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This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economics, Industry and Competitiveness under the grant ECO2017-82449-P., Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2021.1902364, The current environment is highly dynamic and undergoing continuous change, and the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how firms and governments need to act promptly to face unexpected threats. In this regard, location-based applications have been implemented successfully in China and South Korea, but in some Western countries, serious privacy issues have been raised. With these premises in mind, this paper has the aim of examining the factors that motivate or discourage users to adopt mobile applications able to trace location. The proposed model is based on the combination of the Protection Motivation Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the Technology Acceptance Model. A variance-based Structural Equations Modeling approach has been used to test the conceptual model using Partial Least Squares (PLS). The findings show that perceived usefulness positively influences attitude. In addition, subjective norms and self-efficacy were found to be the key drivers of the intention to adopt location-based applications, whilst perceived severity emerged as an important barrier. Finally, this study provides empirical evidence for the positive and significant relationship between the intention to use this type of apps and actual behavior. Academic and managerial implications are drawn and future research directions are suggested., Spanish Ministry of Economics, Industry and Competitiveness ECO2017-82449-P

Tinder has become one of the most popular apps for online users to launch offline connections. While Tinder is culturally known as a “hook up app,” the true reasons behind users interacting on the ...

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic challenged the Finnish society in terms of economic, institutional, and social aspects. Private entrepreneurs could apply for funding to convert their products into digital format or develop digital platforms. The digitalisation of public services has been ongoing for years, but institutional change is slow and has tendency to resist the change. Resilience overall is described as ability to recover from a shock. The public administration has been slowly introducing different digital services for a long time, but their popularity amongst citizens has not been huge. The topographic data in Finland provided by the National Land Survey is open, and it has been used in different new location based applications to provide new commercial services. Location information had also one totally new form or role during the past few months in Finland, and it was the distinction between ‘us' and ‘them', based on where people were living.

Widespread sensing devices enable a world in which physical spaces become personalised in the presence of mobile users. An important example of such personalisation is the use of pervasive displays to show content that matches the requirements of proximate viewers. Despite prior work on prototype systems that use mobile devices to personalise displays, no significant attempts to trial such systems have been carried out. In this article, we report on our experiences of designing, developing and operating the world’s first comprehensive display personalisation service for mobile users. Through a set of rigorous quantitative measures and 11 potential user/stakeholder interviews, we demonstrate the success of the platform in realising display personalisation, and offer a series of reflections to inform the design of future systems.

Digital map is considered as a cyber world, which maps visual representations (cyber objects) to the physical objects in the real world and allows the user to interact with these physical objects t...

Conventional paper-based tourist maps are still created and provided by many local tourism organizations, as they have advantages in representing highly detailed and contextual information, although the static medium limits the functions of such maps. To benefit these analog maps from location-aware environments, interactivity, and data feedback from mobile devices, a sustainable ecosystem for local tourist maps is proposed. A low-cost solution for developing mobile tourism applications by providing tools to georeference analog maps and integrate multimedia sightseeing information owned by local tourism organizations is implemented. The processes for analog map georeferencing and content integration, as well as the design principles for mobile tourism applications, are introduced and discussed in detail. In cooperation with college students, university campuses, and local tourism organizations, experimental applications were implemented to evaluate the functionality and usability of the proposed mobile mapping application and the feasibility of the proposed solution. Two published applications are introduced briefly, with preliminary analyses using data donated by application users, which have shown positive contributions to understanding users' behavior and requirements.

SAGE Publishing regrets that due to an administrative error, this article was accidentally published Online First and in Volume 20 Issue 6 with different DOIs. There was no duplication of the article in the printed and online version of Volume 20 Issue 6. The correct and citable version of the article remains: Francesco F and Paci L (2020) Kernel-based estimation of individual location densities from smartphone data. Statistical Modelling, 20, 6, 617–633. DOI 10.1177/1471082X19870331

Because of recent advances in both client devices and wireless communications, industry has started to look at the potentially relevant market of Location Based Services (LBSs). Several presence service proposals are putting together and standardizing interoperable the needed support for location data dissemination in industry-level LBS applications. However, the deployment of presence-based LBSs is still very challenging since frequent location updates have to be timely delivered to the (potentially many) subscribed LBS applications. The aim of this chapter is to clearly overview the main and still open technical challenges in currently available presence service standardization activities. In addition, by focusing on the most recent IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and IMS-based presence service, the chapter presents an extensive survey of the state-of-art literature and proposes a novel and widely applicable architecture of solution for high scalability. Finally, the chapter also sketches the main presence-based LBS industry efforts nowadays and the currently open research issues.

