A privacy calculus model for contact tracing apps: Analyzing the use behavior of the German Corona-Warn-App with a longitudinal user study.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is a pressing societal issue today. The German government promotes a contract tracing app named Corona-Warn-App (CWA), aiming to change citizens' health behaviors during the pandemic by raising awareness about potential infections and enable infection chain tracking. Technical implementations, citizens' perceptions, and public debates around apps differ between countries, e. g., in Germany there has been a huge discussion on potential privacy issues of the app. Thus, we analyze effects of privacy concerns regarding the CWA, perceived CWA benefits, and trust in the German healthcare system to answer why citizens use the CWA. In our initial conference publication at ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection - 37th IFIP TC 11 International Conference, SEC 2022, we used a sample with 1752 actual users and non-users of the CWA and and support for the privacy calculus theory, i. e., individuals weigh privacy concerns and benefits in their use decision. Thus, citizens privacy perceptions about health technologies (e. g., shaped by public debates) are crucial as they can hinder adoption and negatively affect future fights against pandemics. In this special issue, we adapt our previous work by conducting a second survey 10 months after our initial study with the same pool of participants (830 participants from the first study participated in the second survey). The goal of this longitudinal study is to assess changes in the perceptions of users and non-users over time and to evaluate the influence of the significantly lower hospitalization and death rates on the use behavior which we could observe during the second survey. Our results show that the privacy calculus is relatively stable over time. The only relationship which significantly changes over time is the effect of privacy concerns on the use behavior which significantly decreases over time, i. e., privacy concerns have a lower negative effect one the CWA use indicating that it did not play such an important role in the use decision at a later point in time in the pandemic. We contribute to the literature by introducing one of the rare longitudinal analyses in the literature focusing on the privacy calculus and changes over time in the relevant constructs as well as the relationships between the calculus constructs and target variables (in our case use behavior of a contact tracing app). We can see that the explanatory power of the privacy calculus model is relatively stable over time even if strong externalities might affect individual perceptions related to the model.

Conducting Remote Design Research on Embodied, Collaborative Museum Exhibits

Research activities in interaction design and HCI were widely altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many studies shifting online as health concerns inhibited in-person research. Tangible and collaborative activities are often used in informal learning spaces and child-computer interaction, but they are neither designed for nor easily adapted to online formats. In this case study, I present findings and reflections on my experience adapting an in-situ study of embodied, collaborative museum exhibits to a remote user study during COVID-19. I identify several considerations and notes of inspiration for researchers working on similar projects, which I hope can aid in furthering iterative design research on embodied and/or collaborative activities both during the ongoing pandemic and in other current and future contexts that require remote research or interactions. The reflections I present in this case study additionally play a role in documenting the ongoing history of interaction design as researchers adapt to the rapidly changing global circumstances caused by COVID-19. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Developing a Virtual World for an Open-House Event: A Metaverse Approach

The concept of a metaverse, a virtual world that offers immersive experiences, has gained widespread interest in recent years. Despite the hype, there is still a gap in its practical application, especially in the realm of education. This study presents the design and implementation of a metaverse tailored to the needs of education. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of such a system and evaluate its effectiveness. It is crucial to understand the architecture and implementation of a metaverse to effectively customise it for educational purposes. To assess user experience, a field study was conducted, collecting data through questionnaires and qualitative feedback. The results show that users were pleased with the features, player experience, and ease of use.

Multi-view Layout Design for VR Concert Experience

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerts are gradually being held online. Beyond live-streaming, it has recently become popular to utilize various realistic video technologies to add entertainment value and immersion to online concerts. We conducted a multi-view layout design study in a virtual reality environment with a head-mounted display to help users effectively explore and immerse themselves in multiple videos from various angles. Based on an analysis of an existing user interface for multi-view navigation and the characteristics of virtual reality, we proposed four layouts, i.e., 1) an evenly divided space, 2) an evenly divided designated space, 3) a widget type, and 4) an avatar type. We implemented a prototype by applying Korean pop concerts, where multi-view videos are the most actively utilized, and then conducted a user study to evaluate the usability and preferences of the proposed layouts. The results show that it is adequate to arrange the multi-view videos within a 60° to 110° space and on the left and right side of the main view, which is a range that the users can comfortably access. In addition, when placing multiple videos in a designated space, it is helpful to use visual effects or simple avatars to avoid visual burden being placed on the users. © 2022 ACM.

