Walking phrases: modeling the walking process with respect to contextual conditions

Abstract

Designing for everyday life activities has become an important field within mobile HCI. A critical point in mobile interaction design is to understand a person's changing context. Taking into account the conditions that characterize a person’s context is a prerequisite to provide interactions that are meaningful to the actual situation and supportive. In this paper, we present our approach of modeling the walking process from a body-centric perspective and with respect to contextual conditions that affect walker’s experience. Our walking model is based on a set of walking phrases: sequences of walking movements that are meaningful with regard to walker’s context. To make walking phrases empirically discernable, we interrelate biomechanical and contextual data of the walking activity. Towards this goal, we designed a location-based mobile game and conducted a small process-oriented study in which we collected players’ walking data.