Adding generic contextual capabilities to wearable computers

Context-awareness has an increasingly important role to play in the development of wearable computing systems. In order to better define this role we have identified four generic contextual capabilities: sensing, adaptation, resource discovery, and augmentation. A prototype application has been constructed to explore how some of these capabilities could be deployed in a wearable system designed to aid an ecologist's observations of giraffe in a Kenyan game reserve. However, despite the benefits of context-awareness demonstrated in this prototype, widespread innovation of these capabilities is currently stifled by the difficulty in obtaining the contextual data. To remedy this situation the Contextual Information Service (CIS) is introduced. Installed on the user's wearable computer, the CIS provides a common point of access for clients to obtain, manipulate and model contextual information independently of the underlying plethora of data formats and sensor interface mechanisms

The Stick-e Note Architecture: Extending the Interface Beyond the User

This paper proposes a redefinition of the human-computer interface, extending its boundaries to encompass interaction with the user's physical environment. This extension to the interface enables computers to become aware of their context of use and intelligently adapt their activities and interface to suit their current circumstances. Context-awareness promises to greatly enhance user interfaces, but the complexity of capturing, representing and processing contextual data, presents a major obstacle to its further development. The Stick-e Note Architecture is proposed as a solution to this problem, offering a universal means of providing context-awareness through an easily understood metaphor based on the Post-It note