Moving on from Weiser's Vision of Calm Computing: engaging UbiComp experiences

A motivation behind much UbiComp research has been to make our lives convenient, comfortable and informed, following in the footsteps of Weiser's calm computing vision. Three themes that have dominated are context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring/tracking. While these avenues of research have been fruitful their accomplishments do not match up to anything like Weiser's world. This paper discusses why this is so and argues that is time for a change of direction in the field. An alternative agenda is outlined that focuses on engaging rather than calming people. Humans are very resourceful at exploiting their environments and extending their capabilities using existing strategies and tools. I describe how pervasive technologies can be added to the mix, outlining three areas of practice where there is much potential for professionals and laypeople alike to combine, adapt and use them in creative and constructive ways

Post-stroke depression : Hur sjuksköterskor kan identifiera tidiga tecken på depression hos patienter som överlevt stroke

Bakgrund: Stroke är en av de mest förekommande sjukdomarna i västvärlden och innefattar en stor grupp patienter. Poststroke depression är den vanligaste komplikationen efter insjuknande i stroke och är underbehandlat och underdiagnostiserat. Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur sjuksköterskor kan identifiera tidiga tecken på depression hos patienter som överlevt stroke. Metoden som vi använt är en litteraturstudie med artikelgranskning. Analysen vi använt oss av är en innehållsanalys baserad på Graneheim och Lundmans (2003) beskrivning. Resultatet visade att sjuksköterskor med hjälp av sina observationer, kunskap, bra fungerande kommunikation, ett nära förhållande mellan sjuksköterskor, patienter och deras anhöriga kan upptäcka tidiga tecken på depression hos patienter som överlevt stroke. Det finns också olika diagnostiska skalor och screening verktyg som kan vara sjuksköterskan till hjälp vid identifiering av tidiga tecken på depression. Slutsatser: Vi fann att sjuksköterskor är förmögna att upptäcka tidiga tecken på depression hos patienter som överlevt stroke genom god interaktion, kommunikation och iakttagelseförmåga, men att det krävs mer kunskap, tid och resurser för att uppnå det bästa resultatet

660 Everywhere messaging

By “everywhere messaging ” we refer to the ability to send and receive electronic communication at any time and through a variety of means, including wired and wireless computer networks, voice telephones, and pagers. Our goal is to design messaging systems in which the receiver is always “on ” and available, and messages are correctly chosen for unintrusive delivery. But even in the office, and especially out of it, message arrival must compete in the real world with other activities that place demands on users ’ cognition and for which message alerting may itself be a distraction. In this paper we consider four experimental projects in terms of their ability to meet everywhere messaging requirements of minimizing interruption, adaptation to the user, location awareness, and unintrusive user interfaces. These projects demonstrate message filtering, location-specific delivery, flexible auditory alerting, and operation in, and monitoring of, a heterogenous networking environment. The last decade has seen e-mail become ubiquitous, following on the heels of voice mail from the previous decade. Wireless technology has become pervasive, at least in urban areas, both for text and voice communication. We have increasing means of being contacted and the pace of both personal and business communication is ever faster. Although the spread of wireless telephony clearly indicates a desire to communicate at any place and time, we complain of information overload, spam or junk mail, and continual interruptions from unwanted telephone calls. Some of us deliberately invoke strategies to minimize these interruptions, such as answering e-mail only once a day, but at a price of missing valuable communication and, in turn, spending mor

Project Lachesis: parsing and modeling location histories

Abstract. A datatype with increasing importance in GIS is what we call the location history–a record of an entity’s location in geographical space over an interval of time. This paper proposes a number of rigorously defined data structures and algorithms for analyzing and generating location histories. Stays are instances where a subject has spent some time at a single location, and destinations are clusters of stays. Using stays and destinations, we then propose two methods for modeling location histories probabilistically. Experiments show the value of these data structures, as well as the possible applications of probabilistic models of location histories.

Semantic Geocast Using a Self-organizing Infrastructure

Geocast mechanisms allow a sender to transmit network packets to receivers residing at a certain geographical region. Geocast forms the basis for a number of location-based services, such as announcement services, advertisement services or friend-finders. In this paper, we introduce the notion of semantic geocast, where a target area is specified by its meaning. A sender can broadcast messages to, e.g., a city centre or a specific building, without precisely knowing the physical co-ordinates. We implemented semantic geocast on top of our self-organizing Location Server Infrastructure (LSI), which reflects a location domain model especially designed to cover the needs of mobile users. As our infrastructure is self-organizing, it is flexible and easy to extend. We consider scalability and stability issues. LSI and its geocast mechanism is fully implemented and tested. Evaluations show the effectiveness of our approach