Research and Data Conclusion

In this section, the research process and results will be presented in the next paragraphs, which are divided into four parts, including interviews, literature review, workshop, and bibliography.

1. Literature review

In the beginning, we read some pieces of literature related to a smart home that can help the elderly and disabled to participate in social activities in the community. We found that the smart home technologies help elderly and disabled people to be independent in their private living environment (Linskell and Hill, 2010). A survey on the elderly’s mental health to explore the relationship between social participation and mental health in 2012 showed that social participation plays a vital role in life satisfaction (Chunkai Li., 2018). The more social activities they attended, the more chances of mental health they may get. The loneliness which is the cause of depression and a sense of independence of the elderly is one of the main reasons for mental illness (Goll et al., 2015).

Due to the lack of nursing professionals and the high expenses of finding a nursing service, we want to find an affordable way to support and assist the independent people (Michelle et al., 2017). AI robots may meet some fundamental requirements but cannot provide service anytime for some technical problems. Social mobile networks in smart homes connecting the elderly and disable with other neighbors in the community help independent people getting involved in social activities (Yu, Liang et al., 2015). Social mobile media and devices have been increasingly popular in recent years. For independent groups, especially for the elderly, they have fewer chances to use them because of a lack of technical knowledge, while young generations would use more social mobile applications than the elderly (Arfaa and Kathy, 2016). So, in the next stage, we focused on investigating social participation and experience, social motivations and behaviors between the elderly and young generations.

2. Interview

There are two rounds in the interview section. First round is for eight elderly and two disabled people aged from 60-80 and the insights are as follows: 1). Among 10 participants, eight elderly and one disabled are sociable and energetic and one lame people live along but busy every day with his gardening works. 2). All of them have many activities with their families or neighbors, such as traveling, shopping, chatting or playing with dogs. 3). None of them uses social mobile applications, such as Facebook or what’s up. They prefer calling or meeting face to face rather than using messages.

In the second round, we interviewed young generations. After interviewing 10 strangers aged from 20-40 who are smartphone users, we got some results as follows: 1). All of them use social mobile applications for more than 4 hours every day, including Facebook, Instagram, What’s up and WeChat. 2). 6 participants have problems with social communication and have no idea where to make friends in the same hobbies. 3). 8 participants claim that they prefer to staying at home playing games rather than going out for social activities but they feel lonely and depressed. 4). One of the interviewees said that she would feel blushing and her heart beat faster when she participated in an activity with so many strangers and felt uncomfortable. 5). 2 participants prefer social activities with themes, such as human CS and table games. 6). Although the process will be embarrassing, they still want to participate in activities that can help them to build connections with strangers because they want to take the initiative to jump out of the comfort circle and make new friends.

At first, we set intended users like the elderly and disabled people who have difficulty in getting involved in the community. During the research process, we found that the elderly and disabled hardly use social mobile devices and most of them are dynamic, optimistic and sociable in their own life pace and with their fixed social circle, while young adults are eager to have such an application to allow them attend more offline activities from online platform and get involved in social community. The issue concerning social participation and mental health not merely arises among the elderly and disabled people, but also in the young generations. Therefore, we expanded our target audience from elderly and disabled people to all generations who use social mobile networks but have social phobia.

3. Workshop

The workshop was conducted in week 9. We invited 6 strangers aged from 20-40 to attend three activities, which are ice-breaking, social networks motivations (the influence of time and distance for the activity), and the critique for an app.

The first ice-breaking round aims at providing an environment for participants to know and be familiar with each other, enables the participants to quickly establish relationships for the next round. To alleviate the offline social obstacles, and let strangers feel comfortable in during the activities, we, as the host, play a vital role in leading a conversation to be continued. Observation of their behaviors on connecting with strangers is a great way to help us quickly understand user motivation in social networks. During the several minutes’ free talk, we found that: 1). The host or leader plays a vital role in the whole conversation. Participants are all strangers and they don't know each other before. The leader needs to guide the topic and warm-up. 2). Participants prefer a relaxing atmosphere, such as joking or playing table games. 3). A similar background or life experience is the main reason to influence the participants' conversation. As they are young adults aged 20-30, the topics they discuss are related to study, courses and works. In the second round, we evaluated the users' motivation for social participation and how time and distance influenced their behaviors. The evaluation results show that when people have more leisure time, the longer distance can be accepted by people. And few of them are willing to participate in the activity which held 30 km away. The line chart describes the longest distance of the offline activity that the target users tend to participate in within different time limits.

In the third activity, participants need to critique one app called meet up, which has similar functions as our product, allows users to meet from online to offline. Participants were asked to use this app and discussed its pros and cons. The feedback we collected from our participants are as follows: 1). Every user has mentioned is security concern. They will choose not to go if there is no real-name authentication. 2). When they decide to go out, they prefer to meet people with the same hobbies or propose. 3). The comment and reviews are important for them to choose activities to attend.

4. Card sorting

Old people & Young People

Purpose & Problem

Purpose - Same interests, Friends & Outliers Purpose

Card Sorting

In this stage, we collected the data from the interview and workshops and conducted card sorting methods to achieve insight from our research. We found the different social motivations and behaviors between the elderly and young generations. Due to the development of social mobile technologies, young generations prefer to using online social applications rather than meeting friends face to face. The different social experiences between the elderly and young generations show that young adults may have more barriers than the elderly in strangers' communication and they are easier to feel lonely than the elderly. Besides, the time duration and convenient transportations are two main factors which play a vital role in the selection of activities participation. So, in the next stage, we will continue to explore the requirements and behaviors of online-offline social participation among young generations.

