Challenges for Smart Environments in Bathroom Contexts

Leichsenring C, Yang J, Hammerschmidt J, Hermann T. Challenges for Smart Environments in Bathroom Contexts. Presented at the ICMI 2016 Workshop on Embodied Interaction with Smart Environments, Tokyo, Japan.Smart homes have been mostly treated as homogeneous environments where each room is distinguished by the activities performed there but not by any fundamentally different basic parameters for systems to operate in. We argue that at least for bathroom environments, things like the extensive presence of liquid water and humidity and special privacy considerations challenge these assumptions. We discuss typical and unique challenges for ubiquitous computing interfaces in bathroom environments and we look at how actual and conceptual systems confront these challenges. We review bathroom systems in the literature and present two systems of our own to exemplify the unique challenges to smart environments the bathroom provides

Applying Agile Software Engineering On Medical Ubiquitous Computing (MUC)

Nowadays, people are involved in using computation capabilities to meet their daily life needs although most of the time they may be unaware as to how this actually happens. Ubiquities Computing is considered the future trend for providing unlimited computing capabilities that handle every service in human life. One of the most crucial implementation of Ubiquities Computing is in Medical and Hospital Service. This is due to their great importance in saving people's lives. The huge amount of data and information delivered by MUC systems draw the attention to the necessity of having a new and modern software engineering methodology; Agile Software engineering methodology is highly considered in the matter. In this paper, we present an implementation of applying agile SWE methodology on MUC System, research related issues are also discussed

Multiple multimodal mobile devices: Lessons learned from engineering lifelog solutions

For lifelogging, or the recording of one’s life history through digital means, to be successful, a range of separate multimodal mobile devices must be employed. These include smartphones such as the N95, the Microsoft SenseCam – a wearable passive photo capture device, or wearable biometric devices. Each collects a facet of the bigger picture, through, for example, personal digital photos, mobile messages and documents access history, but unfortunately, they operate independently and unaware of each other. This creates significant challenges for the practical application of these devices, the use and integration of their data and their operation by a user. In this chapter we discuss the software engineering challenges and their implications for individuals working on integration of data from multiple ubiquitous mobile devices drawing on our experiences working with such technology over the past several years for the development of integrated personal lifelogs. The chapter serves as an engineering guide to those considering working in the domain of lifelogging and more generally to those working with multiple multimodal devices and integration of their data

A demonstration case on the transformation of software architectures for service specification

This paper presents a demonstration case on the successive application of a model-based technique to assist on the refinement of software logical architectures. The technique is essentially based on the transformation of use cases into object diagrams. The applicability of the technique is illustrated by presenting some results from a mobile application. For mobile software, the definition of the underlying service-oriented architecture must consider as user requirements the services themselves, the mobile operators entry points and the final clients interfaces, and use them to characterize the platform. Within the presented demonstration case, the specification of one service of the mobile application was obtained by successively applying the technique.Research funded by FCT and FEDER under project STACOS (POSI/CHS/48875/2002)

Context management for heterogeneous administrative domains

When accessing user context, context-aware applications often interact directly with sensors or have to deal with specific space representations. This work addresses context representation and management for mobile users. It proposes a generic solution based on a Context Container where the user context can be represented by an unlimited number of dimensions. The proposed solution is based on a Context Manager that integrates the raw data acquired by sensors and enriches user context with new calculated and estimated dimensions.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (SFRH/BD/8279/2002)

A flexible location-context representation

Ubiquitous computing and the development of context-aware applications have been limited by the lack of open and generic solutions. In this paper we propose a flexible location-context representation which supports data acquired through multiple sensors represented in different space models.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (SFRH/BD/8279/2002)

Immersiveness of ubiquitous computing environments prototypes: A case study

The development of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) environments raises several challenges in terms of their evaluation. Ubicomp virtual reality prototyping tools enable users to experience the system to be developed and are of great help to face those challenges, as they support developers in assessing the consequences of a design decision in the early phases of development. Given the situated nature of ubicomp environments, a particular issue to consider is the level of realism provided by the prototypes. This work presents a case study where two ubicomp prototypes, featuring different levels of immersion (desktop-based versus CAVE-based), were developed and compared. The goal was to determine the cost/benefits relation of both solutions, which provided better user experience results, and whether or not simpler solutions provide the same user experience results as more elaborate one.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through Projecto Estratégico – LA 9 – 2014-2015 (PEst-OE/EEI/LA0009/201

A Model-View-Controller Extension for Pervasive Multi-Client User Interfaces

This paper addresses the implementation of pervasive Java Web applications using a development approach that is based on the Model–View–Controller (MVC) design pattern. We combine the MVC methodology with a hierarchical task-based state transition model in order to achieve the distinction between the task state and the view state of an application. More precisely, we propose to add a device-independent TaskStateBean and a device-specific ViewStateBean for each task state as an extension to the J2EE Service to Worker design pattern. Furthermore, we suggest representing the task state and view state transitionmodels as finite state automata in two sets of XML files. This paper shows that the distinction between an application’s task state and view state is both intuitive and facilitates several, otherwise complex, tasks, such as changing devices 'on the fly'