Public Ubiquitous Computing Systems: Lessons from the e-Campus Display Deployments

In this paper, the authors reflect on their experiences of deploying ubiquitous computing systems in public spaces and present a series of lessons that they feel will be of benefit to researchers planning similar public deployments. They focus on experiences gained from building and deploying three experimental public display systems as part of the e-Campus project. However, they believe the lessons are likely to be generally applicable to many different types of public ubicomp deployment. This article is part of a special issue on Real-World Deployments.     

Design Challenges and Principles for Wizard of Oz Testing of Location-Enhanced Applications

Using Wizard of Oz techniques, designers can efficiently test location-enhanced application prototypes during the early stages of design, without building a full-fledged application or deploying a sensing infrastructure. Location-enhanced applications adapt their behavior to or provide information about the location of people, places, and things. Such location-enhanced applications are the most widely adopted type of ubicomp application; analysts predict that their use will grow tremendously in the near future.     

Ubicomp challenges in collaborative scheduling: Pin&;Play at the Göteborg film festival

Ubicomp technology faces many technical challenges, which makes it difficult to test in real world situations. However, understanding and building for everyday practices is crucial for ubicomp designers, in order to push the technological development in the directions needed. We have developed and tested a ubiquitous computing prototype supporting collaborative scheduling. It is based on Pin&Play, a surface-based networking technology with interactive pushpins. The team of a local film festival was engaged in the development process, which resulted in a partial implementation illustrating how their current work practice could be supported. Drawing on this particular design case, we report findings and discuss challenges for ubicomp technology in general.     

Ubiquitous Computing aus betriebswirtschaftlicher Sicht

This paper identifies and analyses potential business benefits of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). Its aim is to challenge whether the growing visibility of topics such as ubiquitous or pervasive computing, automatic identification (Auto-ID) and radio frequency identification (RFID) can be justified from a business perspective. To do so it analyses the business contribution of existing ubicomp applications, reconstructs their development phases, introduces the business relevant base-functionalities and discusses implications on the design of products, processes and services using ubicomp applications. The creation of an alternative and rather cost efficient machine-machine-relation between already established information systems and the real world things they try to manage has been identified as the main source of business benefit. However, before businesses can systematically leverage all potential benefits, some technical and political questions, such as creating robust solutions and solving privacy issues, have to be answered.     

Support for situation awareness in trustworthy ubiquitous computing application software

Due to the dynamic and ephemeral nature of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) environments, it is especially important that the application software in ubicomp environments is trustworthy. In order to have trustworthy application software in ubicomp environments, situation‐awareness (SAW) in the application software is needed to enforce flexible security policies and detect violations of security policies. In this paper, an approach is presented to provide development and runtime support to incorporate SAW in trustworthy ubicomp application software. The development support is to provide SAW requirement specification and automated code generation to achieve SAW in trustworthy ubicomp application software, and the runtime support is for context acquisition, situation analysis and situation‐aware communication. To realize our approach, the improved Reconfigurable Context‐Sensitive Middleware (RCSM) is developed to provide the above development and runtime support. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Architecture for Interactive Context-Aware Applications

The interactive behavior of context-aware applications depends on the physical and logical context in which the interaction occurs. The main difference between traditional HCI design and context-aware design is how we deal with context. In this article, we pick up on recent ubicomp community trends, drawing from sociology and focusing on interaction's communicative aspects. So, starting from the premise that interaction is communication, we propose a new interaction model for context-aware applications. We then derive an architectural framework that developers can use to implement our interaction model. The main benefit of our architecture is that, by modeling context in the user interface, developers can represent the application's inferences visually for users     

A behavioral reflective architecture for managing the integration of personal ubicomp systems: automatic SNMP-based discovery and management of behavior context in smart-spaces

