Location Based Services Acceptance and Adoption Evaluation: An Investigation on Mobile Phone Users’ Response to Awareness and Utilization of LBS Technology in Nairobi Kenya

Location Based Navigation System (LBNS) is a specific Location Based Service (LBS) purely for navigational purpose. These systems resolve position of a user by using GNSS/GPS positioning technologies, to which supplementary information on goods and services are tagged. The navigation services have become popular and can be installed on mobile phones to provide route information, location of points of interest and user’s current location. LBS has continued to face challenges which include “communication” process towards user reference. Location Based Service System conveys suitable information through a mobile device for effective decision making and reaction within a given time span. This research was geared at understanding the state of LBS technology acceptance and adoption by users in Nairobi Kenya. To do this a quantitative study was carried out through a questionnaire, to investigate mobile phone users’ response on awareness and use of LBS technology. Testing the growth of this technology in this region compared to predictions in previous studies using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), it is evident that many users may be aware of GPS functionality in mobile phones but are certainly yet to fully embrace the technology as they rarely use it. This points to some underlying challenges towards this technology within this part of the World, thereby recommending for deliberate monitoring and evaluation of LBS technology for sustenance growth based on user satisfaction and acceptance for improved usability.

Location Based Navigation Service Technology: Development of an Optimization Algorithm for Multivariate Contextual Cartographic Content in Location Based Navigation Service

User response or reaction to navigation applications is influenced by relevance in geographic information, in terms of cartographic context and content delivered within a definite time, providing a direct impact to outcome or consequence based on decision making and hence user reaction. Location Based Navigation Services (LBNS) have continuously advanced in cartographic visualization, making maps interpretation easy and ubiquitous to any user, as compared to pre-historic times when maps were a preserve of a few. Despite rapid growth in LBNS, there exist challenges that may be characterized as technical and non-technical challenges, among them being process of conveying geospatial information to user. LBNS system deliver appropriate information to a user through smartphone (mobile device) for effective decision making and response within a given time span. This research focuses on optimization of cartographic content for contextual information in LBNS to users, based on prevailing circumstances of various components that constitute it. The research looks into Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR), as a technical challenge centered on a non-technical issue of social being of user satisfaction, leading to decision making in LBNS, hence response and outcome. Though advanced technologically, current LBNS on information sourcing depends on user manual web pages navigation and maneuver, this can be painstaking and time consuming that it may cause unnecessary delay in information delivery, resulting to delayed information response time (DIRT). This in turn may lead to unappropriate decision making with erroneous reaction or response being taken, resulting in loss of opportunity, resources, time and even life. Optimization in LBNS is achieved by a mathematical relationship developed between user status, mobile device variables against cartographic content. The relationship is in turn applied in LBNS android application to fulfill optimization solution for user consumption.

Factors influencing user adoption of location based service:From the expanded TAM perspective

Purpose:This study intends to examine the factors influencing user adoption of location based service(LBS).Design/methodology/approach:This paper develops the research model for user adoption of LBS with the technology acceptance model(TAM) as the theoretical foundation.Using a questionnaire and sampling method,empirical data was collected from 386 participants.Structured equation modeling was used to test the validity of the proposed model.Findings:The results show that I) perceived ease of use.perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness were direct determinants of behavioral intention,and perceived ease of use has the greatest impact of the three;2) emergency,ubiquity,technology maturity and social trust all have positive and significant impacts on perceived ease of use;3) emergency and social trust significantly influence perceived usefulness positively:4) individualization and social impact significantly affect perceived playfulness positively.Research limitations:Subjects were from China’s mainland,which limits the generalizability of the research findings.The interaction effects of age,gender and user experience were not included.Practical implications:This study offers LBS operators,marketers and application developers insights into the way to attract more users by increasing perceived usefulness,ease of use and playfulness of LBS.Originality/value:Location based service is still a relatively new concept and there were few theoretical and empirical studies that examine user adoption of the serv ice.This study contributes to existing LBS adoption studies by modifying and extending TAM and meanwhile the empirical study will help the research community gain a deeper understanding of the factors affecting user adoption of LBS.

Smart phone-based context-aware augmentative and alternative communications system

A smartphone-based context-aware augmentative and alternative communication(AAC) was applied was in order to enhance the user's experience by providing simple, adaptive, and intuitive interfaces. Various potential context-aware technologies and AAC usage scenarios were studied, and an efficient communication system was developed by combining smartphone's multimedia functions and its optimized sensor technologies. The experimental results show that context-awareness accuracy is achieved up to 97%.

A Service Discovery Approach Based on a Quantitative Similarity Measure for M-Tourism Platforms

This paper presents a localization architecture for an m-tourism services delivery platform. The aim of the system is to deliver services for nomads (e-tourists) according to their localization and according to the results given by the search engine. This engine is based on a quantitative similarity measure. The discovered services are presented via a Web Map Service. Moreover, the platform integrates an adaptation sub-system for heterogeneous environments and an e-negotiation module.

Toward Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Applications:Developing Stakeholder-Oriented Location-Based Services

Location-Based Services (LBS),an emerging new business based on smartphone and mobile networks,are becoming more and more popular.Most of these LBSs,however,only offer non-seamless indoor/outdoor applications and simple applications without giving stakeholders the chance to play an active role.Our specific aim is to solve these issues.This paper presents concepts to solve these issues by expanding the Open Location Services Interface Standard (OpenLS) to allow seamless indoor/outdoor positioning and to extend the content of the services to include information recommended by stakeholders.

