Ubiquitous computing enabling greater cooperation
among members of a family
Roushdat Elaheebocus
School of Electronics and Computer
Science
University of Southampton
re1e08@soton.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
The scenario is set in the year 2020. A decade ago major
technological breakthroughs caused speculations about whether
technology, specially computer-science related, was really our ally
or foe, whether it would tear the society apart or bring us closer
together. In this paper we go through one of these possible
outcomes to demonstrate how large scale distributed and
ubiquitous computing systems enables more cooperation among
individuals, specially members of a family. The Echelon family
consists of four members that we will follow during a day in their
normal life.
Keywords
Distributed systems, ubiquitous computing, family, futurology
1. INTRODUCTION
While many researchers have produced research work based on
smart-homes [1, 2, 3, 4] or ubiquitous devices, few have focussed
on the cooperation among individuals that such pervasive and
distributed systems will enable. Based on Mark Weiser's
ubiquitous computing vision [5] of a world where individuals
seamlessly interact with computers just like they breathe-in air
without realising the mechanism behind, we present the
cooperation that pervasive technologies will make possible among
individuals, in this case, among family members in the future. The
scenario is also supported by current research work going on in
terms of ubiquitous technologies.
The layout of this technical report is such that a description of the
family and its members is given followed by an in-depth
description of a smart-device known as the SD that all individuals
will possess in the future and finally, some main activities
performed by one or more members of that family during one day,
each being separated under different sub-headings. For each
activity, there are two parts; firstly a description of the activity as
seen and experienced, and the second part is a brief literature
review grounding the activity into research work that has been
done so far in that context and the technologies behind it.
“Echelon” which happens to coincide with the name of the
infamous widely distributed signal intelligence collection and
analysis network operated by five countries including the UK and
the United States of America [1], here refers merely to a family
name. Daniel Echelon and his wife Sarah live together with their
20 years old daughter Flora and their newborn son Ryan in the
southern city of Southampton, UK. Daniel is a senior lecturer and
researcher at the University of Southampton for the School of
Electronics and Computer Science while his wife has recently
taken up a part-time job at a supermarket a few meters away from
their house. Flora is an undergraduate student in computer
science and wants to follow the footsteps of her father.
We are currently in the year 2020 and Weiser's prediction of
technology weaving “themselves into the fabric of everyday life
until they are indistinguishable from it” [5] is now a reality. It has
taken almost five decades for what was research work some ten to
twenty years ago to mature into widespread usage of ubiquitous
computing.
2. THE SMART-DEVICE (SD)
Facing stiff competition in the smart phone and PDA markets,
companies have found themselves compelled to adopt a more
inter-operable approach supported by standards to develop the
new generations of 'smart phones'.
“A large-screen, data-centric, hand-held device designed to offer
complete phone functions whilst simultaneously functioning as a
personal digital assistant (PDA).” [6]. Such is the definition of a
smart phone widely accepted across the community. However in
recent years, we have witnessed a surge in new functionalities
being added to smart phones that the original and major function
which was: 'making phone calls' has blurred into the background.
Thus in the near future, researchers may even consider dropping
the word 'phone' from 'smart phone' and perhaps replace it with
'device' as we have done in this futurology report. We will be
referring to the new generation of smart phones as 'smart devices'
(SD for short).
All citizens of this pervasive computing era has an SD.
Comparable to the wearing of watches on our wrists, individuals
go everywhere with it to enabling them to interact ubiquitously
with their environment. In one sentence, the SD has become the
sixth sense of the human race.

Figure 1. The SD with some of its capabilities and
functionalities
2.1 Connectivity features of the SD
As shown in Figure 1, several connectivity options are already
being embedded in smart phones such as Bluetooth, WiFi, the less
popular Infra-red and the widespread GPRS. While Bluetooth is
suitable for short-range communication due to its low energy
consumption, WiFi provides a larger bandwidth with a longer
range, typically 250 metres but at the same time is a greedy energy
consumer. GPRS on the other hand is a paid alternative making it
less attractive for frequent usage [7].
What has not been seen so far is Peer-To-Peer networking
capabilities in these smart devices but we are not far from there.
