finland in 2007. Our research presents findings based on qualitative company interviews and both quantitative and qualitative user questionnaires. We conclude that there are several challenges in the adoption of NFC-based applications. However, expect for the shortage of NFC enabled mobile phones, challenges of the adoption may be reduced with careful planning and implementation of NFC-based applications.

This paper reports the results of a field experiment where home-dwelling elderly people used a mobile technology-based service to interact with a home care service to order meals to be delivered to their homes. The primary research focus was on examining the suitability of touch-based interaction in the everyday life activities of elderly users. The eight-week experiment took place in the autumn of 2006. The findings are based primarily on user experience and on the socioeconomic analysis done from the data collected before, during, and after the experiment. The results show that touch-based interaction was easy to learn and adopt, and that the users were able to successfully use it regardless of their physical or cognitive weaknesses. However, the socioeconomic value of the service was questionable. The paper also summarises methodological issues and findings related to user experience evaluation in an experimental setting.

In this paper we report the experiences from a pilot test in which users used an NFC-based catering service system. Primarily, the aim of this paper is to present the requirements for improving the functionality of the NFC-based systems. These requirements are based on the experiences from the catering service pilot described in this paper. The NFC-based catering service system was used by logistics service, meal producer, elderly care and elderly clients of the catering service. Meal service clients and drivers of the logistics service used NFC-enabled devices and other parties monitored the service process. The duration of the pilot test was approximately eight weeks. The NFC-based system is investigated from technical, organizational and user aspects in this paper. Overall, the interaction technique itself was intuitive and easy to adopt, but the unreliability of the system incurred problems during the pilot. We also suggest that continuous identification is an appropriate way to implement user/device identification. However, this requires NFC-enabled mobile devices to be user or environment-specific. Based on experiences from the pilot test, we suggest that integrating NFC with other technologies requires keeping the scheme simple and limiting non-controllable factors. Maintenance of tags should be taken into account when an organization is adopting the system. Furthermore, the importance of immediate feedback concerning touching emerged in the pilot test.