Combination of light-emitting diode positioning identification and time-division multiplexing scheme for indoor location-based service

A combination of light-emitting diode（LED） identification and a time-division multiplexing scheme is proposed in this Letter for indoor location-based service. With the scheme, the arrangement of white LED lamps and the structure of a data frame are designed to realize high-accuracy indoor positioning and location-based payload data transmission simultaneously. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the indoor positioning accuracy is 10 cm and 2 Mb/s data transmission with high signal quality is realized.

“互联网+”背景下导学互动与BOPPPS模式在《LBS技术与应用》课程中的教学探索

全球卫星导航定位系统逐步成为一个全球性的新兴高新技术产业,LBS技术将充分发挥全球卫星导航定位系统的相关功能,在此基础上提供丰富的服务。如何开展LBS技术的学习,并将理论落实到实际需要深入探究。本文提出“互联网+”的大背景下将导学互动与BOPPPS模式相结合,可以克服现有《LBS技术与应用》新课程教学面临的问题,对教学质量的提高以及相关专业的建设具有重要的意义,同时对全球卫星导航系统的运用提供新的思路。

Protecting personalized privacy against sensitivity homogeneity attacks over road networks in mobile services

Privacy preservation has recently received considerable attention for location-based mobile services. A lot of location cloaking approaches focus on identity and location protection, but few algorithms pay attention to prevent sensitive information disclosure using query semantics. In terms of personalized privacy requirements, all queries in a cloaking set, from some user＇s point of view, are sensitive. These users regard the privacy is breached. This attack is called as the sensitivity homogeneity attack. We show that none of the existing location cloaking approaches can effectively resolve this problem over road networks. We propose a （K, L, P）-anonymity model and a personalized privacy protection cloaking algorithm over road networks, aiming at protecting the identity, location and sensitive information for each user. The main idea of our method is first to partition users into different groups as anonymity requirements. Then, unsafe groups are adjusted by inserting relaxed conservative users considering sensitivity requirements. Finally, segments covered by each group are published to protect location information. The efficiency and effectiveness of the method are validated by a series of carefully designed experiments. The experimental results also show that the price paid for defending against sensitivity homogeneity attacks is small.

An efficient method for privacy preserving location queries

Recently, the issue of privacy preserving loca- tion queries has attracted much research. However, there are few works focusing on the tradeoff between location privacy preservation and location query information collection. To tackle this kind of tradeoff, we propose the privacy persevering location query （PLQ）, an efficient privacy pre-serving location query processing framework. This frame- work can enable the location-based query without revealing user location information. The framework can also facilitate location-based service providers to collect some information about the location based query, which is useful in practice. PLQ consists of three key components, namely, the location anonymizer at the client side, the privacy query processor at the server side, and an additional trusted third party connect- ing the client and server. The location anonymizer blurs the user location into a cloaked area based on a map-hierarchy. The map-hierarchy contains accurate regions that are parti- tioned according to real landforms. The privacy query pro- cessor deals with the requested nearest-neighbor （NN） loca- tion based query. A new convex hull of polygon （CHP） algo- rithm is proposed for nearest-neighbor queries using a poly- gon cloaked area. The experimental results show that our al- gorithms can efficiently process location based queries.

Representation and Organization for Spatial Data in LBS

Aiming at the special demand on SVG_based representation and organization for spatial data in location based services（LBS）, the research is made in this article on the conversion method from multiple formats to SVG format, and a harris_corner detector method is proposed and verified to evaluate the conversion result. Based on the above, an optimized compression arithmetic is proposed, which integrated the characteristic of code simplification and GZIP compression. The test shows that the techniques on conversion and compression are feasible, which means that SVG_based representation is suited for spatial data in LBS and the improved compression arithmetic is prior to the former.

VGQ-Vor： extending virtual grid quadtree with Voronoi diagram for mobile k nearest neighbor queries over mobile objects

Performing mobile k nearest neighbor （MkNN） queries whilst also being mobile is a challenging problem. All the mobile objects issuing queries and/or being queried are mobile. The performance of this kind of query relies heav- ily on the maintenance of the current locations of the objects. The index used for mobile objects must support efficient up- date operations and efficient query handling. This study aims to improve the performance of the MkNN queries while re- ducing update costs. Our approach is based on an observa- tion that the frequency of one region changing between being occupied or not by mobile objects is much lower than the frequency of the position changes reported by the mobile ob- jects. We first propose an virtual grid quadtree with Voronoi diagram （VGQ-Vor）, which is a two-layer index structure that indexes regions occupied by mobile objects in a quadtree and builds a Voronoi diagram of the regions. Then we propose a moving k nearest neighbor （kNN） query algorithm on the VGQ-Vor and prove the correctness of the algorithm. The ex- perimental results show that the VGQ-Vor outperforms the existing techniques （Bx-tree, Bdual-tree） by one to three or- ders of magnitude in most cases.

Indoor imaging visible light positioning with sampled sparse light source and mobile device

Indoor visible light positioning becomes attractive due to the increasing demands of location-based services. This Letter proposes an indoor imaging visible light positioning scheme with a sampled sparse light source, image sensor, and gyro. An indoor positioning cellular with a single reference light source and an off-the-shelf mobile device is demonstrated. Experimental results show that the 3-dimensional positioning error is only several centimeters even with a rotated, rolled, and pitched mobile device. The proposed scheme is convenient and cost effective because the transmitter takes advantage of the existing lighting infrastructure and the receiver is a commercial mobile phone without any extra accessories.