Bluetooth enabled devices support simultaneous connection with
up to seven other devices forming a piconet and several piconets
can join together to form a larger scatternet. This shall be the basis
for Peer-To-Peer in SDs and can be further expanded via the
Internet through devices having Internet connectivity. Coupled
with GPS data, the devices will enable applications to determine
locations and thus set up these ad-hoc Peer-To-Peer networks
based on proximity.
2.2 Interacting with objects and appliances
Some researchers have focused on using future SDs as input
devices [8] than can act as a wireless mouse, use their cameras for
gesture recognition or even handwriting recognition on their
touch-screen using limited computation and memory [9]. While
these will be useful functionalities, in a distributed and ubiquitous
environment, users will want to use these devices for much more
interaction with appliances in their surroundings. [10] proposed
the use of Elope middleware that will allow SDs to configure
themselves and communicate with tagged objects and let users
invoke services. Tagging here mainly refers to Radio frequency
identification (RFID) [11] that enables RFID scanners to read the
information without the requirement that barcodes has: direct line-
of-sight. These RFID readers will possibly be embedded in SDs
[12].
So far, the major obstacle that remains to be overcome is the wide
range of appliances and the fact that they are produced by
different manufacturers. Thus most of them will have different
interfaces. A solution proposed [7] is the use of a single
framework that can manage the different interaction models that
SDs are capable of engaging in, such as:
Universal Remote Control whereby each SD should store the
interfaces of entities it interacts with. Since pre-storing them all is
impractical and require too much memory for storage, allowing
the entities to 'teach' the SD their interfaces can be an option.
However, not all entities will have such capabilities rendering it
only partially successful.
Dual Connectivity overcomes the limitation of Universal Remote
Control by requiring an object to only provide its identity to the
SD, usually through Bluetooth. The SD then downloads the
required interface from an interface-bank on the Internet using
either WiFi or GPRS and can thus interact with the object.
A wider scale model is the Gateway Connectivity whereby the SD
connects to a gateway station using Bluetooth or WiFi that knows
at least one of the entity that the SD want to interact with and then
acts as a relay. The entities on the other side may communicate
among themselves in a Peer-To-Peer fashion.
Peer-To-Peer Connectivity has the main advantage of overcoming
the distance limitation of the other models since it allows the
sharing of information and data without users being in direct
proximity of one another.
Generating interfaces on-the-fly for a wide range of appliances
from the abstract specifications of their functionalities is another
approach [13]. However it will require that all the appliances are
capable of communicating this crucial information in a way that
the SD can understand.
2.3 Accessing ubiquitous services
Not only will SDs allow their users to interact with home
appliances but also benefit from services offered by third-parties.
A Mobile Service Toolkit (MST) was developed [14] for this
purpose and examples such as ticket machines, interactive product
catalogues and electronic information kiosks were some of the
services given as examples. Since information were being
provided to third-parties in return for personalised services,
privacy concerns were addressed by providing users with the
ability to choose among three privacy levels that are: 'Always
disclose' , 'Ask for confirmation before disclosure' and 'Request
pin number to authorise disclosure'. However, only services in
fixed locations can be accessed this way. For discovering services
that are mobile and ubiquitous in nature, SDIPP, a protocol
implemented by extending the Bluetooth Service Discovery
Protocol (SDP) with web access, personalisation, context and
location awareness [15] can be used. SDIPP enables on-the-fly
service discovery and supports a method of anonymous payment
based on electronic cash. Anonymity is preserved by using
device-based authentication through the IMEI number of the SD
instead of user-based.
2.4 Digital identity
Also shown in the image, digital identity and e-certificates are
also a highly desirable features of the SDs. Digital identity is
important to be established for some services such as banking and
authentication of certificates to function. This is discussed in [16]
where its importance for law-enforcement is highlighted. Since
the SD will be used for authentication and trust establishment
[17], it has been compared to a wallet, in this case: an electronic
wallet and its characteristic of having many functionalities
embedded into one device is drawn from the Swiss Army Knife
analogy.
