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Keeping track of users' communication activities in web‐based environments has always been considered a complex task. It requires tracking systems that are capable of efficiently tracking users' activities and producing tracking data that can be useful to various users. The objectives of this paper are two‐fold: to present an approach for better observing the different levels of human and computer interactions (HCI) during a computer‐mediated communication (CMC) activity; and to present the technical aspects of a web‐based tracking system for communication tools such as discussion forums.

The research applications are applied to educational settings. Three cases of experiments with result analysis will also be presented. The paper studied different CMC tools. With the participation of researchers from different disciplines, including HCI and e‐learning specialists, we adopted the 5W1H method (When, Where, Who, What, Why, and How) and a participative method to build the approach. The result of the experiments and users' feedback allowed us to evaluate the approach.

An approach for efficiently tracking users' communication activities on CMC tools, by looking very closely at the different levels of HCI is shown. This paper demonstrates how useful it is to have tracking data with finer granularity and to provide significant data indicators to the participants in the learning process.

The data indicators shown in this paper are computed based on the real needs of the participants in the learning process. The proposed approach can be implemented with any conceptual and development languages.

One of the particularities of this research is the approach for efficiently tracking CMC activities on both client and server sides. The quality of the tracking data from the three experiments shows the effectiveness of the system. Another contribution of this paper is a discussion of the important key issues related to the tracking data in learning environments.

Building on theoretical foundation of personal information management (PIM) in information science, this paper seeks to understand how activity tracker users manage their personal health information generated by their devices and to elucidate future activity tracking technology in support of personal health information management (PHIM). This paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors conducted a web survey study with a specific group of activity tracker users – amateur runners. This survey collected both quantitative and qualitative data on participants’ engagement with activity tracking technology, their PHIM practices with the information generated by the technology and how their needs were being met by their activity tracking technology use and PHIM practices.

Amateur runners surveyed in this study exhibit long-term engagement and frequent interaction with activity tracking technology. They also engage in PHIM practices by using a range of PHIM tools and performing various PHIM activities. Furthermore, they use activity tracking technology and engage in PHIM practices to meet various health/fitness-related needs and information needs, while some of these needs such as performance needs and overarching needs are only partially met or unmet.

This research discusses amateur runners as power users of activity tracking technology, provides timely updates to PIM and PHIM research in light of a new type of personal health information, and generates design considerations for future activity tracking technology in support of PHIM. It also brings together previously disparate research regarding everyday life PHIM in information science, human–computer interaction and health informatics.

This paper aims to discuss research and design of learning activities involving activity tracking and wearable activity tracking technology.

Three studies are summarized as part of a program of research that sought to design new learning activities for classroom settings. The first used data from a qualitative interview study of adult athletes who self-track. The second used video excerpts from a designed learning activity with a group of fifth grade elementary students. The third study draws largely on quantitative assessment data from an activity tracking unit enactment in a rural sixth grade class.

Activity tracking appears to provide opportunities for establishing benchmarks and calibration opportunities related to intensity of physical activities. Those features of activity tracking can be leveraged to develop learning activities where elementary students discover features of data and how data are affected by different distributions. Students can show significant improvement related to statistical reasoning in classroom instructional units that centralize the use of self-tracked data.

As activity tracking is becoming a more ubiquitous practice with increased pervasiveness and familiarity with mobile and wearable technologies, this paper demonstrates a topical intersection between the information and learning sciences, illustrates how self-tracking can be recruited for instructional settings, and it discusses concerns that have emerged in the past several years as the technology related to activity tracking begins to be used for educational purposes.

Construction suffers from “peculiarities” that concern the temporary natures of the construction site, project teams and unique product design. Considering the digital transformation of construction, new solutions are being investigated that can provide consistent data between changing projects. One such source of data manifests in the tracking of logistics activities across the supply chain. Construction logistics is traditionally considered a site management activity focused solely on the “back end” of projects, but an expanded logistics focus can unlock new avenues of improvement. This study aims to understand the requirements and benefits of such a consistent thread of data.