Context-aware ubiquitous computing systems should be able to introspect the surrounding environment and adapt their behavior according to other existing systems and context changes. Although numerous ubiquitous computing systems have been developed that are aware of different types of context such as location, social situation, and available computational resources, few are aware of their computational behavior. Computational behavior introspection is common in reflective systems and can be used to improve the awareness and autonomy of ubicomp systems. In this paper, we propose a decentralized approach based on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), and on state transition models to model and expose computational behavior. Typically, SNMP and UPnP are targeted to retrieve raw operational variables from managed network devices and consumer electronic devices, e.g., checking network interface bandwidth and automating device discovery and plug and play operations. We extend the use of these protocols by exposing the state of different ubicomp systems and associated state transitions statistics. This computational behavior may be collected locally or remotely from ubicomp systems that share a physical environment, and sent to a coordinator node or simply shared among ubicomp systems. We describe the implementation of this behavior awareness approach in a home health-care environment equipped with a VoIP Phone and a drug dispenser. We provide the means for exposing and using the behavior context in managing a simple home health-care setting. Our approach relies on a system state specification being provided by manufacturers. In the case where the specification is not provided, we show how it can be automatically discovered. We propose two machine learning approaches for automatic behavior discovery and evaluate them by determining the expected state graphs of our two systems (a VoIP Phone and a drug dispenser). These two approaches are also evaluated regarding the effectiveness of generated behavior graphs.     

Designing for ubiquity: the perception of privacy

Ubicomp researchers have long argued that privacy is a design issue, and it goes without saying that successful design requires that we understand the desires, concerns, and awareness of the technology's users. Yet, because ubicomp systems are relatively unusual, too little empirical research exists to inform designers about potential users. Complicating design further is the fact that ubicomp systems are typically embedded or invisible, making it difficult for users to know when invisible devices are present and functioning. As early as 1993, ubicomp researchers recognized that embedded technology's unobtrusiveness both belies and contributes to its potential for supporting potentially invasive applications. Not surprisingly, users' inability to see a technology makes it difficult for them to understand how it might affect their privacy. Unobtrusiveness, nevertheless, is a reasonable goal because such systems must minimize the demands on users. To investigate these issues further, I conducted an ethnographic study of what I believe is the first US eldercare facility to use a sensor-rich environment. Our subjects were normal civilians (rather than ubicomp researchers) who lived or worked in a ubiquitous computing environment. We interviewed residents, their family members, and the facility's caregivers and managers. Our questions focused on how people understood both the ubiquitous technology and its effect on their privacy. Although the embedded technology played a central role in how people viewed the environment, they had a limited understanding of the technology, thus raising several privacy, design, and safety issues.     

Understanding privacy regulation in ubicomp interactions

Ubiquitous computing contains a huge promise for more intelligent services that are available anywhere and are able to dynamically adapt to the users’ current context. However, what necessarily follows such an environment is the compromising of the users’ privacy. We aim at analyzing this complex issue by applying and extending Altman’s theoretical privacy framework, well known in social sciences, to privacy in ubicomp. Altman understands privacy as a two-way interactive process, which makes the approach promising in analyzing ubicomp where people, devices and the environment interact with each other. We point out similarities between the existing model and the features of ubicomp environment, and verify the results by applying and analyzing the resulting extended framework to typical ubicomp use cases. Based on the analysis, we argue that privacy in ubicomp can be modeled similarly to privacy in general by extending the model to cover such factors as mediation and non-human actors.

Prototyping and analysing ubiquitous computing environments using multiple layers

If ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is to enhance physical environments then early and accurate assessment of alternative solutions will be necessary to avoid costly deployment of systems that fail to meet requirements. This paper presents APEX, a prototyping framework that combines a 3D Application Server with a behaviour modeling tool. The contribution of this framework is that it allows exhaustive analysis of the behaviour models that drive the prototype while at the same time enabling immersive exploration of a virtual environment simulating the proposed system. The development of prototypes is supported through three layers: a simulation layer (using OpenSimulator); a modelling layer (using CPN Tools) and a physical layer (using external devices and real users). APEX allows movement between these layers to analyse different features, from user experience to user behaviour. The multi layer approach makes it possible to express user behaviour in the modelling layer, provides a way to reduce the number of real users needed by adding simulated avatars, and supports user testing of hybrids of virtual and real components as well as exhaustive analysis. This paper demonstrates the approach by means of an example, placing particular emphasis on the simulation of virtual environments, low cost prototyping and the formal analysis capabilities.     

