About IPfad

IPfad (‘Pfad’ means ‘path’ in German)  is created specifically for the real-time recording of wayfinding behaviors in buildings and outdoor environments.

Its aimed at Researchers, Architects, Psychologists, Pervasive computing specialists and those interested in recording peoples wayfinding behaviours in buildings.

The primary features of the iPfad

 These consist of the ‘home page’ (where new participant records are entered and where the experiment-recording phase is initialized) and the ‘Map’ page (for behavior recording/encoding).

The Map page screen is further divided into two sections: the upper ‘map’ section and the lower ‘events’ section. The map section displays the current floor level (for a multi-level building) and is a ‘drawable’ part of the screen, allowing the experimenter to trace the path of a subject onto the screen as they observe their progress through an environment. (For GPS enabled iPads used in outdoor environments with good GPS coverage this path may be created automatically, however since this is not applicable to most interior settings, the hand-drawn trace option is available.) The coordinates of the participant’s location are recorded in real-time. The lower half of the screen consists of a series of buttons permitting actions to be logged. The buttons are classified as changes in floor level (at which point the displayed map will be updated accordingly), as path events (starting a new task, pausing, backtracking, arriving at a false destination, becoming lost or giving up the task), the use of external aids (signage, maps, external views to the outside or equivalent invariant views, asking for help) and other log/action events (saving a compass direction in a pointing task, recording the location of a significant remark, if simultaneously recording an audio transcript). Every time an event is logged a colored ‘dot’ on the traced-path is created: it is time-stamped and its location is noted in the log-file. The text-based log-files, annotated maps and any associated audio files are saved for subsequent retrieval.