I hereby give my permission for this project to be shown to other University of Glasgow students and to be distributed in an electronic format. Mark McGill (SE5M) ii Currently there exist a number of attempts to leverage technology in a bid to aid exercise motivation and performance. However these solutions often solve little, and rarely go beyond the status of a novelty to most, and those that do tend to be geared towards semi-professional athletes. Given the progression of society toward a more sedentary lifestyle, where entertainment can be found in the arms of a computer or games console, there exists a challenge to sufficiently engage and motivate a new generation to improve their fitness/health, and stave off obesity. This dissertation addresses techniques to motivate runners, both to perform a run and perform during a run, through technological means with which a new generation is intimately familiar with: mobile phones (enacting a competitive challenge during a run) and social networking (allowing users to motivate, and gain motivation from, their own social cabals).iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Stephen Brewster for his initial proposal of a running project, and his guidance and allowance for the project to move off in various disparate directions. Thanks go also to those developers whose work and aid enabled the rapid development of this project, in particular those inside the department (Andrew Ramsay and John Williamson), those that have contributed to the PyS60 development community (in particular Nick Burch, Nikhil Vajramushti, Tero Hasu, and Fredrik Lundh), those that have contributed to the Ruby on Rails community (through a variety of useful Gems), and those that have contributed to the Freesound[2] project, to which this work is indebted. Thanks also go to my fellow Masters students (particularly Usman and Steve) who have helped through the dark days of research readings, and friends (Jim, Yaser, Paul, James, David, and Mark) and family for support and the occasional stint of running! Contents

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Abstract. The ability to move is an important characteristic of the human condition and an important aspect for interactive settings. The role of body movement however was not addressed with priority in human computer interaction until now. In this paper we explore the possibilities and issues for usability and user experience research utilizing body motion data. We provide an overview of relevant related work and report the setup and initial results of two studies utilizing body motion capture. We discuss the experiences made in using motion capture approaches for human computer interaction research and provide an outlook on future directions of research. 1

Personalized and context-aware music retrieval and recommendation algorithms ideally provide music that perfectly fits the individual listener in each imaginable situation and for each of her information or entertainment need. Although first steps towards such systems have recently been presented at ISMIR and similar venues, this vision is still far away from being a reality. In this paper, we investigate and discuss literature on the topic of user-centric music retrieval and reflect on why the breakthrough in this field has not been achieved yet. Given the different expertises of the authors, we shed light on why this topic is a particularly challenging one, taking a psychological and a computer science view. Whereas the psychological point of view is mainly concerned with proper experimental design,