Conducting In Situ Evaluations for and With Ubiquitous Computing Technologies

Abstract

To evaluate ubiquitous computing technologies, which may be embedded in the environment, embedded in objects, worn, or carried by the user throughout everyday life, it is essential to use methods that accommodate the often unpredictable, real-world environments in which the technologies are used. This article discusses how we have adapted and applied traditional methods from psychology and human-computer interaction, such as Wizard of Oz and Experience Sampling, to be more amenable to the in situ evaluations of ubiquitous computing applications, particularly in the early stages of design. The way that ubiquitous computing technologies can facilitate the in situ collection of self-report data is also discussed. Although the focus is on ubiquitous computing applications and tools for their assessment, it is believed that the in situ evaluation tools that are proposed will be generally useful for field trials of other technology, applications, or formative studies that are concerned with collecting data in situ.     

Hidden Issues in Deploying an Indoor Location System

Installing indoor location system prototypes yields practical lessons about how to design and deploy future ubiquitous technologies. The design of context-aware technologies has been on many research team agendas since Mark Weiser first described his ubiquitous computing vision. Determining the location of people and objects in indoor environments with a high degree of accuracy is a main technical obstacle to achieving this vision.     

Better Living Through Geometry

Mark Weiser described ubiquitous computing as “invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere”[1]. The EasyLiving project is concerned with development of an architecture and technologies for ubiquitous computing environments that allow the dynamic aggregation of diverse I/O devices into a single coherent user experience. Though the need for research in distributed computing, perception and interfaces is widely recognised, the importance of an explicit geometric world model for enhancing the user’s experience of a ubiquitous computing system has not been well-articulated. This paper describes three scenarios that benefit from geometric context and introduces the EasyLiving Geometric Model.     

Exploring the grid's potential for ubiquitous computing

In contrast to many scientific disciplines embracing the vision of a uniform global distributed infrastructure to support their activities, ubiquitous computing is currently characterized by an extremely diverse set of infrastructure platforms. Such heterogeneity makes conducting large-scale wide-area experiments extremely difficult - most researchers choose instead to construct their own ubiquitous computing environment within which they can run their experiments. This heterogeneity makes the basic vision of ubiquitous computing difficult to realize because interworking between components at different sites isn't possible. One suggestion is that grid technologies will make an ideal starting point for developing future infrastructure support for ubiquitous computing, facilitating the deployment of ubiquitous computing technologies.     

Exploring context-awareness for ubiquitous computing in the healthcare domain

Ubiquitous technologies have potentials to play major roles in different real world organizational settings. One of the areas where applying ubiquitous technologies has been given a lot of attention is in the healthcare domain. Here, users are frequently on the move while at the same time relying increasingly on centralized computerized information. In this paper, we explore ubiquitous technologies in the real world through two studies in the healthcare domain. First, we look at the use and usability of a ubiquitous electronic patient record (EPR) system distributed on desktop and laptop computers throughout a large hospital. Secondly, we present an extension to this ubiquitous computing environment in the form of a context-aware mobile computer terminal prototype. The usability of the mobile EPR prototype was evaluated in both laboratory and field settings. Our results indicate that the usefulness of a ubiquitous computing environment supporting work activities in healthcare can benefit from context-aware mobile information access. However, interaction design for such systems must be carefully thought out and thoroughly evaluated. Also, while the use of mobile and stationary computers complement each other very well, we found that the usefulness of ubiquitous computing environments in healthcare may benefit from additional elements such as situated displays at key locations and on key objects, and from seamless integration between the different devices comprising the system as a whole.     

Smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing

Applications and services for pervasive computing have been dramatically grown and have contributed extensively to our daily experiences in recent years. Smart systems, devices, and spaces are proactive for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Smart information technology (IT) is also an outcome of the state of the art and novel mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies that include highly capable handheld device, pervasive and personal device, etc. This special issue will be a trigger for further related research and technology improvements in pervasive and ubiquitous computing using smart devices and services. This special issue called for original papers describing the latest developments, trends, and solutions of smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing including real-time operating systems (OS), tiny OS and middleware supports, mobile system performance, trustworthy Internet and communications, agents and mobile and pervasive services, among others. In particular, this special issue focuses on a remote control and media-sharing system, flash storage-based smart system, heterogeneous mobile OS, and prediction and auto-execution system for pervasive computing.     