Telepresence Robot for Isolated Patients in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Effects of Socio-relationship and Telecommunication Device Types on Patients' Acceptance of Robots

Telecommunication devices can help mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus among the patients quarantined in hospitals. In contrast to the conventional telecommunication devices, a telepresence robot can deliver tangible communication cues from a remote sender to a receiver that vary according to level of interaction modalities. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, telecommunication interactants can be divided into two categories based on their socio-relationships. The types include those engaged in social-oriented relationships such as that between patients and families or acquaintances, and task-oriented relationships such as those between patients and doctors or nurses. We hypothesize that the types of telecommunication device used and socio-relationship would be factors affecting the COVID-19 patients' telecommunication experiences and acceptance of telepresence robots. We conducted a user study comparing three types of telecommunication devices namely floor-based robot versus desk-based robot versus tablet with the aforementioned two types of socio-relationships. The results indicated that the participants preferred telecommunication service in a social-oriented relationship to a task-oriented relationship. A mediation analysis revealed that social presence, competency, and familiarity mediates the effects of socio-relationship type on the satisfaction of the telecommunication service. Based on the socio-relationship type, different tendencies on the effect of telecommunication device types on service evaluation were observed. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A User Study in a Pandemic: Some Lessons Learned

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some research that otherwise would have been conducted in person pivoted to online platforms. This poster paper describes lessons learned from an online study of information behavior by individuals with long-term information needs, focusing on what was learned about how to conduct such a study online. Broadly, three themes are evident: (1) Trust mechanisms were weaker than would be expected for an in-person study, resulting in greater coordination difficulties;(2) What seemed to be a fair reimbursement rate appears to have provided an outsized incentive for fraud;and (3) Zoom proved to be sufficiently capable as a platform for remote use of software for a study that had not originally been designed with remote use in mind. 85th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology ;Oct. 29 – Nov. 1, 2022 ;Pittsburgh, PA. Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license.

Passive Video Quality Assessment Using Lab and Remote Testing

In this chapter, research about the assessment of video quality for gaming content will be provided. At first, a dataset that was used for the development of the ITU-T Rec. G.1072 will be presented. The dataset was created in a laboratory environment using the passive test paradigm described in Chap. 3. Next, some results of the collected video quality ratings will be illustrated. While QoE assessment studies traditionally make use of controlled laboratory environments, there are also other possibilities to conduct user studies without a laboratory environment. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented many researchers from performing lab studies, the concept of supervised and unsupervised remote studies got lots of attention. By using such a remote study design, two studies assessing video quality ratings of similar conditions as in the previously mentioned dataset were conducted. These two studies allow to address three research topics that will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. At first, it will be investigated whether video quality ratings obtained using the remote study design are comparable to those collected in the lab environment. Second, a comparison between video quality ratings collected using a stimulus duration of 20 s instead of 30 s will be performed, which tries to answer whether it is enough to use a shorter stimulus duration as proposed in ITU-T Rec. P.809. Lastly, the differences between using a discrete 5-point ACR scale and the extended continuous 7-point scales will be investigated. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Why Individuals Do (Not) Use Contact Tracing Apps: A Health Belief Model Perspective on the German Corona-Warn-App.

