UBICOMP/ISWC ’16 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2016, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY

Personalized record of the city
wander with a wearable device:a pilot study
suggests that heart rate is significantly higher whenparticipants see what they consider an interesting spot
when compared with spots they are indifferent towards,
implying that our concept is supported by quantitative
physiological data responses. Perspectives of thisresearch direction are discussed in terms of therelationship between city and human emotions.

Feng Liang
Masashi Nakatani
Kai Kunze
Kouta MinamizawaGraduate School of Media Design
Keio UniversityYokohama, Japan
caiusliang@kmd.keio.ac.jp
Nakatani@kmd.keio.ac.jp
kai@kmd.keio.ac.jp
kouta@kmd.keio.ac.jp

Author Keywords
Locative experiences; city guide; tourism; mobilemedia; mobile technology

Abstract
In this paper, we proposed personalized guided walking
holidays in the city with wearable devices, which aim toprovide a personalized service based on one’s interest[Figure 1]. We firstly hypothesize that one’s heart rate
rises when he/she sees something he/she is curious
about, and then test this using our developing
prototype device. We conducted an experiment withfour participants, in popular holiday walking areas suchas Akihabara and Asakusa area in Tokyo. The data

Figure 1. The basic concept of ourstudy. When the participant sees
something he/she is interested in, theirheart rate increases.

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UbiComp/ISWC '16 Adjunct, September 12-16, 2016, Heidelberg,
Germany
ACM 978-1-4503-4462-3/16/09.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2968219.2971462

141

ACM Classification Keywords
H.1.2 Models and Principles: Human information
processing
H.5.1 Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g.,HCI): Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities
J.4 Social and Behavioral Sciences: Psychology

Introduction
Walking Holidays has become a popular hobby in recentyears. People enjoy exploring the city by walking, they
may take pictures of the views they think are beautiful,and may also go into a nice restaurant that they havenever been to before. City walking is a hobby to relax
oneself, and to discover new treasure of the city andone’s life.
Since everybody has different interest, the routes thatwould make him or her happy should also be different

UBICOMP/ISWC ’16 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2016, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY

from each other. In order to provide a better routesuggestion based one’s interest, there is a projectcalled “Urban Gems Project” [1] in UK. On the websiteof this project, people are asked to choose the more
beautiful photo out of two, then based on the survey
data, routes like “Happy”, “Beauty”, “Shortest” and“Quite” were generated.
Besides of the need for personal hobbies, city walking
can be also be used for local promotion. For example,“Hiroshima Cat Street View” [2] gives people theexperience of exploring the back streets of Hiroshima
through a cat’s eyes. Your sight becomes as low as acat, and you can find some cat-like comment when you
are exploring. By combining city walking and cat view,
this service is effective for the promotion of Hiroshima’sback streets.
In contrast to the traditional travel guide, the GPSlinked content distribution platform “Street Museum”[3], which is developed by Toppan Printing, provides
the experience that user can see the world heritage’s
revival CG when they point their camera at it.
Information of the spots is also shown on the screen.
City wander can also be applied as GPS based mobilegame. For example, the “GPS Entertainment forLuxembourg” [4]. It is a game that combines real
objects on the street with the virtual game stage,
player would not be told which way to go next until theplayer solves the puzzle.
Although there are a lot of works that are related topublic relations surrounding city walking, to ourknowledge, up until now there has been no service thatis totally personalized based on physiological data (inother words, embodied data) such as heart rate, bloodpressure, or the amount of sweating. Therefore, in thisresearch, we would like to discuss the possibility ofusing wearable devices while city wander. Especially,
we report a pilot study for considering the relationship142

between one’s interest and real-time heart rate, inorder to provide a more personal city walking service.

Combining one’s heart rate data with GPS
Latest advancement of wearable devices makes it easy toobtain physiological data such one’s heart rate with GPS
information. This set of multidimensional data is collectedand stored in a wearable device, however, this is not
usually combined to extract specific information.
What will happen if personal heart rate information areintegrated with the map of city? In this case, user canrecord personal response to the city that is evaluated by
the heart rate data with GPS information. This isinteresting dataset since we may be able to grasp how
people react to the town based on this visualization. In
addition, it may be more interesting if we could estimate
one’s interest based on heart rate information and taken
photos with GPS data if one conducted city wander.
Some software enables to visualize spatial information oftaken pictures onto the map. This is good datavisualization method to understand what is the overall
atmosphere of the city based on personal photos. Onemay consider that Google Street View can also provide
similar experience concept, however, the information is
too massive and general to grasp the atmosphere of thecity in terms of one’s viewpoint. It would be easier forusers to personally taken photos rather than machine inorder to provide sensual experience to humans, leading to
the feeling as if one had visited there.
In the following section, we report our preliminary studyof the relationship between one’s heart rate and taken
photos during city wander in a town, to test a hypothesisthat one’s heart rate increase may associate withpreferred features of the town that one walks.

Experiment
In order to test our hypothesis that one’s heart ratewould rise when he/she sees something he/she is

SESSION: POSTERS

interested in, we conducted feasibility study with four
participants.
Participants (three females and one male) did 30minutes or longer walking in one of several designatedareas in Tokyo with our prototype, the application ofiPhone 5s which would record the GPS data andpictures the participant took during the walk, and theApple Watch on the participant’s wrist, which would
record one’s heart rate during the walking. The
participants were asked to take pictures when they saw
anything they wanted to have. The heart rate sensor of
the Apple Watch would take the heart rate value at themoment when the participant took a picture, and it also
recorded the heart rate once every minute. After thewalking, participants were asked several questions suchas “Which pictures you took are you interested in orindifferent?”, “Is the data result synchronized with yourfeeling?”, and “Is there anything impressive during
your walking?”