From a research project with one of Australia’s largest contracting companies, this paper details a series of construction tracking tests as an empirical case study in using Bluetooth low energy aware tracking technology to capture data across the manufacture, delivery and assembly of a cross-laminated timber structural prototyping project.

The findings affirm the tracking of expanded logistics data can improve back-end performance in subsequent projects while also demonstrating the opportunity to inform a project’s unique front-end design phase. The case study demonstrates that as the reliability, range and battery life of tracking technologies improve, their incorporation into a broader range of construction activities provides invaluable data for improvement across projects.

As a live case study, this research offers unique insights into the potential of construction tracking to close the data loop from final site assembly back to the early project design phase, thus driving continual improvement from a holistic perspective.

The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which self-tracking data have meaning and value in and after the life of the creator, including how such data could become part of the larger historical record, curated in an institutional archive. In doing so, the article expands upon existing shared interests among researchers working in the areas of self-tracking, human–computer interaction and archival science.

A total of 18 people who had self-tracked for six months or more were recruited for the study. Participants completed a survey which gathered demographic data and characteristics vis-à-vis their self-tracking behavior. In-person semi-structured interviews were then conducted to ascertain the beliefs of the participants regarding the long-term use and value of personal quantified-self data.

The findings reveal the value that people place on self-tracking data, their thoughts on proper modes for accessing their archive once it moves from the private to the public space, and how to provide fidelity within the system such that their experiences are represented while also enabling meaning making on the part of subsequent users of the archive.

Today’s quantified-self data are generally embedded in systems that create a pipeline from the individual source to that of the corporate warehouse, bent on absorbing and extracting insight from a totality of big data. This article posits that new opportunities for knowing and for design can be revealed when a public interest rationale is appended to rich personalized collections of small data.

This paper presents a part of our research work that places an emphasis on Tracking Data Analysis and Visualization (TrAVis) tools, a web‐based system, designed to enhance online tutoring and learning activities, supported by computer‐mediated communication (CMC) tools. TrAVis is particularly dedicated to assist both tutors and students in the task of exploiting tracking data of communication activities throughout the learning process. This paper focuses on the technical aspects of TrAVis, the visualization of students' tracking data and the experiment we have conducted in an authentic learning situation.

A mixture of iterative and participative approaches has been adopted for the design of TrAVis. Different versions of TrAVis were built during the progress of our research. The major changes in each build have particularly involved the conceptual design of data indicators of students' activities and the visualization techniques of the data indicators. Both case studies and experiments have been made to evaluate TrAVis.

This paper demonstrates how TrAVis provides a new experience in visualizing and analyzing students' tracking data. While it shows the originality and novelty of the system, it also reveals the potential benefits of TrAVis to both tutors and students in their online tutoring and learning activities.

The result from the experiment is not sufficient to evaluate some specific aspects of TrAVis. As a matter of fact, the lack of user's feedback did not enable us to justify whether or not the proposed data indicators would be actually used by the users.

The data indicators shown in this paper are computed based on the real needs of the participants in the learning process. Online questionnaires were used and face‐to‐face interviews have been made to study the needs of the users throughout this research work.

One of the particularities of this research is the proposed system, TrAVis, objectively designed to better support the tutors in the tasks of monitoring and evaluating students on CMC tools. Plus, TrAVis is distinguished from the existing systems by its capacity in computing substantial data indicators, allowing the tutors to efficiently visualize and analyze both the process and the product of students' activities.

The future construction site will be pervasive, context aware and embedded with intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to explore and define the concept of the digital skin of the future smart construction site.

The paper provides a systematic and hierarchical classification of 114 articles from both industry and academia on the digital skin concept and evaluates them. The hierarchical classification is based on application areas relevant to construction, such as augmented reality, building information model-based visualisation, labour tracking, supply chain tracking, safety management, mobile equipment tracking and schedule and progress monitoring. Evaluations of the research papers were conducted based on three pillars: validation of technological feasibility, onsite application and user acceptance testing.