5. Bibliography

This section presents the pieces of literature review according to the results of the team research we got above. We conducted further investigation related to social mobile applications in the aspect of social motivations, online-offline, technical devices, security, and privacy.

Firstly, we investigated the motivations and behaviors of people in social mobile networks and the way of influencing social participation. Studies show that positive emotions promote social engagement and emotion can be regarded as an important factor affecting the participation of social activities (Watson, D., 1992). Trust is an important factor affecting social network participation, which refers to the user's recognition and believe in one service, including cognitive trust and emotional trust. (Ortiz, J., 2017). Therefore, to encourage more people to attend social activities, we should initially create a sense of trust from each other.

For the elderly social motivations, social media platforms and geographic distance have an impact on them. Elderly who are willing to accept new technology may cost more time and money for social network communication and long-distance will greatly hinder the social activities (Wang, X., 2018). So, following this concept, we focus on developing a social mobile application for all generations, not just for the elderly.

Studies also show that online and offline interrelationships can help build social bonds. The reason why people fail to attend offline social activities is that Internet can give people multiple identities, and people can play various roles online. Some may be the ordinary person in real life, but they can choose to be superman online to escape reality. In addition, there is a lack of organization in the activity and less common sense or understanding between strangers. So, we tried to build the function that people can find their own interests group and make more friends through our products (Kwak, D., 2017).

Secondly, we surveyed the relationship between online and offline social participation. Online social is linked to the offline world. Teenagers primarily use instant messaging to stay in touch with their peers in offline life. Social networking sites have strengthened their friendship and helped them make new friends. For adults, especially college students, they use online tools to maintain their real-life community (Subrahmanyam, K., 2008). Besides, the increasing popularity of social networking sites is changing the social context of teenagers and increasing the exposure of teenagers to strangers they do not normally encounter in their daily lives, which poses certain risks to adolescents. (Reich, S. M., 2012). So, we decided to build a social mobile application with online-offline participation functions in the final prototype. We found that the recommendation system is very important for social software. It can help users quickly find what they need from a large amount of information and help users make decisions (Colace, F., 2015).

In the stage of functions development, we found that the social barriers that shy people often encounter, and the Internet may provide a social environment conducive to shy groups because many social issues can be reduced through online social interaction, while user profile information displayed in the profile section of the online social software mentioned in the article can help them find their own social group. (Baker, L. R., 2010). People may interact online in a variety of ways, which can make up for shortcomings in face-to-face communication (for instance, emoji instead of facial expression, text instead of spoken language) (Reich, S. M., 2017). So, we added the chatting function for users to communicate online to prepare for offline activities.

Thirdly, we probed into two technologies used in the social electronic-to-face community, which are event-based social networks (EBSNs) and Location-based social networks (LBSNs). The benefits of activity recognition and predication would encourage event participation based on the user’s preference. The location-based functions allow people having similar outdoor location histories in the geographic spaces that could share some similar life interests. Two friends are more likely to share more than a few check-in locations, homophily in play, than in the case of two randomly selected users. People could share some similar interests if they have similar mobility patterns in the space of semantic locations. Homophily dictates that individuals tend to socialize with others who are more like themselves. Users sharing longer semantic location sequences would be more similar. The sequence of people’s daily routine will affect their destinations to go (S. Zhang and Q., 2018).

Fourthly, the study shows that the security and privacy in social mobile networks play an important role in online-offline social activities. Face-to-face meetings between community members and building relationships can help users build a sense of belonging that enhances user trust in the community and community members and creates more interaction. An effective way to reduce the perceived uncertainty of users is to view other members' past online behaviors and obtain more relevant personal information through an online platform. This approach can motivate users to connect and increase credibility (Kunz, W., & Seshadri, S., 2015). Online trust can mitigate the risk of disclosure of personal and identifiable information and reduce the perception of uncertainty and vulnerability. Users will feel more risk as they disclose more information, and when they think it is more uncomfortable, the less identifiable comments and information they post (Mesch, G. S., 2012). Therefore, in our design, we should focus on the amount of information that users need to disclose.

There are four motives for online social which are relationship maintenance, entertainment, relationship building, and information seeking. Privacy concerns did not inhibit self-disclosure on online social networks but motives did. People's privacy attitudes and privacy behavior in online social networks are consistent, which depends on the motivation of people using online social networks (Heravi, A., 2018). Besides, the location data flow is the exposure to the risk of location privacy in Location-Based Social Network applications (Zhao, S., 2016). The location sharing by using Google API is one of the foundations of our project. Following the suggestions in this article, we tend to apply data encryption techniques rather than HTTPS protocol, as well as add encrypted parameters, including checksum or signature into the requests for data tampering detection to protect the data privacy in the next stage.

6. Conclusion

To sum up, according to the previous domain research, literature reviews and workshops, we expanded our target audience from elderly and disabled people to all smartphone users, who would like to get involved in the community. From the interview data, we found that many elderly people are dynamic and energetic, spending their pleasant life with their fixed social community and less of them used social mobile applications, while loads of young social mobile users are concerned about social participation. So, we decide to develop a platform that allows users to select one interesting group or organize activities, help them get involved in the community through online and offline social participation. From the workshop, we collected the insight into the aspect of users' social mobile experience and behaviors and then made a wireframe of the basic functions and interface. The literature reviews help us deeply consider the strong point and shortage of our functions combined with interview and evaluation data. Finally, we applied card sorting to supplement our general concept of the final products. These research methods have a large impact on our design and development process from idea generation, target audience setting, wireframe design and functions building. However, there still have some limitations to the interview sections. As we set elderly and disabled people as our target audience at the beginning, it is hard to find these participants meeting such requirements for research. Therefore, the interview data will be bounded to some extent.

deco3500-2019 / Moo-Young-Rain