The adoption and use of mobile location-based applications (LBAs) (e.g. Loopt, Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook Places, My Town) are far behind industry expectations. Drawing on social exchange theory, we present a theoretical framework to examine the cost-benefit tradeoffs considered by potential users of mobile LBAs. A research model is proposed and tested using data collected from a sample of 222 respondents. Our study offers two explanations for why users would release location information: 1) the application's controls reduce privacy risk beliefs, and 2) the application provides opportunities for socialness. Understanding the motivations and concerns of different types of users and developing LBAs to meet those specific needs is both a challenge and a condition for the growth of the location-based market.

Location-based games entertain players usually by interactions at points of interest (POIs). Navigation between POIs often involve the use of either a physical or digital map, not taking advantage of the opportunity available to engage users in activities between POIs. The paper presents riddle solving as a navigational method for a location-based game. 10 families with 2-6 persons and at least one child in the age range 9- 11 years old participated in the evaluation. Results show that riddle solving as a navigational method is more enjoyable than a 2D digital map. Additional findings from video recordings, field notes, questionnaires, logging and semi-structured interviews revealed that riddle solving has potential for engaging users in learning activities.

Improvement of mobile computing and sensory technology has facilitated to collect and analyze the human mobility and physiological features in a real time. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of preserving the user location privacy for location based mobile application such as health wellness initiative. To anonymize location trajectory we introduce the global locations sets, and it is a useful model to finish the anonymization process more efficiently. The proposed privacy model will effectively anonymize the user location trajectory while it is submitting for future processing and analysis. We believe that the privacy model of this paper might help the business organizations to implement location based applications such as wellness initiative and so on with ensuring more personal privacy. Experimental results show that the privacy model can effectively anonymize location trajectory and can keep the more data utility than the existing perturbation method.

With the fast adoption of location-enabled devices, Location-based Applications (LBAs) have become widely popular. While LBAs enable highly useful concepts such as geo-social networking, their use also raises serious privacy concerns as it involves sharing of location data with non-trusted third parties. In this respect, we propose an approach that protects the frequently visited locations of users, e.g., a bar, against inferences from long-term monitoring of their location data. Such inferences equate a privacy leak as they reveal a user's personal behavior and interests to possibly malicious non-trusted parties. To this end, we first present a study of a dataset of location check-ins to show the existence of this threat among users of LBAs. We then propose our approach to protect visit-frequency of the users to different locations by distributing their location data among multiple third-party Location Servers. This distribution not only serves to avoid a single point of failure for privacy in our system, it also allows the users to control which LBA accesses what information about them. We also describe a number of possible attacks against our privacy approach and evaluate them on real-data from the check-ins dataset. Our results show that our approach can effectively hide the frequent locations while supporting good quality-of-service for the LBAs.

The proposed method obtains the data of virtual reference points and received signal strength in the service area. Then, the AP location is estimated using the measurements based on the one of the several localization algorithms such as inverse distance weighting, iterative least square, and direct solution methods. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using the error analysis, simulations, and experiments. Performance results show that the arbitrary deployed APs can be searched and localized efficiently using the proposed method.

As RFID systems are applied to various fields and applications such as supply chain management, asset management, location based applications etc. the requirements becomes diverse. For example, Much higher performance, TCP/IP protocol stack are required in some applications. However, low end processors based systems such as 8051 processor can not meet such requirements due to their low processing capacity and limited size of memory. In this paper a UHF band RFID system which meets the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 specification with ARM920T-based processor is implemented and tested.

Given the enormous demands for location based applications and service, localization technologies, which estimate accurate locations of the mobile users, have been developed rapidly outdoors (e.g., GPS) and indoors (e.g., WiFi fingerprinting). However, in half-open areas where existing studies are rarely conducted, either the outdoor or indoor localization technique fails to achieve a satisfactory performance due to the short of signals. In this paper, we propose a hybrid localization method tailored for the use in half-open areas. Specifically, we present two individual probabilistic localization techniques, which are extended from conventional GPS and WiFi fingerprinting. Moreover, our hybrid approach combines the locations estimated by the two techniques, and modifies the estimation by an enhanced Kalman filter leveraging the user movement capacity as well as the location probability. The experiment results show our hybrid localization method outperforms the conventional GPS and WiFi fingerprinting based methods in half-open areas.

The increase in location-based applications makes protecting personal location information a major challenge. Addressing this challenge requires a mechanism that lets users automate control of their location information, thereby minimizing the extent to which the system intrudes on their lives.

