Context-awareness in wearable and ubiquitous computing

Abstract

A common focus shared by researchers in mobile, ubiquitous and wearable computing is the attempt to break away from the traditional desktop computing paradigm. Computational services need to become as mobile as their users and be extended to take advantage of the constantly changing context in which they are accessed. This paper will report on work done in the Future Computing Environments Group at Georgia Tech. We describe solutions we have generated to provide a flexible context-aware infrastructure and several applications that take advantage of context-uwareness to allow freedom f i o m traditional desktop computing.

Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness

“…Context Type Context-Aware System Name System Description A I L T P E T Classroom 2000 [1] Capture of a classroom lecture X X X Cyberguide [1] Tour guide X X X Teleport [2] Teleporting X X X X Stick-e Documents [3,4,5] Tour guide Paging and reminders X X X X X X X X X Reactive Room [6] Intelligent control of audiovisuals X X X X GUIDE [7] Tour guide X X CyberDesk [8,9,10] Automatic integration of user services X X X Conference Assistant [11] Conference capture and tour guide X X X X X X Responsive Office [12] Office environment control X X X NETMAN [13,16] Network maintenance X X Fieldwork [17,18,22] Fieldwork data collection X X X X Augment-able Reality [19] Virtual post-it notes X X X Context Toolkit [24] In/Out Board Capture of serendipitous meetings X X X X X X X X X Active Badge [28] Call forwarding X X X X…”

Interactive theatre via mixed reality and Ambient Intelligence

“…Ambient Intelligence (AmI) aims at taking the integration even one step further by realizing environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. The focus is on the users and their experience from a consumer electronics perspective, which introduces several new basic problems related to natural user interaction and context aware architectures [8] supporting human centered information, communication, service, and entertainment [2].…”

Controller design for human-robot interaction

“…More recently Mitsunaga et al demonstrated the use of gaze tracking to estimate the affective state during human-robot interaction (Mitsunaga et al 2005). Efforts in the closedloop category are described in (Abowd et al 1997) and (Pentland 2004). Recent work has utilized biofeedback to understand a human's emotions, which can then be used to endow robots with "emotional intelligence".…”