The World Health Organization declared the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in January 2020. To trace infection chains, Germany launched its smartphone contact tracing app, the "Corona-Warn-App" (CWA), in June 2020. In order to be successful as a tool for fighting the pandemic, a high adoption rate is required in the population. We analyse the respective factors influencing app adoption based on the health belief model (HBM) with a cross-sectional online study including 1752 participants from Germany. The study was conducted with a certified panel provider from the end of December 2020 to January 2021. This model is primarily known from evaluations of medical treatments, such as breast cancer screenings, but it was rarely applied in prior work for a health-related information system such as the CWA. Our results indicate that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to use the CWA are the strongest drivers of app use. In contrast, technical barriers, privacy concerns and lower income are the main inhibitors. Our findings contribute to the literature on the adoption of contact tracing apps by questioning actual users and non-users of the CWA, and we provide valuable insights for policymakers regarding influences of adoption and potential user groups of disease prevention technologies in times of pandemics.

Healthcare system engagement and algorithm-identified cancer incidence following initiation of a new medication.

PURPOSE: Implausibly high algorithm-identified cancer incidence within a new user study after medication initiation may result from increased healthcare utilization (HU) around initiation ("catch-up care") that increases diagnostic opportunity. Understanding the relationships between HU prior to and around initiation and subsequent cancer rates and timing is important to avoiding protopathic bias. METHODS: We identified a cohort of 417 458 Medicare beneficiaries (2007-2014) aged ≥66 initiating an antihypertensive (AHT) after ≥180 days of non-use. Initiators were stratified into groups of 0, 1, 2-3, and ≥4 outpatient visits (OV) 60-360 days before initiation. We calculated algorithm-identified colorectal cancer (aiCRC) rates stratified by OVs and time since AHT initiation: (0-90, 91-180, 181-365, 366-730, and 731+ days). We summarized HU -360/+60 days around AHT initiation by aiCRC timing: (0-29, 30-89, 90-179, and ≥180 days). RESULTS: AiCRC incidence (311 per 100 000 overall) peaked in the first 0-90 days, was inversely associated with HU before initiation, and stabilized ≥180 days after AHT initiation. Catch-up care was greatest among persons with aiCRCs identified <30 days in follow-up. Catch-up care magnitude decreased as time to the aiCRC date increased, with aiCRCs identified ≥180 days after AHT initiation exhibiting similar HU compared with the full cohort. CONCLUSION: Lower HU before-and increased HU around AHT initiation-seem to drive excess short-term aiCRC incidence. Person-time and case accrual should only begin when incidence stabilizes. When comparison groups within a study differ by HU, outcome-detection bias may exist. Similar observations may exist in other settings when typical HU is delayed (e.g., cancer screening during SARS-CoV-2).

Not Only for Contact Tracing: Use of Belgium's Contact Tracing App among Young Adults

Many countries developed and deployed contact tracing apps to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Prior research explored people's intent to install these apps, which is necessary to ensure effectiveness. However, adopting contact tracing apps is not enough on its own, and much less is known about how people actually use these apps. Exploring app use can help us identify additional failures or risk points in the app life cycle. In this study, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with young adult users of Belgium's contact-tracing app, Coronalert. The interviews were conducted approximately a year after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings offer potential design directions for addressing issues identified in prior work - such as methods for maintaining long-term use and better integrating with the local health systems - and offer insight into existing design tensions such as the trade-off between maintaining users' privacy (by minimizing the personal data collected) and users' desire to have more information about an exposure incident. We distill from our results and the results of prior work a framework of people's decision points in contact-tracing app use that can serve to motivate careful design of future contact tracing technology. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Users' Expectations, Experiences, and Concerns With COVID Alert, an Exposure-Notification App

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 users of Canada's exposure-notification app, COVID Alert. We identified several types of users' mental models for the app. Participants' concerns were found to correlate with their level of understanding of the app. Compared to a centralized contact-tracing app, COVID Alert was favored for its more efficient notification delivery method, its higher privacy protection, and its optional level of cooperation. Based on our findings, we suggest decision-makers rethink the app's privacy-utility trade-off and improve its utility by giving users more control over their data. We also suggest technology companies build and maintain trust with the public. Further, we recommend increasing diagnosed users' motivation to notify the app and encouraging exposed users to follow the guidelines. Last, we provide design suggestions to help users with Unsound and Innocent mental models to better understand the app. © 2022 ACM.

