Experiences of developing and deploying a context-aware tourist guide

Abstract

The GUIDE system has been developed to provide city visitors with a hand-held context-aware tourist guide. The system has been successfully deployed in a major tourist destination and is currently at the stage where it is publicly available to visitors who wish to explore the city. Reaching this stage has been the culmination of a number of distinct research efforts. In more detail, the development of GUIDE has involved: capturing a real set of application requirements, investigating the properties of a cell-based wireless communications technology in a built-up environment and deploying a network based on this technology around the city, designing and populating an information model to represent attractions and key buildings within the city, prototyping the development of a distributed application running across portable GUIDE units and stationary cell-servers and, finally, evaluating the entire system during an extensive field-trial study. This paper reports on our results in each of these areas. We believe that through our work on the GUIDE project we have produced a blueprint for the development of interactive contextaware systems that should be of real value to those in the community who wish to develop such systems in a practical environment.

Experiences from Real-World Deployment of Context-Aware Technologies in a Hospital Environment

“…The system has been successfully deployed in a tourist setting and used over a period of four weeks by 60 people [9]. The major conclusions from the study were that visitors found the location-aware navigation and information retrieval mechanisms both useful and reassuring; and that the majority of visitors appreciated that the system were aware of their location to within a certain area.…”

“…for tagging [22], for displaying context information, like location [15], or for displaying relevant information in a specific context [9]. There are no examples reported on the use of 'active' use of context information for automatically triggering actions or services.…”

“…Over the last decade, numerous context-aware applications have been reported for use in e.g. hospitals [3,20], shops [1], museums [14,21], tourism [2,9], zoological fieldwork [22], on universities [8,15], conferences [11,10], and offices [24]. Furthermore, numerous infrastructures and application frameworks have been proposed to enable the easy development of context-aware applications, each having different technological approaches and application focuses.…”

Providing user context for mobile and social networking applications

“…Projects such as GUIDE [7] and Cyberguide [8] addressed the use of information about location and situation to guide the user when visiting tourist attractions.…”

“…With respect to sensors, the vest prototype includes more sensors than the backpack. We used a sound sensor 7 , a temperature sensor 8 , a light sensor 9 , a humidity sensor 10 and a 3-axis accelerometer 11 , all wired to the sensor node. In addition to these, there are three other sensors being used, two that are internal to the smartphone -the internal accelerometer and a virtual time sensor to provide the time of day -and one external bluetooth GPS receiver 12 node.…”