Towards a New Perspective of Building Tools for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Technological growth has been exponential in relation to mobile devices (such as embedded sensors) that have allowed developing context-aware mobile applications for the market. This growth generates a new challenge about how to develop this kind of application to adapt them to the current user’s demand. Nowadays, there are several approaches that could be used to create context-aware mobile applications, but these approaches are designed without considering to provide variability in the kind of generated applications. The aim of this paper is to propose a building tool that has been designed from scratch taking into account variability points in order to generate a wide variety of contextaware mobile applications. The first version of our tool is presented in this paper which is based on UML tools like Eclipse, Sirius Obeo, and JBoss. Finally, a discussion of different aspects is detailed to help designers to have guidelines to select the appropriate development environment for the design of building tools for context-aware mobile applications.Publicado en: Gervasi O. et al. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020. ICCSA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12254. Springer, Cha

Towards a New Perspective of Building Tools for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Technological growth has been exponential in relation to mobile devices (such as embedded sensors) that have allowed developing context-aware mobile applications for the market. This growth generates a new challenge about how to develop this kind of application to adapt them to the current user’s demand. Nowadays, there are several approaches that could be used to create context-aware mobile applications, but these approaches are designed without considering to provide variability in the kind of generated applications. The aim of this paper is to propose a building tool that has been designed from scratch taking into account variability points in order to generate a wide variety of contextaware mobile applications. The first version of our tool is presented in this paper which is based on UML tools like Eclipse, Sirius Obeo, and JBoss. Finally, a discussion of different aspects is detailed to help designers to have guidelines to select the appropriate development environment for the design of building tools for context-aware mobile applications.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 12254).Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

Smartphone Augmented Reality Applications for Tourism

Invisible, attentive and adaptive technologies that provide tourists with relevant services and information anytime and anywhere may no longer be a vision from the future. The new display paradigm, stemming from the synergy of new mobile devices, context-awareness and AR, has the potential to enhance tourists’ experiences and make them exceptional. However, effective and usable design is still in its infancy. In this publication we present an overview of current smartphone AR applications outlining tourism-related domain-specific design challenges. This study is part of an ongoing research project aiming at developing a better understanding of the design space for smartphone context-aware AR applications for tourists

Mobile access to personal digital photograph archives

Handheld computing devices are becoming highly connected devices with high capacity storage. This has resulted in their being able to support storage of, and access to, personal photo archives. However the only means for mobile device users to browse such archives is typically a simple one-by-one scroll through image thumbnails in the order that they were taken, or by manually organising them based on folders. In this paper we describe a system for context-based browsing of personal digital photo archives. Photos are labeled with the GPS location and time they are taken and this is used to derive other context-based metadata such as weather conditions and daylight conditions. We present our prototype system for mobile digital photo retrieval, and an experimental evaluation illustrating the utility of location information for effective personal photo retrieval

Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies

The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach