Assisting the Study of Indoor Mobility: Issues, Methods and Tools

Understanding and characterizing the nature of indoor mobility is an essential requirement for developing proper mobile technologies. Yet, a detailed study of indoor mobility in real scenarios represents a challenge as it requires intensive labor from researchers and a level of intrusion which is not always welcome by participants. Previous research in mobile environments has been based on observational ethnographic approaches, which place little emphasis on quantitative analysis of the observed phenomenon. We lack a sound methodological approach to study indoor mobility that provides ways to capture observations of general and detailed aspects of human work. Reflecting on our experiences while conducting several workplace studies in a hospital, we defined an approach to study indoor mobility. Based on the lessons learned in using this approach on site, we propose The Mobile Ethnographer, a tool that facilitates the acquisition and analysis of data in situ. We discuss how the data acquired with the tool could be used as a base against which to compare the impact of mobile technology once introduced.