Supporting parents for in-home capture of problem behaviors of children with developmental disabilities

Ubiquitous computing has shown promise in applications for health care in the home. In this paper, we focus on a study of how a particular ubicomp capability, selective archiving, can be used to support behavioral health research and practice. Selective archiving technology, which allows the capture of a window of data prior to and after an event, can enable parents of children with autism and related disabilities to record video clips of events leading up to and following an instance of problem behavior. Behavior analysts later view these video clips to perform a functional assessment. In contrast to the current practice of direct observation, a powerful method to gather data about child problem behaviors but costly in terms of human resources and liable to alter behavior in the subjects, selective archiving is cost effective and has the potential to provide rich data with minimal instructions to the natural environment. To assess the effectiveness of parent data collection through selective archiving in the home, we developed a research tool, CRAFT (Continuous Recording And Flagging Technology) and conducted a study by installing CRAFT in eight households of children with developmental disabilities and severe behavior concerns. The results of this study show the promise and remaining challenges for this technology. We have also shown that careful attention to the design of a ubicomp system for use by other domain specialists or non-technical users is key to moving ubicomp research forward.     

Integrating information appliances into an interactive workspace

The authors present a robust, infrastructure-centric, and platform-independent approach to integrating information appliances into the iRoom, an interactive workspace. The Interactive Workspaces Project at Stanford explores new possibilities for people to work together in technology-rich spaces with computing and interaction devices on many different scales. It includes faculty and students from the areas of graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), networking, ubiquitous computing, and databases, and draws on previous work in all those areas. We design and experiment with multidevice, multiuser environments based on a new architecture that makes it easy to create and add new display and input devices, to move work of all kinds from one computing device to another, and to support and facilitate group interactions. In the same way that today's standard operating systems make it feasible to write single-workstation software that uses multiple devices and networked resources, we are constructing a higher level operating system for the world of ubiquitous computing. We combine research on infrastructure (ways of flexibly configuring and connecting devices, processes, and communication links) with research on HCI (ways of interacting with heterogeneous changing collections of devices with multiple modalities)     

Designing dynamic English: a creative reading system in a context-aware fitness centre using a smart phone and QR codes

Abstract

This article describes the design and development of a context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) system for users to increase fitness-related reading comprehension in a fitness centre. With the use of mobile devices and sensing technologies, practitioners and researchers of ICT and ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) are paying attention to the planning and use of u-learning components to provide users more interactions with authentic learning objects in a real context. Meanwhile, English for specific purposes (ESP) with interaction design has been a focus in recent years; however, few ESP practitioners and researchers have explored fitness-related English with ubicomp. All of the users were satisfied with the use of the smart phones and scanning of QR codes on the machines in the fitness centre to develop their reading comprehension of fitness-related English. Finally, a learning design model for Fitness English reading with u-learning components was developed and elaborated from designers' perspectives.     

When design just isn’t enough: the unanticipated challenges of the real world for large collaborative displays

Large interactive displays for supporting workgroup collaboration comprise a growing area of ubiquitous computing research and many such systems have been designed and deployed in laboratory studies and research settings. Such displays face difficulties in real-world deployments, as they are often supplemental technologies as opposed to primary tools for work activities. In this work, we investigate the integration and uptake of the NASA MERBoards, shared interactive displays that were deployed to support science tasks in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. We examine the hurdles to adoption imposed specifically by the real-world circumstances of the deployment that were external to the design of the system, and explain how these concerns apply to the general deployment of shared ubicomp technologies in the real world.     

