Social Devices Client for Arduino

In the last few decades we have been witnessing great technology advancements regarding smart devices. At the same time we have accepted few social web services, such as Facebook or Twitter, to become a part of our everyday lives. Social Devices takes a step further regarding social services and proposes a new approach where people and devices would form together a new socio-digital system. In this system devices could participate proactively in social situations by enriching them somehow. According to the concept, the devices could, for instance, participate in a conversation or enable certain services that would encourage socialising. This thesis' research question is to find out if a modest embedded system, such as Arduino, is capable of functioning as a Social Device. For a device to function as a part Social Devices, it needs to have a client software that is tried to be implemented in this thesis. In addition, the Social Devices concept is introduced in the literature review part. In the literature review part we discussed about requirements and characteristics of Social Devices. Additionally, we presented two implementations, the Social Devices Platform and OrchestratorJS, and introduced their architecture and components. Furthermore, relating communication protocols and the target platform were presented. In the implementation part, we designed a client software that is compatible with the two implementations of the Social Devices. Additionally, general design paradigms and matters that influenced the design were introduced. Furthermore, the architecture and the components that the client consists of were presented as well. Finally, an example of Social Devices application that demonstrates the client was shown. We concluded that the implemented client functions as a proof of concept for Social Devices. The client fulfils the requirements as it is capable of registering itself to the server and communicating with it. In addition, the client is able to update its state values and informing RSSI values of nearby devices to the server. However, we acknowledged that there are specific circumstances where the client can not respond reliably. Performance-wise we stated that the client is fast enough for certain applications but can not meet the requirements of an application that needs real-time responsiveness

Emerging models for the development of social mobile applications: people as a service, and social devices. A proof of concept.

Nowadays mobile devices have gained a great importance in our society and they are present everywhere. These devices have a huge amount of data about their owners and context data of their surroundings, and many communication channels. Nevertheless with current models mobile devices cannot take advantage of this situation. For these reasons, new models for mobile applications have appeared recently. People-as-a-Service (PeaaS) allows interactions between mobile devices in their surroundings, using sociological profiles of their owners to create communication between interested devices. Social Devices is a recent model that implements the PeaaS concept, taking advantage the devices are almost always with the user it creates a new kind of interactions between nearby devices with the main target of improve social relations. For this purpose each device is able to provide services to nearby devices and consume them, keeping the user’s data in the device and sharing it only when it is authorized. This concept could be integrated with technologies like Internet-of-Things and Ubiquitous Computing, allowing devices to connect with nearby objects like elevators, traffic lights or your own vehicle. In particular, there is a new platform that implements both concepts, which is the study object of this work: OrchestratorJS. The platform is still under development and is not too stable yet, furthermore there is no documentation available. The main target of this work is to explore the platform and to create a basic documentation which could be used for anybody interested on the in, acting as a starting point for future works