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Key research themes
1. How can mobile tourist guides optimize user experience through personalization, adaptation, and contextual awareness?
This research theme examines how mobile tourist guides leverage personalization techniques, adaptive functionalities, and context awareness to enhance the usability and relevance of tourist information. It explores mechanisms that tailor guide content and interface to individual preferences, situational context (e.g., location, device capabilities), and cognitive load, thereby promoting user engagement and decision support.
Key finding: The authors developed a multi-sensory mobile city guide prototype based on the triad of tourist experiences (education, entertainment, excitement) and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, using open source technologies on Android.... Read more
Key finding: This work systematically conceptualizes adaptive mobile guides with a taxonomy of resource-adapted, resource-adaptive, and resource-adapting systems that adjust to technical and cognitive resource limitations in real time. It... Read more
Key finding: The paper presents a map-integrated conversational recommender system for mobile travelers that combines long-term and session-specific user preferences. It introduces a composite query representation blending logical... Read more
Key finding: By empirically investigating user intention, it was found that mobile design quality (e.g., screen design, terminology, consistency) positively influences user perception of innovation characteristics (relative advantage,... Read more
Key finding: This study validates a theoretical model where mobile design quality directly impacts both innovation characteristics and intention to use, while innovation characteristics directly influence intention to use. The findings... Read more
2. What technologies and architectures support effective real-time, location-based, and context-sensitive tourist mobile guides?
This theme investigates the technological solutions, system architectures, and data integration methods enabling mobile tourist guides to deliver accurate, context-aware, and timely information across both indoor and outdoor cultural environments. It includes exploration of positioning modalities, open source mobile GIS implementations, augmented reality integration, and system frameworks facilitating scalability and usability despite mobile device resource constraints.
Key finding: Provides a comprehensive overview of existing map-based mobile guide systems highlighting context-awareness as a central feature. The paper enumerates challenges related to positioning technologies (GPS, indoor localization),... Read more
Key finding: This work details the design of a mobile GIS system based on open source technologies integrating client-server architecture, Java-based map servers, and positioning via GPS and RFID. It discusses overcoming mobile hardware... Read more
Key finding: Introduces LIFEPLUS, an augmented reality system designed to offer continuous, context-aware guided tours by enhancing real-world views of archaeological sites with synchronized audiovisual content. The paper details system... Read more
Key finding: Presents a mobile application integrating multi-source data (internet weather data, smartwatch health monitoring, on-site tourist input) into a unified platform to provide timely weather warnings and health recommendations... Read more
3. How do mobile tourist guides influence tourist behavior, destination promotion, and user engagement during the travel experience?
This theme addresses the socio-behavioral impact of mobile tourist guides on tourists' decision-making, travel patterns, safety, destination image, and engagement. It examines how mobile technology reshapes traditional tourism information-seeking, supports accessible tourism for disabled users, influences emotional states, and promotes local tourism. The theme also assesses the effects of mobile guide usage as substitutes or supplements to conventional sources and explores implications for tourism marketing and sustainability.
Key finding: Highlights the significant potential of mobile apps to enhance accessible tourism by tailoring information delivery to users with disabilities. The paper identifies technological challenges (e.g., communication barriers,... Read more
Key finding: Empirical study showing that smartphones significantly alter tourist behaviors and emotional states by facilitating information gathering, social sharing, and experiential engagement across pre-consumption, consumption, and... Read more
Key finding: Using an ethnographic study of visitors in Philadelphia, the paper discovers that some tourists replace traditional information sources (e.g., printed maps, guidebooks) with mobile device navigation and guide functionalities.... Read more
Key finding: Investigates the tension between technological affordances and cost constraints in mobile tourist guide usage. It assembles a prototype emphasizing offline operation to mitigate high roaming charges, providing rich... Read more
Key finding: This comprehensive evaluation of commercial and research mobile tourist guides identifies key design principles including context-adaptive features, multi-modal interaction, indoor/outdoor positioning integration,... Read more