Three-dimensional context-aware tailoring of information

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 EmeraldPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of context in ubiquitous computing. Personal Information Managers exploit the ubiquitous paradigm in mobile computing to integrate services and programs for business and leisure. Recognising that every situation is constituted by information and events, context will vary depending on the situation in which users find themselves. The paper aims to show the viability of tailoring contextual information to provide users with timely and relevant information. Design/methodology/approach – A survey was conducted after testing on a group of real world users. The test group used the application for approximately half a day each and performed a number of tasks. Findings – The results from the survey show the viability of tailoring contextual information to provide users with timely and relevant information. Among the questions in the questionnaire the users were asked to state whether or not they would like to use this application in their daily life. Statistically significant results indicate that the users found value in using the application. Originality/value – This work is a new exploration and implementation of context by integrating three dimensions of context: social information, activity information, and geographical position

Sensors in your clothes: Design and development of a prototype

Wearable computing is fast advancing as a preferred approach for integrating software solutions not only in our environment, but also in our everyday garments to exploit the numerous information sources we constantly interact with. This paper explores this context further by showing the possible use of wearable sensor technology for information critical information systems, through the design and development of a proof-of-concept prototyp

Data analysis as a service: an infrastructure for storing and analyzing the internet of things

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an increasingly trendy topic both for individuals, businesses and governments, the need for academically reviewed and developed prototypes focusing on certain aspects of IoT are increasing as well. Throughout this paper we propose an architecture and a technology stack for creating real-time applications focusing on time-series data generated by IoT devices. The architecture and technology stack are then implemented through a proof-of-concept prototype named Office Analysis as a Service, DaaS, a data-centric web application developed using Meteor. js and MongoDB. We also propose a data structure for storing time-series data in a MongoDB document for optimal query performance of large datasets. One common research challenge in the IoT, security, is considered only briefly, and is of utmost importance in future research

Exploring microsoft hololens for interactive visualization of UML diagrams

Large diagrams of Unified Modeling Language (UML) are complex. In this paper we propose a novel approach to reducing this complexity by not focusing on UML itself but how we interact with it. We lift UML into an interactive 3D space and apply concepts and design guidelines of Natural User Interfaces (NUI). The goal is to present UML in a way that is easy to understand and that scales well regardless of the size and complexity of a software architecture. This research is aimed at a business landscape and collaboration between several architects. We start by describing the interactive system with a small introduction to the technologies in use and then look at the current state of UML and different interpretations of virtual realities. We follow up with our design rationale for the 3DML system and then evaluate it based on established design guidelines for NUI. We finally elaborate on valuable outcomes in the short and long term as well as a conclusion on the 3DML project in general

Digital Avatars for Older People’s Care

Es el preprint de: Bertoa M.F., Moreno N., Perez-Vereda A., Bandera D., Álvarez-Palomo J.M., Canal C. (2020) Digital Avatars for Older People’s Care. In: García-Alonso J., Fonseca C. (eds) Gerontechnology. IWoG 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1185. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-41494-8_6.The continuous increase in life expectancy poses a challenge for health systems in modern societies, especially with respect to older people living in rural low-populated areas, both in terms of isolation and difficulty to access and communicate with health services. In this paper, we address these issues by applying the Digital Avatars framework to Gerontechnology. Building on our previous work on mobile and social computing, in particular the People as a Service model, Digital Avatars make intensive use of the capabilities of current smartphones to collect information about their owners, and applies techniques of Complex Event Processing extended with uncertainty for inferring the habits and preferences of the user of the phone and building with them a virtual profile. These virtual profiles allow to monitor the well-being and quality of life of older adults, reminding pharmacological treatments and home health testings, and raising alerts when an anomalous situation is detected.This work has been funded by the Spanish Government under grant PGC2018-094905-B-100

REST4Mobile: A framework for enhanced usability of REST services on smartphones

Considering end-user research and proliferation of smartphones and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) interfaces, we envisage that smartphone owners can innovate to compose applications on the small screen. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a REST service development framework (viz, REST4Mobile) with the aim to enhance the usability when consuming on smartphones. Our design process uses the usability factors identified in our previous work as primary constraints for modeling the framework and a corresponding composition tool. Thus, sample REST services are developed with and then without the framework, and usability of composing the services on smartphones is evaluated. Evaluation was conducted by deploying the component REST services, the composition tool, and the resulting composite apps on a local machine. As the task of service composition is conducted directly on the smartphone's screen, the evaluation process is designed to be repeatable on remote servers and on the cloud. Results showed that constraints can be added into the REST architectural style on the basis of the influences of domain specific terms and human cognitive capabilities on the naming and size of the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). In addition, the principles embodying the framework are found to be influential factors in enhancing the usability of REST services on smartphones

Adopting SOA in public service provision

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Ensuring accessibility of utility and social services is one of the public obligations of governments. Today, nations make use of the notion of e-government to expose such services to citizens. In line with this, many public organizations in Ethiopia are automating their workflows, and the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) is attempting to unify certain services as part of its e-government initiative. However, the architectural patterns in use generally lack the required flexibility, and scalability for future expansion needs and business models with respect to the option that latest technologies such as SOA can offer. Literature shows that the loosely-coupled nature of SOA addresses the above-mentioned limitations and many e-government initiatives are exploiting its potential. Thus, it is apparent that SOA can address the e-government needs in Ethiopia too. In this paper, we conducted an SOA e-readiness assessment against the available e-readiness frameworks and found out that the infrastructural, legal, government, customer, and human resource requirements are met. Thus, we recommend that SOA be applied to incrementally and loosely integrate the existing (and upcoming) systems and realize “ubiquitous” public service provision

Automated Climate Monitoring System: the Case of Greenhouse Industries in Ethiopia

Technological interventions can play a significant role to keep optimal growing conditions in greenhouse industries with varying seasons and improve environmental performance by maintaining heating, cooling, and humidity levels. The research reported in this paper aims to integrate an Automated Climate Monitoring System (ACMS) for greenhouse in Ethiopia. Green- houses in Ethiopia require constant monitoring to properly maintain optimal climate conditions to grow plants all year round. To this end, they apply environment monitoring systems like timing devices, ON/OFF controllers and manual (human) monitoring which are prone to error. We propose a flexible ACMS prototype which can be applied without a user having the knowledge of how the system is made. The prototype system uses Advantech PC- cards and maintains the optimal climate condition (temperature, humidity and light intensity) of the greenhouses. Moreover, the easy to use graphical user interface provided by the system enables to combine the hardware and software functionalities for optimal manipulation of the environmental conditions. The system is centralized in that anyone can control several de- vices spread in the environment being monitored from one Computer. The performance of the system is found to be 88.89% which is “accurate and acceptable” result according to our confusion matrix. This indicates that better environmental supervision can be achieved when using the system. Moreover, the mean user acceptance (by the flower growers) of the ACMS and timing devices, ON/OFF implementations is 84.6% and 73.2%, respectively, highlighting the potential for integrating the ACMS into the greenhouse industry