Figure 2. The route of experiment
A2. The positions of pictures taken are
also shown. The number indicates theheart rate (average beats per minute)obtained from the Apple Watch.

With the quantitative data such as heart rate and GPS
data and the qualitative data obtained by thequestionnaire, we conducted an analysis of the data. Allpictures taken were tagged with GPS information using
the built-in function in iOS and the value of the heartrate at the moment when participants took a picture.
Based on a subjective, two-alternative choice of thepicture (interesting or indifferent), pictures were also
tagged with the participants’ preference. The dataset ofeach participant was analyzed using an unpaired twosample t-test.
With regard to the locations for doing the experiment,
we chose Asakusa and Akihabara areas. These areas
were chosen not only due to the abundant attractive
content in these two areas, but also for that their flat
terrains, which help to avoid the influence of climbing
and descending slopes or hills on the data.

143Result
In this feasibility experiment, 185 pictures and heart
rate values during the walking. We numbered theexperiments as A1~D. A1 was done by the same
participant as A2 in different areas (A1 took place inAsakusa area, A2 took place in Akihabara area) andB~D were the result of three different participants inthe same area (Akihabara area).

Table 1: The relationship between number of pictures taken
while waling in the city and participants’ interest. Participant
A2 started from Akihabara station, and the heart rate
fluctuated during the walking. Please note that heart rate was
not always in ascending fashion, implying that the walking
itself was not the only reason for heart rate variations. Smallpictures also show the photos the participant took during thewalk. See Figure 2 for a representative result of Participant A2.

To visualize the trend of the heart rate data, Figure 3
shows the variations of the heart rate of Participant A2.
When Participant A2 found a theater and a café, theheart rate increased. On the other hand, the heart rate
dropped when A2 found a store, which A2 mentioned
later was not of interest. Other than these tagged
points I picked up in experiment A2, most of the otherpoints in all the experiments also show acorrespondence of the participants’ personal interests.
This trend suggests that the increase in the heart rate
may be associated with the participants’ interest.
Quantitative data and its statistical analysis showedthat our hypothesis was supported by the data. Table 1
summarizes the number of pictures that participants
took during this feasibility study. It shows thatparticipants tended to take more pictures when they
were interested. To correlate with these behavioral

UBICOMP/ISWC ’16 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2016, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY

responses (taking pictures) with the heart rate data ofparticipants, we calculated averaged heart rates foreach participant when they were interested in or
indifferent to the pictured scene (Figure 4). Using
unpaired t-test, we found that there was a significant
difference in averaged heart rate between moments
where they took interesting and indifferent pictures infour out of five trial. In addition, statistical analysis withrepeated one-way ANOVA showed that there is asignificant difference in averaged heart rate between
interesting and indifferent pictures that participants
subjectively reported, suggesting that heart rate is agood indicator of personal preferences.
Figure 3. The heart rate graph ofexperiment A2, showing heart ratechanges during the walk.

User feedback also told us that our study is attractive
enough during the walking. In the subjective
questionnaire feedback, participants told us that “It is
happy to see my emotion on the heart rate graph”,“The graph matches to my feelings during the walking”
and other comments that expressed that it wasinteresting to walk with wearable device because itvisualized the physiological response of the participant
during the walk in the city.

and GPS in iPhone, and the heart rate sensor in Apple
Watch, for collecting location and geographical (howsteep the slope is) data and physiological responses of
the user to walking in the city. We also would like tolaunch a web-based service, which may achievecustomized routing for holiday walking.
In the future, our proposed concept can be used for
personal training or rehabilitation by walking in the city.
Recent map services such as Google maps also provide
altitude information [5], so future device could also
judge how much exercise is done during the walk. If
our proposed service were connected with fitness
services such as Fitbit [6] or UP by Joebone [7], it
could be another interesting web service for suggestinga recommended route that is beneficial both forphysical exercise and for one’s personal interests.

References
1.

UrbanGems: Crowdsourcing Quiet, Beauty andHappiness. Retrieved January 13, 2016 fromhttp://urbangems.org/

2.

Hiroshima CAT STREET VIEW. 2015. Retrieved
January 13, 2016 from http://hiroshimawelcome.jp/kanpai/catstreetview

3.

Street Museum. 2015. Retrieved January 13, 2016
from http://www.toppan.co.jp/news/2015/10/20151005.html.

4.

“GPS Entertainment for Luxembourg” Demo – GPSBased Mobile RPG Game. Retrieved January 13,
2016 from https://www.countdownx.com/en/project/X0969224

5.

The Google Maps Elevation API. 2016. Retrieved
January 13, 2016 fromhttps://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/intro

6.

Fitbit. 2016. Retrieved January 13, 2016 fromhttps://www.fitbit.com/

7.

UP. 2016. Retrieved January 13, 2016 fromhttps://jawbone.com/Discussion and Future Work

Figure 4. The average heart rate ofInterested Pictures and Indifferent
Pictures in all 5 experiments. Whenthe participants saw something
he/she is curious about, the heart
rate is greater than the heart rateduring normal walking.

In this study, we have proposed a novel holiday
walking system and have tested the feasibility of theconcept. Data from our user study supported thehypothesis that one’s heart rate rises when one sees
something one is curious about. Using our proposed
city walking, people could enjoy a more personal
service that suggests unfamiliar spots that the personmay like, and help the user to realize a new attractive
aspect of the city based on one’s own interest.
To have a deeper study in the future, we are currently
designing and developing the device to collect moreaccurate quantitative data in a more sophisticated way.
Since the application on iPhone and the heart ratemeasuring system were not fully integrated during thefeasibility study, we plan to implement greater
integration between the 9-axis inertial motion sensors

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