Technologies learned about in the literature review enabled the envisaging of the pervasive construction site of the future. The paper presents scenarios for the future context-aware construction site, including the construction worker, construction procurement management and future real-time safety management systems.

Based on the gaps identified by the review in the body of knowledge and on a broader analysis of technology diffusion, the paper highlights the research challenges to be overcome in the advent of digital skin. The paper recommends that researchers follow a coherent process for smart technology design, development and implementation in order to achieve this vision for the construction industry.

The purpose of this study is to monitor the progress of construction activities in an automated way by using sensor-based technologies for tracking multiple resources that are used in building construction.

An automated on-site progress monitoring approach was proposed and a proof-of-concept prototype was developed, followed by a field experimentation study at a high-rise building construction site. The developed approach was used to integrate sensor data collected from multiple resources used in different steps of an activity. It incorporated the domain-specific heuristics that were related to the site layout conditions and method of activity.

The prototype estimated the overall progress with 95% accuracy. More accurate and up-to-date progress measurement was achieved compared to the manual approach, and the need for visual inspections and manual data collection from the field was eliminated. Overall, the field experiments demonstrated that low-cost implementation is possible, if readily available or embedded sensors on equipment are used.

Previous studies either monitored one particular piece of equipment or the developed approaches were only applicable to limited activity types. This study demonstrated that it is technically feasible to determine progress at the site by fusing sensor data that are collected from multiple resources during the construction of building superstructure. The rule-based reasoning algorithms, which were developed based on a typical work practice of cranes and hoists, can be adapted to other activities that involve transferring bulk materials and use cranes and/or hoists for material handling.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of wearable health and fitness trackers in everyday life, and users’ motivations and their understanding and use of the data derived from devices, and understand the results using the lens of information behaviours.

The study used a qualitative, constructionist approach, based on 21 interviews with users of a range of wearable activity trackers used for health and fitness.

Findings show that the lifelogging devices have become companion tools that enable users to take information from their bodily indicators and make some decisions about their health and fitness, and also track the results when they act on it, thus giving them a sense of gratification and a sense of control over their own health.

The findings have implications on how health professionals can talk to their lifelogging patients about how to deal with and understand the information provided by their activity-tracking devices. Some participants in the study already discuss these data regularly with their health professionals.

As the self-tracking practices attract wide range research interests from human–computer interaction, information systems, digital sociology, health informatics and marketing among others. This study provides important everyday information-seeking perspective that contributes to the understanding of the practices of how people make sense of the data, how the data improves their wellbeing, i.e. physical health improvement or fitness, and implications to users health behaviour. Additionally the study adds to the lifelogging literature through a constructionist, qualitative approach rather than a technological deterministic approach.

The purpose of this study was to identify existing users' acceptance of the multidimensional health and fitness features of wrist-worn wearable devices (WWDs) required for each stage of physical activity (i.e. before, during and after) and examine the relationship between its acceptance (i.e. knowledge acquisition, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) and the actual use of its health and fitness attributes.

Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were taken to analyze the relationships. A focus group interview was conducted (N = 9) to design the research model, including the operationalized definition of the study constructs. A questionnaire survey was conducted with respondents in South Korea (N = 480). Partial least squares structural equation modeling via Smart PLS 3.0 was employed to test the hypotheses.

When users learned to use fitness functions and perceived them as useful for physical activity without causing any difficulty, they tended to use those functions more, which provided enhanced health benefits in the digitalized interactive environment of WWDs.

This research is one of the first to examine the relationship between the perceived user value of WWDs and their actual usage within a digitalized and interactive environment. The results are expected to offer theoretical insights into how well users accept the health and fitness components of WWDs. Practically, it will build awareness of what makes users adopt and use WWDs, helping practitioners design better health promotions and campaigns associated with WWDs.