Mobile Location-based Awareness and Connectedness

Mobile social awareness systems open up new social opportunities by enabling the automatic disclosure of awareness cues. We are trying to understand which cues work best to achieve feelings of connectedness between users and identify valid and comprehensive effect measures to evaluate such systems in HCI. We choose to study specifically two sensors – location, via GPS and movement, via accelerometers. The methodology of this research mixes in-lab testing with ethnographic studies using data to be collected using a selfreport, ecologically valid technique from psychology: ESM.