Research Scientist - User Experience
NRC Tampere, Finland & Bangalore, India
Contact
Hello!
My name is Aino Ahtinen, I'm a member of User Experience team (Smart Spaces Laboratory), and a PhD student in Tampere University of Technology, department of Human-Centered Design. My hometown is Tampere, Finland, but currently I'm living in Bangalore, India.
I have been working on the area of usability, user experience and user-centered design for several years, and been involved in quite a few different research projects related to, for example, media consumption, personal displays, location-aware systems, social applications and privacy.
However, nothing that is related to work can interest me more than the domain of wellness applications. The working title of my Phd research is "the UI design of wellness applications", focusing on finding appropriate, human-centered solutions to support people in their own wellness related goals in their own contexts. What personally interests me most is how the technology can support in increasing physical activity level of people, in a long-term perspective. Not surprisingly, most of my current research activities relate somehow to wellness domain. As I am now staying in India, I have a good opportunity to explore my topic in a totally different context - most of the existing research related to wellness (not healthcare as such) have been conducted in the western world so far. In addition to Indian projects, In Finland I do user research in Nuadu-project, which is a cooperational project between several partners, such as Työterveyslaitos and VTT. It is a long-term pilot (one year) with middle-aged working persons and with several different types of wellness technologies included. Other minor research activities related to wellness are ongoing as well.
Back to Finland, most of my leisure time is dedicated to keeping up my own wellness level by riding my Icelandic horse Fálki. If there is still time left, I love running in the forest, trekking in all forms (by foot, bike and kayak for example) and snowboarding. Here in India I like to go to gym.
List of the publications:
Ahtinen, A. & Lehtiniemi, A. A Challenge of Designing Mobile Devices to Support Fitness and Wellness Activity. Ambience 2005.
Ahtinen, A., Lehtiniemi, A. & Häkkilä, J. User Perceptions on Interacting with Mobile Fitness Devices. Pervasive and Mobile Interaction Devices (PERMID) workshop in Pervasive 2007.
Ahtinen, A. Mattila, E., Koskinen, E. & Häkkilä J. Small Things Matter – The User Evaluation with Wellness Diary Application. Ubiwell workshop in Ubicomp 2007.
Ahtinen, A., Isomursu, M. Huhtala, Y., Kaasinen, J., Salminen, J. & Häkkilä, J. Tracking Outdoor Sports - Personal and Social Perspective. Submitted.
Ahtinen, A. Wellness Applications – UI Design to Support Long-Term Usage Motivation. Doctoral Consortium paper in CHI 2008. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2008.
Ahtinen, A. & Häkkilä, J. User Study – Motives and Barriers for the Heart-rate Monitor Use. Submitted to Pervasive Healthcare 2008 workshop in Pervasive 2008.
Ahtinen, A., Mäntyjärvi, J. & Häkkilä, J. Using Heart Rate Monitors for Personal Wellness – The User Experience Perspective. Submitted to EMBC 2008.
Ahtinen, A. & Anderson, M. Learnability and Automatic Clustering of Images in Mobile Devices. Mobile HCI 2004.
Ahtinen, A., Nurminen, J. K. & Häkkilä, J. Developing a Mobile Reporting System for Road Maintenance – User Research Perspective. Mobility 2008.
Hakala, T., Lehikoinen, J. Korhonen, H. & Ahtinen, A. Mobile Photo Browsing with Pipelines and Spatial Cues. Interact 2005.
Yang, Y., Ahtinen, A., Lähteenmäki, J., Nyman, P., Paajanen, H., Peltoniemi, T. & Quiroz, C. A Service Paltform Architecture Design towards a Light Integration of Heterogenous Systems in the Wellbeing Domain. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society 2007.
