Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Delivering real-world ubiquitous location systems

Location-enhanced applications are poised to become the first real-world example of ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we emphasize the practical aspects of getting location-enhanced applications deployed on existing devices, such as laptops, tablets, PDAs, and cell phones, without the need to purchase additional sensors or install special infrastructure. Our goal is to provide readers with an overview of the practical considerations that are currently being faced, and the research challenges that lie ahead. We ground the article with a summary of initial work on two deployments of location- enhanced computing: multi-player location-based games and a guide for the Edinburgh Festival

SpaceSemantics: an architecture for modeling environments

The notion of modeling location is fundamental to location awareness in ubiquitous computing environments. The investigation of models and the integration with the myriad of location sensing technologies makes for a challenging discipline. Despite notable development of location models, we believe that many challenges remain unresolved. Complexity and scalability, diverse environments coupled with various sensors and managing the privacy and security of sensitive information are open issues. In this paper we discuss our previous experience combining location sensing with mobile agents and how the lessons learnt have lead to the conception of SpaceSemantics, an open architecture for modeling environments

Working Document on Gloss Ontology

This document describes the Gloss Ontology. The ontology and associated class model are organised into several packages. Section 2 describes each package in detail, while Section 3 contains a summary of the whole ontology

ConCom - a language and protocol for communication of context

With ConCom, we address the area of communication in wireless networks. We focus on heterogeneous settings with highly mobile devices carrying limited resources. ConCom present a way to express and communicate information, especially context, in a way that is similar to a naturally spoken language. ConCom uses sentences with a subject and attributes in its structure to represent and organize the transport of context and data. ConCom works connectionless and without addressing and forms an efficient way to exchange information in ubiquitous computing environments. We implemented ConCom and show applications taking advantage of it

Using colocation to support human memory

The progress of health care in the western world has been marked by an increase in life expectancy. Advances in life expectancy have meant that more people are living with acute health problems, many of which are related to impairment of memory. This paper describes a pair of scenarios that use RFID to assist people who may suffer frommemory defects to extend their capability for independent living. We present our implementation of an RFID glove, describe its operation, and show how it enables the application scenarios

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

Motion Detecting Method And Device

In some embodiments, a motion detecting device is configured to detect whether one or more movement events have occurred. The motion detecting device can include: (a) a processing module configured to run on a computational unit; and (b) a sensing device having: (1) one or more pressure sensors configured to provide two or more pressure measurements; and (2) a transmitter electrically coupled to the one or more pressure sensors and configured to transmit the two or more pressure measurements to the computational unit. The processing module is configured to use the two or more pressure measurements to determine whether the one or more movement events have occurred. The sensing device can be configured to be placed in at least one of ductwork of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system or an air handler of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system. Other embodiments are disclosed.Georgia Tech Research Corporatio

Aggregating multiple body sensors for analysis in sports

Real time monitoring of the wellness of sportspersons, during their sporting activity and training, is important in order to maximise performance during the sporting event itself and during training, as well as being important for the health of the sportsperson overall. We have combined a suite of common, off-the-shelf sensors with specialist body sensing technology we are developing ourselves and constructed a software system for recording, analysing and presenting sensed data gathered from a single player during a sporting activity, a football match. We gather readings for heart rate, galvanic skin response, motion, heat flux, respiration, and location (GPS) using on-body sensors, while simultaneously tracking player activity using a combination of a playercam video and pitch-wide video recording. We have aggregated all this sensed data into a single overview of player performance and activity which can be reviewed, post-event. We are currently working on integrating other non-invasive methods for real-time on-body monitoring of sweat electrolytes and pH via a textile-based sweat sampling and analysis platform. Our work is heading in two directions; firstly from post-event data aggregation to real-time monitoring, and secondly, to convert raw sensor readings into performance indicators that are meaningful to practitioners in the field