This paper presents an implementation of a location-based service developed for smartphone devices. It also covers a review of the need for location-based services and methods of location acquisition, which include GPS, cell-stations, wireless access point and IP address based Geo-location lookup positioning. The paper covers a review of con temporary technologies for development of software systems based on the location-based services and their use on smartphone devices. The paper presents the implementation of a GIS designed to provide venue information based on the location information of smartphones with Android operating system. Apstrakt: U radu je predstavljena primena usluge bazirane na lokaciji, kreirane za pametne telefone. U njemu se analizira potreba za uslugama bazi ranim na lokaciji, kao i metode utvrđivanja lokacije, među kojima su GPS, lociranje pomocu baznih stanica, bežicnih mreža i utvrđivanje lokacije pomocu IP adrese. Rad sadrži i pregled savremenih tehnologija za izradu softverskih sistema baziranih na lokaciji i njihovu upotrebu na pametnim telefonima. Predstavljena je implementacija jednog ge ografskog informacionog sistema dizajniranog da pruži informacije o ugostiteljskim objektima, koje su u blizini pametnih uređaja sa Android operativnim sistemom, bazirane na njihovoj lokaciji.

Quest UbiquX fuses a multimodal mixed reality implementation of a traditional tabletop role-play game with a location-based mobile aspect to provide a novel Ubiquitous gaming eXperience (UbiquX). Mobile devices are used to progress the game in a single-player adventure phase based on the players location in the real world. In addition, they support the interaction with an interactive tabletop surface in a collaborative skirmish phase.

International audience; With the increasing popularity of GPS-enabled hand-held devices, location-based applications and services have access to accurate and real-time location information, raising serious privacy concerns for their millions of users. Trying to address these issues, the notion of geo-indistinguishability was recently introduced, adapting the well-known concept of Differential Privacy to the area of location-based systems. A Laplace-based obfuscation mechanism satisfying this privacy notion works well in the case of a sporadic use; Under repeated use, however, independently applying noise leads to a quick loss of privacy due to the correlation between the location in the trace. In this paper we show that correlations in the trace can be in fact exploited in terms of a prediction function that tries to guess the new location based on the previously reported locations. The proposed mechanism tests the quality of the predicted location using a private test; in case of success the prediction is reported otherwise the location is sanitized with new noise. If there is considerable correlation in the input trace, the extra cost of the test is small compared to the savings in budget, leading to a more efficient mechanism. We evaluate the mechanism in the case of a user accessing a location-based service while moving around in a city. Using a simple prediction function and two budget spending stategies, optimizing either the utility or the budget consumption rate, we show that the predictive mechanim can offer substantial improvements over the independently applied noise.

Nowadays, location based applications increasingly used in many areas. Although outdoor navigation software applications are mature and widely used, improvements are required for indoor navigation. The applications such as guidance of disabled people, applications for security, visitor tracking, address mapping, the organization of services, automatic tourist guidance etc. are also needed for indoor environments. In this study, location-based navigation software has been developed for indoor environment. New plug-ins are added to navigation software, so that it can be used in Intelligent Wheelchair (ATEKS) systems, too. Thus, the software is specialized for autonomous robot application. The software is developed on Android platform.

Location-Based services with social networks improve users' experience and enrich people's social live. However, location information is often inadequate due to privacy and security concerns. We seek to infer users' ‘Current City’ on Facebook for coarse location based applications. We first extract users' multiple explicit and implicit location attributes, and analyze correlations of these attributes from two perspective: user-centric and user-friends. We observe that both user-centric and user-friends location attributes tightly correlate to a user's Current City (e.g., 60% of users stay in their hometown, 60% of users live in the same city as 50% of their friends). Based on extensive analysis and observations on location attributes correlations, we have constructed a Current City Prediction model (CCP) using artificial neural network (ANN) learning frameworks. The experimental results indicate that we achieve accuracy levels of 84% for city-level prediction and 98% for country-level which are increases of 9% and 18%, respectively than what is possible with Tweecalization.

Effective and efficient retrieval of similar spatial textual objects plays an important role for many location based applications, such as Foursquare, Yelp, and so forth. Although there are many studies exploring on this issue, most of them focus on how to integrate spatial and textual information to efficiently retrieve top-k results yet few of them address the effectiveness issue. In this paper, we propose a semantic aware strategy which can effectively and efficiently retrieve the top-k similar spatial textual objects based on a general framework. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that the performance of our proposal outperforms the state-of-the-art approach.

One of the biggest opportunities presented to mobile developers is the wealth of options opened up by the very nature of Android devices like phones and tablets: They are mobile! While the location of a user of a traditional desktop application can be interesting, it’s rare for someone to pick up a desktop machine and move about with it all day. But mobile devices move, and their location (and, by implication, the location of the device user) can influence everything from games, to searching for products and information, to nuances and options for things as diverse as language settings and device behavior.

