Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userThe Geography of Pokemon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement
126
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Brent Hecht
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
The widespread popularity of Pokemon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pokemon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pokemon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pokemon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pokemon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pokemon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pokemon GO may be counteracted.
rate research
Read More
Physical activity helps people maintain a healthy weight and reduces the risk for several chronic diseases. Although this knowledge is widely recognized, adults and children in many countries around the world do not get recommended amounts of physical activity. While many interventions are found to be ineffective at increasing physical activity or reaching inactive populations, there have been anecdotal reports of increased physical activity due to novel mobile games that embed game play in the physical world. The most recent and salient example of such a game is Pokemon Go, which has reportedly reached tens of millions of users in the US and worldwide. We study the effect of Pokemon Go on physical activity through a combination of signals from large-scale corpora of wearable sensor data and search engine logs for 32 thousand users over a period of three months. Pokemon Go players are identified through search engine queries and activity is measured through accelerometry. We find that Pokemon Go leads to significant increases in physical activity over a period of 30 days, with particularly engaged users (i.e., those making multiple search queries for details about game usage) increasing their activity by 1473 steps a day on average, a more than 25% increase compared to their prior activity level ($p<10^{-15}$). In the short time span of the study, we estimate that Pokemon Go has added a total of 144 billion steps to US physical activity. Furthermore, Pokemon Go has been able to increase physical activity across men and women of all ages, weight status, and prior activity levels showing this form of game leads to increases in physical activity with significant implications for public health. We find that Pokemon Go is able to reach low activity populations while all four leading mobile health apps studied in this work largely draw from an already very active population.
Distal facial Electromyography (EMG) can be used to detect smiles and frowns with reasonable accuracy. It capitalizes on volume conduction to detect relevant muscle activity, even when the electrodes are not placed directly on the source muscle. The main advantage of this method is to prevent occlusion and obstruction of the facial expression production, whilst allowing EMG measurements. However, measuring EMG distally entails that the exact source of the facial movement is unknown. We propose a novel method to estimate specific Facial Action Units (AUs) from distal facial EMG and Computer Vision (CV). This method is based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NNMF), and sorting of the resulting components to determine which is the most likely to correspond to each CV-labeled action unit (AU). Performance on the detection of AU06 (Orbicularis Oculi) and AU12 (Zygomaticus Major) was estimated by calculating the agreement with Human Coders. The results of our proposed algorithm showed an accuracy of 81% and a Cohens Kappa of 0.49 for AU6; and accuracy of 82% and a Cohens Kappa of 0.53 for AU12. This demonstrates the potential of distal EMG to detect individual facial movements. Using this multimodal method, several AU synergies were identified. We quantified the co-occurrence and timing of AU6 and AU12 in posed and spontaneous smiles using the human-coded labels, and for comparison, using the continuous CV-labels. The co-occurrence analysis was also performed on the EMG-based labels to uncover the relationship between muscle synergies and the kinematics of visible facial movement.
Motor imagery (MI) is a mental representation of motor behavior that has been widely used as a control method for a brain-computer interface (BCI), allowing communication for the physically impaired. The performance of MI based BCI mainly depends on the subjects ability to self-modulate EEG signals. Proper training can help naive subjects learn to modulate brain activity proficiently. However, training subjects typically involves abstract motor tasks and is time-consuming. To improve the performance of naive subjects during motor imagery, a novel paradigm was presented that would guide naive subjects to modulate brain activity effectively. In this new paradigm, pictures of the left or right hand were used as cues for subjects to finish the motor imagery task. Fourteen healthy subjects (11 male, aged 22-25 years, mean 23.6+/-1.16) participated in this study. The task was to imagine writing a Chinese character. Specifically, subjects could imagine hand movements following the sequence of writing strokes in the Chinese character. This paradigm was meant to find an effective and familiar action for most Chinese people, to provide them with a specific, extensively practiced task and help them modulate brain activity. Results showed that the writing task paradigm yielded significantly better performance than the traditional arrow paradigm (p<0.001). Questionnaire replies indicated that most subjects thought the new paradigm was easier and more comfortable. The proposed new motor imagery paradigm could guide subjects to help them modulate brain activity effectively. Results showed that there were significant improvements using new paradigm, both in classification accuracy and usability.
Virtual Reality (VR) headsets can open opportunities for users to accomplish complex tasks on large virtual displays, using compact setups. However, interacting with large virtual displays using existing interaction techniques might cause fatigue, especially for precise manipulations, due to the lack of physical surfaces. We designed VXSlate, an interaction technique that uses a large virtual display, as an expansion of a tablet. VXSlate combines a users headmovement, as tracked by the VR headset, and touch interaction on the tablet. The users headmovement position both a virtual representation of the tablet and of the users hand on the large virtual display. The users multi-touch interactions perform finely-tuned content manipulations.
We investigate the standard susceptible-infected-susceptible model on a random network to study the effects of preference and geography on diseases spreading. The network grows by introducing one random node with $m$ links on a Euclidean space at unit time. The probability of a new node $i$ linking to a node $j$ with degree $k_j$ at distance $d_{ij}$ from node $i$ is proportional to $k_{j}^{A}/d_{ij}^{B}$, where $A$ and $B$ are positive constants governing preferential attachment and the cost of the node-node distance. In the case of A=0, we recover the usual epidemic behavior with a critical threshold below which diseases eventually die out. Whereas for B=0, the critical behavior is absent only in the condition A=1. While both ingredients are proposed simultaneously, the network becomes robust to infection for larger $A$ and smaller $B$.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