2.5 Other functionalities
While listing all the functionalities of an SD is difficult, a set of
useful ones will now be briefly listed, mainly based from [18].
• The SD will include all the features of the smartphones
currently available.
• Speech recognition enabling talks from a group of
participants in a meeting for example to be recorded,
classified person-wise and a text-script generated and
archived.
• Act as an intelligent agent capable of gathering,
reasoning and inferring information from the Web,
made possible with the semantic web.
• In-built projector allows a user to have a much larger
screen to be displayed on any flat surface and the SD's
camera detects and recognises gestures made by the user
on the projected image.
• Act as a personal health monitoring system [19] by
communicating with wireless bio-sensors and analysing
the data in real time. If necessary, ambulance or pre-
assigned care-givers are contacted automatically. The
system can also provide medical advice to the user.
2.6 Challenges to be overcome
While much of the technologies for developing the various
functionalities in the SDs are already available, there remain
several challenges to be addressed. Privacy is a major concern for
such devices since they will be gathering, holding and sharing so
much data about individuals when the latter start to rely more on
such pervasive devices [20]. Most research work are inclined at
outputting new functionalities and have largely ignored privacy.
One of the possibility to tackle this concern is by delegating the
task of privacy level assignment to users [14] whereby they
specify different levels of privacy for different pieces of
information.
Along with privacy, trust and security are also important issues as
discussed in [15, 18] which also mentioned energy consumption
as a constraint that has to be taken into consideration since SDs as
most mobile devices will be running on batteries that have limited
power.
3. ACTIVITIES
3.1 Wake up
Scenario
With a vibrating pillow under his head, Daniel is woken up at six
in the morning by the bed's alarm system that has obtained data
from his personal calendar service through his SD. Five minutes
later, the alarm system detects that Daniel is still in bed with
minimal movements and concludes that he has fallen asleep again
and thus give him another vibration, a little harder this time.
While Daniel's day has already begun, Sarah, is still sleeping in
the same bed, undisturbed, since she works as a part-timer in the
afternoon, she will woken up at 8a.m with the latest soft music
tunes that she has enjoyed listening recently or that her SD has
recommended to the alarm system.
Flora, with the deadline of one her assignment and the end of year
examinations approaching, the alarm system is requested by the
latter's SD to consider these as parameters. The bed sensors has
detected however that she has been sleeping for only five hours
and concludes based on her sleep patterns and other data, that she
requires at least two more hours of sleep.
Related Research
Tracking movements in bed has been done for monitoring patients
at a hospital [21]. In that case, passive infra-red sensors were used
and movement data was being recorded for batch processing. In
our case, a real time system will be desirable as described in [22]
whereby not only movements but also sleeping patterns will be
monitored and analysed. This will require sensors embedded into
the mattress and pillows as well.
Interestingly, alarm systems have been largely ignored by the
research community. However an innovative alarm system [23]
makes use of vibrating pillows connected to an alarm for setting
the time was patented. Using vibrations instead of sounds make it
possible to wake up an individual without disturbing others still
sleeping in the same bed.
By providing the alarm system with some form of artificial
intelligence to allow reasoning, connecting it with the sleep-
monitoring sensor network and enabling interaction with devices
such as the SD normally through a wireless connection such
Bluetooth or WiFi, we effectively obtain a smart alarm system that
has been demonstrated in the scenario.
3.2 Lost Comb
Scenario
Sarah has the habit of always combing her hair as the first thing
when she is up from bed. The previous day , Flora used her
mother's comb and has not put it back in its place. Now since the
latter is still sleeping, Sarah, cannot ask her about the comb's
location. Fortunately, since the comb, as most objects in the
house, has an RFID tag, Sarah, just pick up her SD and search for
the comb's location. The room in which it currently is and the
approximate distance from another bigger object in that room is
provided. With these information, the lost object is very quickly
located.
