Perceived Benefits and Concerns of Prospective Users of the SmartCampus Location-Aware Community System Test-bed

The SmartCampus initiative aims to turn an urban university campus into a living laboratory for location aware community system services. To lay a foundation for this effort, the SmartCampus test-bed is being created through provisioning to 500+ students with personal computing devices (smart phones and tablet PCs), which runs a suite of applications that link "people-to-people-to-place", or P3-systems. To explore anticipated usage and concerns, and to use this information to help to refine the design of various applications, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a cross section of 65 members of the NJIT campus community. The interviews employed hypothetical use scenarios to enable prospective users to give their opinions about applications that did not yet exist at the time of the study. Most students were quick to see the possible benefits of applications that can allow one, for instance, to see the campus location of their 'buddies' at a glance. The major concerns were with privacy control, the validity of the data entered (e.g., can applications be used to make verbal attacks on others?), and interruptions/overload with information, which may be disruptive. The concerns raised are being used to help inform the design of test-bed applications

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