Authors: Deepak P, Anuradha Bhamidipaty, Swati Chall
Comments: Aaron
Summary:
This paper deals with an enhancement for mobile phone design to be more cost-conscious for users. Lower income areas like India and China have found it difficult to purchase mobile phones because of how expensive they can be. Those who do own mobile phones sparsely use them so that they can manage the cost and achieve "cheap-usage". This paper focuses on different techniques that will make the phone assist the user to be cost-conscious so that they can stay within their budget. Usage history logs are a sequence of entries ordered in time that have type, duration, time of activity, and category of recipient. In order to find patterns they used an algorithm described below.
They also made a suggestion generator that would let the user know that they were making over the recommended number of calls in order to stay within their budget. In order to test out both generators they took logs from four people from the lower-income group and some logs from the high-income groups. There were strong call patterns for those in lower-income groups because they are trying to save money.Discussion:
This paper was interesting because it was exploring a topic that hasn't really been looked into before. In order to make a persons cell phone bill within their budget it is usually up to them to keep track of how many minutes they have used and how much everything they do on their phone costs. Many phone companies have websites that tell you all of this information, but no one has really thought about making your phone help you stay within your budget. I think this kind of application would be useful for people who can't really afford cell phones but really need one to help keep in contact with people. This may also help younger adults learn how to budget their money and still have a cell phone to call their friends with.
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