Activity-Based Support for Mobility and Collaboration in Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract. For unknown reasons, research into ubiquitous computing seems to pay no attention to collaboration among users in such an environment. This paper presents the design philosophy of activity-based computing (abc) and a technical implementation of it in a ubiquitous computing infrastructure, the ABC framework, which takes collaboration in ubiquitous environments as its starting point. The idea of activity-based computing and the aim of the framework is to: (i) support the human activity by managing its collection of work tasks on a computer, (ii) to support mobility by porting activities across heterogeneous computing environments, (iii) to support asynchronous collaboration by allowing several people to participate in an activity, and (iv) to support synchronous, real-time collaboration by enabling ’desktop conferring ’ by sharing the activity across several clients. During a period of two years, our framework have been co-designed and evaluated in cooperation with a range of clinicians in a hospital.