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

Peer-To-Peer Backup for Personal Area Networks

FlashBack is a peer-to-peer backup algorithm designed for power-constrained devices running in a personal area network (PAN). Backups are performed transparently as local updates initiate the spread of backup data among a subset of the currently available peers. Flashback limits power usage by avoiding flooding and keeping small neighbor sets. Flashback has also been designed to utilize powered infrastructure when possible to further extend device lifetime. We propose our architecture and algorithms, and present initial experimental results that illustrate FlashBack’s performance characteristic

An overview of the assisted cognition project

Abstract The rise of Alzheimer's disease is one of the greatest health crises facing the industrialized world. Today, approximately four million Americans suffer from Aizheimer's disease; by 2050, the number is expected to rise to 15 million people. As a result of the increasing longevity of the elderly, many sufferers are now aware that their capacities to remember, to learn, and to carry out the tasks of everyday life are slowly being lost. The Assisted Cognition Project is a new joint effor

Closing the Feedback Loop: A 12 Month Evaluation of ASTA, a Self-tracking Application for ASHAs

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) have been shown to have a positive impact on health outcomes of the households they visit, particularly in maternal and neonatal health. As the first line of the public health system in many countries, they are a critical link to the broader public health infrastructure for community members. Yet they do this all with minimal training and limited support infrastructure. To a pregnant woman, an ASHA is a trusted ally in navigating the health system---information gathered is returned by appropriate advice and counseling. To the health system, the ASHA is a key channel of valuable householdlevel information for the public health system, yet she generally receives minimal guidance in return. In this paper we present ASTA---the ASHA Self-Tracking Application---a system that provides ASHAs with timely, on-demand information regarding their own performance compared to their peers. Using ASTA, ASHAs access comparative performance data through both a web-based and voice-based interface on demand. We evaluated ASTA through a 12-month deployment with 142 ASHAs in Uttar Pradesh, India, assessing the impact of providing feedback on ASHA performance. We find that ASHAs with access to the ASTA system made significantly more client visits, with average monthly visits 21.5% higher than ASHAs who had access to a control system. In addition, higher ASHA performance was correlated with increased usage of ASTA. However, the performance improvement was front-loaded, with the impact of the system decreasing toward the end of the study period. Taken together, our findings provide promising evidence that studying and incorporating tools like ASTA could be cost effective and impactful for ASHA programs

Key Challenges in Communication . . .

fic web site and enter their current location and destination. Although this is a powerful capability, it nonetheless requires the user to remember to check in a timely manner to adjust their route or leave earlier than forecast and to enter mundane data into the user interface. In ubiquitous computing, an autonomous agent would constantly be checking the user's current location (available from GPS or in-building wireless infrastructure) and their calendar to determine if an adjustment in schedule should be made. If traffic conditions warrant it, the user can be signaled and their PDA can show a brief reminder with the minutes left before they should head off. Another example uses a biologist in a laboratory that would like to record all the steps in their experimental protocol so that others can faithfully reproduce them. Traditional computing would provide the biologist with a PDA or laptop in which to enter each step but requiring the biologist to interrupt the flow of their work t

Dynamic Communication Models in Embedded System Co-Simulation

Many co-simulation techniques either suffer from poor performance when simulating communications intensive systems, or they represent communications with a uniformly low level of detail. This paper presents a technique which allows communication to be represented at multiple levels of detail and which gives a designer the ability to dynamically choose the appropriate level for different parts of the system. This paper also presents a tool which uses this technique and experiments which show relative simulation speedups