Related Research
The idea of using ubiquitous technology to find lost objects such
keys, purse, and in our case, a comb, commonly referred to as
Frequently Lost Objects (FLO) [24] has been around for the past
decades. Most systems [24, 26, 27] have proposed the use of low
cost radio-frequency tags, known as RFID [25] attached to objects
and that can be read without line-of-sight unlike conventional
barcodes. While the sole use of RFID present some challenges
such as the limited detection range or that the lost object has been
taken out of the house for instance, the smart floor solution is
proposed [24], whereby the information is provided to the user
about the last location that the object was detected and with
whom. All this information is transmitted from the wireless sensor
network to a display unit, in our case, the SD. A step further will
be the use of mobile robots [28] to help locate the object. An
important target population for such systems has been for people
suffering from Alzheimer [29].
3.3 Smart Refrigerator
Scenario
As Daniel takes out the milk from the refrigerator for breakfast,
the latter records that action and if the milk bottle is not returned
back, the stock level will be decreased. The Echelon family need
not worry about any items from the refrigerator getting out of
stock since the stock level is constantly monitored by the
refrigerator management system. Along with stock levels, expiry
dates are also monitored and family members are notified
whenever an item's expiry date is approaching.
Sarah wanted to speak to her father about some computer-related
assignment she is currently working. But since Daniel has been
rather busy lately, he has not been able to discuss it with her at
home. As both individuals will be on the campus today, Daniel
thought that maybe they can meet up there. So he writes a note on
the modern 'stick-notes' on the refrigerator's door: a touch screen
used as a display panel for the refrigerator's system, acts as a
notice board for 'sticking' notes for other family members and
finally, is an interface for the kitchen management system
providing recipes for example. The appliance is also WiFi enabled
and provides a web interface for the family to access when they
are away from home as shown below in figure 2.
Figure 2. Interaction between Smart Refrigerator and SD
via the Web
Related Research
The smart refrigerator, as described in [22, 30] does not only store
food but can also generate shopping list, manages stock levels, re-
order some common items online automatically, while
considering expiry dates of products stored. It must be highlighted
here that RFID [25] will facilitate the refrigerator's monitoring
task; equipped with an RFID reader, it will be able to accurately
keep track of its content . Furthermore, taking the traditional role
of the empty refrigerator door acting as a notice board, a touch
screen can be embedded into it as proposed in [31, 32], providing
a more aesthetically pleasing look and also enabling messages to
be sent through the web from the display to the family member's
SDs or vice versa.
3.4 Car Navigation & Automated Driving
Scenario
After breakfast, Daniel gets ready for work. In the mean-time,
Sarah prepares Ryan so that his father can drop him at the
kindergarten on his way to university. Since dropping the baby
before going to work is an everyday routine, the car navigation
system has already programmed itself for taking that route.
However occasionally, Sarah may not send Ryan with his dad. In
these cases, the car's sensors will detect that there is no baby on
board and thus modify the route. Traffic jam is no longer an issue
now since most of the time, cars auto-drive themselves at constant
speed.
Cars communicate with one another and also with road-side nodes
that they encounter on their way, sharing information about their
destination and traffic flow. With these data, routing is optimised
and time to reach destination is calculated in real-time. With
automatic navigation, cars are able to travel closely to one another
while passengers can relax. Car sensors and cameras detect the
mood of the passengers and react accordingly for example by
playing some soft music by recognising who is currently in the car
and adapting to their taste.
Related Research
While navigation systems using GPS technology is now
widespread [33], cars having automated driving capabilities are
still not on our roads although research works and prototypes
have been produced since the early 90's [34]. The idea of having
one human driver in a vehicle and several other vehicles following
it in automated mode forming a platoon was explored in France in
1993 [34]. The automated highway project demonstrated the
feasibility of automated driving using several technologies
including vision based, radar-based and also platoon-based
[35].It has been shown that the automated system is safer than
having human drivers [36, 37]. One major obstacle that hindered
the success of these early systems was a lack of appropriate
wireless communication technology such as Bluetooth and WiFi.
These were explored in [38] which suggested that cars should
share information about their destination, and the route they
intend to take with other cars. This will allow cars to process
information and optimise their routing. A peer-to-peer network is
used to establish communication with cars over a long range. This
system can be further enhanced by placing road-side nodes to
collect and distribute these information to passing cars. A recent
work studied how ants do not have traffic jam problems [39]. This
is attributed to the fact that they do not overtake one another, are
able to travel very closely to their neighbours and also maintain a
constant speed even when traffic density increases. Comparing
this with cars, it will be very difficult if not impossible for human
drivers to control cars with such precision. Thus, an automated car
navigation and driving system is the ultimate solution.
