Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Leveraging the Grid to Provide a Global Platform for Ubiquitous Computing Research

The requirement for distributed systems support for Ubicomp has led to the development of numerous platforms, each addressing a subset of the overall requirements of ubiquitous systems. In contrast, many other scientific disciplines have embraced the vision of a global distributed computing platform, i.e. the Grid. We believe that the Grid has the potential to evolve into an ideal platform for building ubiquitous computing applications. In this paper we explore in detail the areas of synergy between Grid computing and ubiquitous computing and highlight a series of research challenges in this space

Device and context influence on wireless infotainment access: A real world story

Copyright @ 2005 CEPISUser considerations are paramount when it comes to take up of technologies, and even more so in the case of mobile devices, in which the success of a particular device often depends on its novelty appeal. However, relatively little work has been undertaken exploring how day-to-day tasks are affected when mediated by such access devices. This paper reports the results of an empirical study placed in a 'real-world' setting, in which participants undertook typical infotainment - combined information and entertainment access tasks on three different wireless-enabled mobile devices. These were a laptop, a Personal Digital Assistant and a Head Mounted Display device. Our results show that, with the exception of participants' level of self-consciousness when using such devices in public environments, the user wireless infotainment access experience is generally unaffected by device type. Location was shown, though, to be a significant factor when users engage in tasks such as listening to online music or navigation

The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201

Towards a user-centric and multidisciplinary framework for designing context-aware applications

Research into context-aware computing has not sufficiently addressed human and social aspects of design. Existing design frameworks are predominantly software orientated, make little use of cross-disciplinary work, and do not provide an easily transferable structure for cross-application of design principles. To address these problems, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary and user-centred design framework, and two models of context, which derive from conceptualisations within Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science. In a study, our framework was found to significantly improve the performance of postgraduate students at identifying the context of the user and application, and the usability issues that arise