Moset: An anonymous remote mobile cluster computing paradigm

The advance of technology in terms of cellular communications and the increasing computing power of the mobile systems have made it convenient for people to use more of mobile systems rather than static systems. This has seen more of mobile devices in personal and distributed computing, thus making the computing power ubiquitous. The combination of wireless communication and cluster computing in many applications has led to the integration of these two technologies to emerge as Mobile Cluster Computing (MCC) paradigm. This has made parallel computing feasible on mobile clusters, by making use of the idle processing power of the static and mobile nodes that form the cluster. To realize such a system for parallel computing, various issues such as connectivity, architecture and operating system heterogeneities, timeliness issues, load fluctuations on machines, machine availability variations and failures in workstations and network connectivities need to be handled. Moset, an Anonymous Remote Mobile Cluster Computing (ARMCC) paradigm is being proposed to handle these issues. Moset provides transparency to mobility of nodes, distribution of computing resources and heterogeneity of wired and wireless networks. The model has been verified and validated by implementing a distributed image-rendering algorithm over a simulated mobile cluster model.     

集成RFID的智能建筑系统研究

RFID技术是近年来业界关注的热点,被认为是21世纪最重要的技术之一。本文结合普适计算环境发展的趋势,提出了集成RFID的智能建筑系统原型和模块设计,并对RFID在智能建筑系统中的安全及隐私性设计进行了详细论述。     

The Mobile-Stationary Divide in Ubiquitous Computing Environments: Lessons from the Transport Industry

The emergence of ubiquitous computing offers new possibilities and opportunities for organizations attempting to improve their productivity and effectiveness. in particular, the promises of ubiquitous computing are attractive to organizations such as transport firms, in which coordination of diverse sets of mobile units is central to organizational performance. This article analyzes the use of ubiquitous transport systems in Swedish road haulage firms and discusses the opportunities and challenges for the early adopters. It pays specific attention to the mobile-stationary divide; that is, the set of challenges associated with integration of mobile and stationary people and systems into a seamless computing environment.     

Taxonomy of ubiquitous computing service for city development

Due to advanced information and communication technologies, the paradigm of cities has been changing. This new paradigm is pursued in different concepts and methods depending upon countries; however, common characteristics are shown in terms of making high-tech cities through information and communication technologies. Under these circumstances, Korea’s ubiquitous city (u-city) construction project is receiving attention. An u-city began with the purpose of improving the life quality of city people by providing diverse ubiquitous computing service. However, diverse problems currently arise from operating costs, specialization of cities, and connection with industries in pursuing the project. To develop a u-city successfully, the problems of operating costs and their utilization should be connected with the functions inherent to cities. To solve these problems, this research has studied the u-city service classification system to develop it successfully by means of providing balanced city service through information communication technologies. The usefulness of this research is expected to be very high in terms of analyzing the development stages of a u-city and positioning the future u-city into perspective.     

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.     

Improving location awareness in indoor spaces using RFID technology

Location awareness is a key issue to improve the development of autonomous entities that are embedded into ubiquitous computing environments. GPS seems to be the best solution to develop outdoor location systems, but the performance of these systems is not good enough to locate objects or humans within indoor environments, mainly if accuracy and precision are required. In this article we propose the use of a cheap and reliable technology as RFID to develop a passive RFID-based indoor location system that is able to accurately locate autonomous entities, such as robots and people, within a defined surface. This system is applied to solve the robot tracking problem. We include the evaluation of the proposal by comparing our system technology performance with other alternatives built on different technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IrDA, ultrasound, etc.). We have also performed a location awareness proof concept test to analyze the viability of the approach.     