3.5 Daniel at work
Scenario
Being an academic staff for the 'Intelligence, Agents, Multi-Media
Group' (IAM), it is not surprising that Daniel and his colleagues
are taking full advantage of advanced computer agents to help
them in their various tasks. This morning, Daniel wants to set up a
meeting for the group to discuss about some important
development in a research project that they are currently working
on. Since he has already logged-in into his personal computer, he
'summons' the computer agent and provides the latter with some
information including his intention of setting up a meeting, the
group of people he wants to attend it, the urgency level and the
time range. The agent first interacts with Daniel's SD to make sure
he doesn't have any other appointment himself in case of which,
he will be warned. The agent then proceeds to contact the other
people concerned through their own agents that will each have
information about their masters. A consensus is reached among
the agents, a meeting room is booked and their respective masters
are notified about the meeting being scheduled including the time
and location.
During the meeting, each individual uses his SD to jot down
comments, take notes as well as making reviews about different
ideas being discussed. Participants may choose to share comments
directly from their SDs to the other attendees.
Through an email on his SD, Daniel is informed about a
conference being held next month and his agent on the SD has
already annotated the date and time of the conference with a
comment that Daniel will probably be free based on his current
calendar data. A link has also been added to book air and train
tickets. Daniel clicks on the link and the agent proceeds to book
the tickets on his behalf. The information is then recorded in his
calendar.
Related Research
Autonomous agents have as primary objective to reduce the
cognitive loads of their users by performing calendar management
on their behalf [40, 46]. The use of agents for meeting scheduling
is considered as an “inherently distributed” task [41, 42] whereby
agents have to find the right balance between protecting their
users' privacy and preferences with the overall organisation which
in our case will include availability of other agents' users,meeting
room, equipments and other resources. The negotiation process
among agents is described as a “distributed search process” [41]
in which agents have to choose the optimal strategies [43].
As far as reviewing is concerned, the mobility of the Web enabled
by smart phones and in the future by SDs make this activity
possible [44]. With the connectivity among SDs collaborative
work will be greatly facilitated.
The scenario of agent understanding emails,annotating them and
performing bookings online is made possible through the
semantic web [45] whereby data is given meaning through the use
of ontologies expressed in RDF or OWL for example and thus
allowing agents to perform reasoning and make inferences.
3.6 Looking after baby Ryan
Scenario
From time to time both Sarah and Daniel look after the baby
during the day by connecting to the kindergarten's Web Interface
through their SDs. They are able to see Ryan via a camera
installed in his bed at the kindergarten. Ryan can also see and hear
them through an LCD display embedded in every baby's bed.
Through the interface, Sarah usually look at what time Ryan has
been fed his meals, and read comments made by the care-givers
looking after him. The feeding time, quantity can also be edited by
Sarah or Daniel online. At these specified time, the staff at the
kindergarten are reminded by the system.
Ryan also wears a special diaper that can detect when it needs to
be replaced by detecting moisture level. Thus the care-givers do
not need to keep checking the baby manually.
Related Research
Video-conferencing is already widespread but with time, the cost
of equipments will drop significantly. As demonstrated in [47]
baby-care through the Internet using video link reduces cost and
in this situation allows parents to look after their babies even
when they are away. Research has been carried out in facial
expression recognition for babies to detect when they are in pain
[48]. In future research works, recognition of other kind of
expressions such as hunger and joy may also be possible and thus
relayed back to parents.
With low cost RFID tags [25], a smart-diaper has been developed
that uses semi-passive tags that are activated when moisture is
detected [49]. RFID readers incorporated in the beds can thus
detect signals emitted from these tags and transmit them to the
baby-care monitoring system with information about which bed's
occupant requires a diaper change.