Location information is the major component in location based applications. This information is used in different safety and service oriented applications to provide users with services according to their Geolocation. There are many approaches to locate mobile nodes in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we are interested in outdoor localization particularly in cellular networks of mobile nodes and presented a localization method based on cell and user location information. Our localization method is based on hello message delay (sending and receiving time) and coordinate information of Base Transceiver Station (BTSs). To validate our method across cellular network, we implemented and simulated our method in two scenarios i.e. maintaining database of base stations in centralize and distributed system. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our approach and its implementation applicability in telecommunication systems., Comment: 10 Pages, 7 figures; ISSN:0975-3834 (Online); 0975-4679 (Print)

Location-based applications have become increasingly popular on smartphones over the past years. The active use of these applications can however cause device battery drain owing to their power-intensive location-sensing operations. This paper presents an adaptive location sensing framework that significantly improves the energy efficiency of smartphones running location-based applications. The underlying design principles of the proposed framework involve substitution, suppression, piggybacking, and adaptation of applications' location-sensing requests to conserve energy. We implement these design principles on Android-based smartphones as a middleware. Our evaluation results show that the design principles reduce the usage of the power-intensive GPS (Global Positioning System) by up to 98% and improve battery life by up to 75%.

Passengers pay attention to the landscape as they move through the environment. We suggest a new type of applications, which adds to that experience. It consider their motion and velocity, which make the time available for interaction with individual geographical objects very limited, at the same time as they cannot control it. Applications, in this case a game, could utilize audio and gesture interfaces, as well as digital maps to provide for experiences that are sequentially mapped onto the landscape. An initial user feed back trial made visible interactional and experiential challenges in passengering.

The potential loss of privacy due to the use of location based applications may be one of the greatest obstacles to their wider acceptance. Nevertheless, most research about privacy management to-date has not taken into consideration the complexity in the utilization of collaborative applications that may require users’ location sharing among participants. In this article, we propose a privacy service that helps users to maintain their privacy policy in a flexible and incremental way. We also carried out a qualitative evaluation study whose results illustrate several challenges that should be handled in the design of such a service.

Complex and dynamic working environments such as health care facilities consist of staff, patients and equipment constantly moving in response to changing medical requirements. Knowing the current location of people and equipment is essential for the smooth running of a facility, yet creating a global view through tracking is a challenging task. It is clear that many common hospital situations can be improved with real-time access to the various actors' location information. One of the main problems with implementing such services is that current location based applications tend to be proprietary and the data generated closed. The realisation of ubiquitous location based services demands the exploration of hybrid models and methods that can utilise existing and subsequent infrastructures in novel and complimentary ways. We describe a number of hospital scenarios that use location-based services and make available all the location data gathered. We propose that by aggregating location data by a range of acquisition methods it is possible to improve the performance of location applications and readily adapt to the introduction of new location detection technologies.

Wireless sensor networks have been proposed for many location based applications, so the localization problem in wireless sensor networks has got considerable attentions these days. More and more researchers pay attention to how to use the location information to implement specific application and how to locate nodes accurately. In this paper, DV-hop localization algorithm is introduced, and the influence of beacon nodes on localization average error of DV-hop are explored. The paper focuses on how the placement and quantity of beacon nodes affect on localization average error. And simulations show the results

The emergence of location-based computing promises new and compelling applications, but raises very real privacy risks. Existing approaches to privacy generally treat people as the entity of interest, often using a fidelity tradeoff to manage the costs and benefits of revealing a person's location. However, these approaches cannot be applied in some applications, as a reduction in precision can render location information useless. This is true of a category of applications that use location data collected from multiple people to infer such information as whether there is a traffic jam on a bridge, whether there are seats available in a nearby coffee shop, when the next bus will arrive, or if a particular conference room is currently empty. We present hitchhiking, a new approach that treats locations as the primary entity of interest. Hitchhiking removes the fidelity tradeoff by preserving the anonymity of reports without reducing the precision of location disclosures. We can therefore support the full functionality of an interesting class of location-based applications without introducing the privacy concerns that would otherwise arise.

Location-based and location-oriented applications will be amongst the most powerful drivers of organizational change in the coming years. However, the strategic use of these technologies and the benefits tied to them will vary from one organization to another based on the business needs to fill. The alignment between the use of location-based technologies and the firms' business strategic orientation is thus of primary importance. In an attempt to support firms in this alignment process, this paper presents the GEOGRID framework for identifying and analyzing the strategic opportunities offered to firms by the use of leading edge location technologies. This framework groups the main variables that need to be considered in order to analyze the competitive positioning of the business, to surface assumptions, to ascertain benefits, and to control costs tied to the strategic applications of location technologies in organizations.

After a review of current and next generation digital broadcasting and navigation systems, we will take a closer look at important commercial mobile and portable applications. Moores Law projects an increase in hardware complexity by one order of magnitude every five years. At least for the next ten years, it appears this law will keep its validity allowing new system implementation trade-offs. Increasing processing performance and storage capabilities of several signals in parallel can be implemented effi- ciently. Terminals supporting various functions or receivers with advanced diversity-combining schemes are now attractive for the consumer