An Adaptive Middleware for Context-Sensitive Communications for Real-Time Applications in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Context-sensitivity is an important expected capability in applications in ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) environments. These applications need to use different contextual information from the user, host device, on board sensors, network, and the ambient environments to systematically adapt their actions. In addition, some context-sensitive applications may use specific contextual conditions to trigger impromptu and possibly short-lived interactions with applications in other devices. This property, referred to as context-sensitive or context-aware communications, allows applications to form short-range mobile ad hoc networks consisting of mobile and stationary devices, sensors, and other computing resources. Real-time applications, especially those having reactive behavior, running on embedded devices and requiring context-sensitive communications support, pose new challenges related to systematic representation of specific contexts, associations of contexts with real-time actions, timely context data collection and propagation, and transparent context-sensitive connection establishment. An object-based middleware can be effective to meet these challenges if such a middleware can provide a well-defined development framework as well as lightweight runtime services. In this paper, an adaptive and object-based middleware, called reconfigurable context-sensitive middleware (RCSM) is presented to facilitate context-sensitive communications in ubicomp environments. To facilitates context-sensitive communications, RCSM provides a context-aware interface definition language for specifying context-sensitive interfaces of real-time objects, an object container framework for generating interfaces-specific context-analyzers, and a context-sensitive object request broker for context-sensitive object discovery and impromptu connection management. RCSM is adaptive in the sense that depending on the context-sensitive behavior of the applications, it adapts its object discovery and connection management mechanisms.     

Rapid prototyping and user-centered design of interactive display-based systems

Much work on display-based ubicomp systems (and rapid prototyping in general) focus on producing proof-of-concept demonstrators, usually to gauge technical feasibility and collect initial user feedback. In our work, we've found that it's often equally important to investigate factors such as use and appropriation and that in some cases, without user studies, technical feasibility can be meaningless. We used rapid prototyping combined with a phased, iterative, and user-centered design approach to develop five display-based ubicomp systems for real-world use over time. In this article, we discuss our aims, approach, and lessons learned. The ubicomp systems that we developed and deployed use rapid prototyping techniques and a user-centered design approach.     

Agency Effects in Human–Computer Interaction

The studies presented in this article explore a human-centered conceptualization of agents and agency based on the observation that people attribute agency to sufficiently complex interactive systems. Although agency attribution appears to be an unconscious human response, findings from social psychology, affective computing, and perceptual-motor studies suggest agency attribution influences human–computer interaction (HCI). Three studies are presented that examine whether recent findings on agency attribution in physical environments also apply in the virtual environments characteristic of HCI. Results of the studies indicate that agency effects operate in desktop computing environments. Agency effects, however, appear to be influenced by learning effects that preserve a previously observed relationship between perception and action but alter how this effect is expressed. Results suggest that there are both bottom-up and top-down contributions to agency effects in HCI.     

Community computing as human - computer interaction

There is too little engagement between community computing and human - computer interaction. In the future there should be more. Better integrating community computing and human - computer interaction can help to make HCI richer and more comprehensive, conceptually and methodologically. It can help HCI to have more of an impact on society and on everyday collective life. Six examples are briefly discussed.     

Prototypes and paratypes: designing mobile and ubiquitous computing applications

Conducting user-centered design is a primary challenge in ubiquitous computing. Two kinds of prototyping techniques can be particularly effective for developing mobile and ubiquitous computing applications: compound prototypes and situated experience prototypes. Compound prototypes combine the final product's user interface (UI) with a computational implementation that runs on a separate system without the resource constraints of the target device. This model lets researchers and designers evaluate a new application's physicality and aesthetics as well as its functionality. Situated experience prototypes, or paratypes, include experimental protocols that attempt to reproduce user interaction with the system in real situations, and can optionally use common prototyping instruments such as paper mock-ups or physical props. Using our Personal Audio Loop (PAL) project as a case study, we discuss how you can fruitfully employ compound prototypes and paratypes when designing and developing mobile and ubiquitous computing applications.     

Design and evaluation of virtual home objects with music interaction in smart homes

Well-designed virtual home objects and human-computer interactions (HCIs) can provide convenient ways to easily make use of home services for home inhabitants in smart homes. This work tries to design the virtual home objects with the ability of playing the music and implement a particular HCI interface accomplishing the music interaction with virtual home objects for deploying virtual home music services in smart homes. Each virtual home object is connected to a list of songs. When a home inhabitant holds a virtual home object and moves it as operating gestures upon the implemented HCI interface, the virtual home music service will be activated and the smart home will automatically play the favorite songs for its inhabitant. In this way, a highly interactive home music service for home inhabitants can be realized through the convenient operating interactions between the virtual home objects and the implemented HCI interface in smart homes.