"Hide Your Video, Show Your Action!" Investigating a New Video Conferencing Interface for Virtual Studying

With the advent of COVID-19, new virtual social activities arose. These activities include virtual studying, which is studying while joining a video conference. Virtual studying is different from most virtual activities in that users try to minimize unnecessary interactions while sharing their presence through video streaming. Here, video streaming that runs in the background can cause problems such as invasion of privacy and excessive self-awareness. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether a new video conferencing interface that reduces video explicitness but detects important actions can mitigate the problems of video streaming and still deliver users' presence in virtual studying. To this end, we designed a research prototype in three versions: blurred video version, small video version, and no video version. All versions were provided with an activity recognizer that detects absence, leaning, and using a smartphone. To evaluate the feasibility of the design, we conducted a user study where four virtual studying teams used all three versions of the prototype and participated in an interview. Our study explored the effects of new design strategies for virtual studying, which is a new virtual activity that focuses on sharing presence. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Transferring AI Explainability to User-Centered Explanations of Complex COVID-19 Information

This paper presents a user-centered approach to translating techniques and insights from AI explainability research to developing effective explanations of complex issues in other fields, on the example of COVID-19. We show how the problem of AI explainability and the explainability problem in the COVID-19 pandemic are related: as two specific instances of a more general explainability problem, occurring when people face in-transparent, complex systems and processes whose functioning is not readily observable and understandable to them ("black boxes”). Accordingly, we discuss how we applied an interdisciplinary, user-centered approach based on Design Thinking to develop a prototype of a user-centered explanation for a complex issue regarding people's perception of COVID-19 vaccine development. The developed prototype demonstrates how AI explainability techniques can be adapted and integrated with methods from communication science, visualization and HCI to be applied to this context. We also discuss results from a first evaluation in a user study with 88 participants and outline future work. The results indicate that it is possible to effectively apply methods and insights from explainable AI to explainability problems in other fields and support the suitability of our conceptual framework to inform that. In addition, we show how the lessons learned in the process provide new insights for informing further work on user-centered approaches to explainable AI itself. © 2022, The Author(s).

A Study of Users' Privacy Preferences for Data Sharing on Symptoms-Tracking/Health App.

Symptoms-tracking applications allow crowdsensing of health and location related data from individuals to track the spread and outbreaks of infectious diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time in history, these apps were widely adopted across the world to combat the pandemic. However, due to the sensitive nature of the data collected by these apps, serious privacy concerns were raised and apps were critiqued for their insufficient privacy safeguards. The Covid Nearby project was launched to develop a privacy-focused symptoms-tracking app and to understand the privacy preferences of users in health emergencies. In this work, we draw on the insights from the Covid Nearby users' data, and present an analysis of the significantly varying trends in users' privacy preferences with respect to demographics, attitude towards information sharing, and health concerns, e.g. after being possibly exposed to COVID-19. These results and insights can inform health informatics researchers and policy designers in developing more socially acceptable health apps in the future.

"I just want to play games with friends and it asked me for all of my information": Trading privacy for connection during the COVID-19 pandemic

We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with participants in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when restrictions were in effect, to learn about social media users' privacy behaviors and what influenced changes in behavior since the beginning of the pandemic. We found that participants felt pressured to stay "relevant"online, which led to increased consumption and sharing of content, as well as increased re-posting of older content. Participants also noted increased disclosure of negative emotional states and that they were expected to publicly display their stance in regards to social movements. Participants felt increasingly reliant on social media as a means of connection which led them to download and install additional social apps despite privacy concerns. Each of these activities has potential privacy implications in terms of explicit data sharing and in terms of increased sources of information for online behavioral tracking and profiling. © 2022 ACM.