Consistent Modelling of Users, Devices and Sensors in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment

This paper describes the use of an accretion-resolution user modelling representation to model people, places and objects. We explain the motivation for the key properties of the representation, especially those of particular importance for ubiquitous computing: firstly, for flexibility in interpreting the typically noisy and potentially conflicting evidence about users’ locations; secondly, to support users in scrutinising their user model, the processes that determine its contents and the way that it is used in the ubiquitous computing environment. A novel and important aspect of this work is our extension of the representation beyond modelling just users, using it also to represent the other elements such as devices, sensors, rooms and buildings. We illustrate our approach in terms of models we have been building for a system which enables users to gain personalised information about the sensors and services in a ubiquitous computing environment. We report experiments on the scalability and the management of inconsistency in modelling of location, based on accretion-resolution     

Brain-Computer Interfacing for Intelligent Systems

Advances in cognitive neurosci- ence and brain-imaging technologies give us the unprecedented ability to interface directly with brain activity. These technologies let us monitor the physical processes in the brain that correspond with certain forms of thought. Driven by society's growing recognition of the needs of people with physical disabilities, researchers have begun using these technologies to build brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)communication systems that don't depend on the brain's normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles. In BCIs, users explicitly manipulate their brain activity instead of motor movements to produce signals that control computers or communication devices. This research has extremely high impact, especially for disabled individuals who can't otherwise physically communicate.     

Ubiquitous computing in the real world: lessons learnt from large scale RFID deployments

Ubiquitous computing technologies are slowly finding their way into commercial information systems, which are often constructed at considerably larger scale compared to what is possible in research demonstrators. Furthermore, lengthy and costly preparation or upgrade of existing infrastructures, training of employees and users in the new ways of working, controlled introduction of new functionality, features and services to manage risk, unexpected behaviors due to the wider variety of possible real-world situations, incremental approach to systems development so as to better identify successful aspects, regard for the economics of systems as a core requirement, and selection of open or closed systems are all issues that are mostly outside the scope of current ubiquitous computing research but play a critical role in industrial deployments. In this paper we review two case studies of fully operational Radio Frequency Identification-based systems: the Oyster card ticketing system used at the London Underground in the UK, and retail applications deployed at the Mitsukoshi departmental stores in Tokyo, Japan. We examine each case in terms of technologies, user interactions, and their business and organizational context and make several observations in each case. We conclude by drawing general lessons related to ubiquitous computing in the real world and identify challenges for future ubiquitous computing research.     

普适计算及其定位感知系统

普适计算的目的是为了使计算机更好地为人类服务，提高人们的生活质量。普适计算中的定位感知系统是普适计算研究中的核心部分之一，如何确定室内用户的动态位置信息，如何主动向用户提供各种所需的信息，这些都是其研究话题。给出了一种自行设计的普适计算室内定位感知系统的最小功能模型。     

Ontology-Based User Modeling in an Augmented Audio Reality System for Museums

Ubiquitous computing is a challenging area that allows us to further our understanding and techniques of context-aware and adaptive systems. Among the challenges is the general problem of capturing the larger context in interaction from the perspective of user modeling and human–computer interaction (HCI). The imperative to address this issue is great considering the emergence of ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. This paper provides an account of our addressing the specific problem of supporting functionality as well as the experience design issues related to museum visits through user modeling in combination with an audio augmented reality and tangible user interface system. This paper details our deployment and evaluation of ec(h)o – an augmented audio reality system for museums. We explore the possibility of supporting a context-aware adaptive system by linking environment, interaction objects and users at an abstract semantic level instead of at the content level. From the user modeling perspective ec(h)o is a knowledge-based recommender system. In this paper we present our findings from user testing and how our approach works well with an audio and tangible user interface within a ubiquitous computing system. We conclude by showing where further research is needed.     

基于普适计算的学习框架的研究

普适计算（ Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing ）是继主机计算、桌面计算之后发展起来的一种新的计算模式,但它在教育和学习领域还涉足甚微。随着技术的不断进步和学习科学理论的发展,普适计算与教学环境相结合是不可抵挡的趋势。普适学习环境就是将普适计算应用到人类的学习环境中,使其实现无处不在的学习这一特点。文章在总结普适计算及普适学习环境相关概念的基础上,通过研究分析一个比较成熟的普适学习环境的个案,提出了实现这一环境的框架模型及相关技术。     

Physical prototyping with Smart-Its

Exploring novel ubiquitous computing systems and applications inevitably requires prototyping physical components. Smart-Its are hardware and software components that augment physical objects with embedded processing and interaction to address this need. Our work, which uses small computing devices called Smart-Its, addresses the need to create embedded interactive systems that disappear from the foreground to become secondary to the physical objects with which people interact during everyday activities. Such systems create new design challenges related to prototyping with embedded technologies and require careful consideration of the physical design context.