Passive Video Quality Assessment Using Lab and Remote Testing

In this chapter, research about the assessment of video quality for gaming content will be provided. At first, a dataset that was used for the development of the ITU-T Rec. G.1072 will be presented. The dataset was created in a laboratory environment using the passive test paradigm described in Chap. 3. Next, some results of the collected video quality ratings will be illustrated. While QoE assessment studies traditionally make use of controlled laboratory environments, there are also other possibilities to conduct user studies without a laboratory environment. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented many researchers from performing lab studies, the concept of supervised and unsupervised remote studies got lots of attention. By using such a remote study design, two studies assessing video quality ratings of similar conditions as in the previously mentioned dataset were conducted. These two studies allow to address three research topics that will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. At first, it will be investigated whether video quality ratings obtained using the remote study design are comparable to those collected in the lab environment. Second, a comparison between video quality ratings collected using a stimulus duration of 20 s instead of 30 s will be performed, which tries to answer whether it is enough to use a shorter stimulus duration as proposed in ITU-T Rec. P.809. Lastly, the differences between using a discrete 5-point ACR scale and the extended continuous 7-point scales will be investigated. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Holistic Approach to SUMP Strategies and Actions in the Post-pandemic and Energy Crisis Era

Since its first appearance, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted urban mobility in cities. Governments around the world have tried to implement various actions to limit the spread of this virus. As a result, a significant amount of research on sustainable urban mobility has been published since 2020. The spread of the virus has led to changes in transport supply and demand, which is represented by policy makers and users. In fact, the literature reviewed is classified into two broad categories: (i)User studies: analysis of modal choice before and after the pandemic.(ii)Policy makers’ studies: analysis of government actions to promote public transport (bus, train), soft mobility (cycling, walking) and micro-mobility (especially electric scooters) and rationalization of private car use. Therefore, this manuscript analyses the relationship between urban mobility and COVID-19 through a holistic review of the literature published from 2020 until 2022. The main objective of the research aims at identifying new trends in research and recommendations in the field of sustainable urban mobility. While the COVID-19 pandemic represents an opportunity for governments to rethink the mobility system, this synthesis helps to clarify the vision of policy makers in developing post-pandemic urban mobility recovery plans and developing or updating Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) in line with sustainable development goals and also taking into account the recent energy crisis. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Theory Based Adaptive Pedagogical Agent in a Reading App for Primary Students - A User Study

The Covid19 pandemic situation stressed the importance of appropriate digital applications that foster knowledge acquisition and can be used independently. This requires empirically validated applications, adapted to and evaluated within their target group. We therefore developed a theory based mobile app for training reading skills including two games and a pedagogical agent. The app is based on a validated analogue reading intervention for second-graders, which has already been partly digitized, aiming to address the gap of theory based educational applications for children. We used the ARCS model to modify the application and especially the agent’s behavior and compared this extended version to a control version in a user study with primary school students, investigating effects on motivation and performance. The children were motivated in both conditions and performed significantly better in one of the two games in the ARCS modeled version. The app and the pedagogical agent were well perceived and could be successfully used in the home study setting without external aid by all children, which supports the applicability for applied settings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Note: Learn Online: High School Students' Adoption of Online Learning in Bangladesh during COVID-19 Pandemic

Online learning is playing a significant role, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we perform an interview study through in-depth interviews with 22 high school students of a developing country (Bangladesh) to find out about their experience and practices with online learning during the pandemic. Our findings reveal several usage strategies, challenges of the conventional usage of online learning, workarounds students adopt to address those challenges. Through the adaptability lens, we find that many students are adapting to online learning despite being in favor of it. © 2022 ACM.

Public Views on Digital COVID-19 Certificates: a Mixed Methods User Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has led governments worldwide to introduce various measures restricting human activity and mobility. Along with the administration of COVID-19 vaccinations and rapid testing, socio-technological solutions such as digital COVID-19 certificates have been considered as a strategy to lessen these restrictions and allow the resumption of routine activities. Using a mixed-methods approach - a survey (n=1008) and 27 semi-structured interviews - this study explores the attitudes of residents in the Republic of Ireland towards the idea of introducing digital COVID-19 certificates. We examine the topics of acceptability, fairness, security and privacy of COVID-related personal data, and practical considerations for implementation. Our study reveals the conditional and contextual nature of the acceptability of digital certificates, identifying specific factors that affect it, associated data practices, and related public concerns and expectations of such technologies. © 2022 Owner/Author.