3.7 Lunch time
Scenario
At 11am, Sarah starts preparing a quick lunch for herself since she
is the only one at home. She accesses the kitchen advisor system
through the touch-screen on the refrigerator's door, choose the
option of 'lunch preparation advice' and select 10 minutes as the
preparation time. Based on her food preferences, which
ingredients are available and what she has eaten recently, tuna
salad and scrambled eggs are the two options advised to her. She
selects tuna salad and the system provides her with the
preparation steps as well as the location of the different
ingredients.
At the university, Daniel decides to go to the Piazza restaurant on
the campus to eat something. Since most of his colleagues that he
usually enjoys lunch with have left for a conference, he ends up
going to eat alone. But his SD's agent also knows about the lunch-
mates absence since their agents shared that information. The SD
search for potential people that can accompany Daniel. Her
daughter Flora happens to be going for lunch and She wanted to
discuss with her dad about an assignment. Daniel's SD is aware
about the fact that he had written a note on the refrigerator's
digital notice board. Flora's SD is contacted using an ad hoc peer
to peer network and she is asked whether she wants to join her
dad. Both entities agree and the meet-up location is shared by
their SDs share : 'The piazza' enabling both family members to
share a nice lunch-time together while discussing about Flora's
assignment.
Related Research
The kitchen advisor system, is linked to the smart-refrigerator
system described earlier. Since the system is connected to the
Web, the Semantic Web to be more precise, information such as
recipes, preparation time and ingredients are pulled in real-time
from several websites in real-time as described by Tim Berners
Lee [45]. In addition to these information, the system also use
data collected by SDs such as the kind of food that Sarah usually
orders and runs some recommender system algorithms based on
these parameters.
Ad hoc peer to peer networking [7] is one of the four modes of
communication that the SD is capable of. As described in more
details in the 'Smart Device' section, this allows communication
among individuals although they may be out of range for
Bluetooth or WiFi to function.

3.8 Sarah at work

Scenario
At noon, Sarah walks to work at the nearby supermarket. She is
working on the afternoon shift today. As soon as she enters the
building, her presence is acknowledged along with the time of
entry by the supermarket's staff attendance system which has
identified Sarah through her SD coupled with a face recognition
process.
At the supermarket, the shopping carts now have digital touch
screen displays (figure 3) that can be used to advertise products
currently on discounts. Shoppers normally download there
shopping list from their SDs to the digital display of the carts
since it is larger in size. The display then convert it into a
checklist, guiding the shoppers to the items' shelf locations as
well as providing suggestions and advice about each product. As
soon as a product is added to the cart, it is marked accordingly in
the digital list.
Checkout is simply about rolling the cart nearby an exit space and
the SD then ask the user to confirm payment for the items
purchased and a digital receipt is issued.
Sarah's job, although being called a cashier, is no longer like the
traditional one. She rarely performs checkout, she just need to be
present for special cases where a customer has trouble with the
self-checkout system.
At the end of her shift, Sarah use her SD to query the home
refrigerator's system for a shopping list as depicted in figure 2.
Within seconds, a list is sent to her. Knowing that prices at the
supermarket can be higher than elsewhere or the suggestions by
the supermarket can be biased, Sarah's SD camera is used to
detect gestures made with her fingers and perform actions such as
price comparison of a product with several other supermarkets.
Reviews made by customers are also downloaded from the Web
and shown to her. One of the items in the list: 'Corn' is out of
stock at the supermarket. So the SD advises Sarah to delegate this
item to Daniel who can purchase it on his way back home from
somewhere else. Sarah agrees and a few more items that were out
of stock at the supermarket are also delegated to Daniel's SD.
Figure 3. Shopping cart with LCD
touch-screen display [51]
Related Research
As discussed in the SD and the smart-refrigerator sections, they
can interact with one another through several methods. In this
case, the SD communicates with the refrigerator system through
the Web.
Radio Frequency Identification tagging [25], is once again used
on all products instead of barcodes. A large portion of the
scenario above has been derived from an experimental store
developed by the METRO Group [50] that have referred to the
system of intelligent shopping cart as personal selling assistants
(PSAs). These are WiFi enabled with Internet connectivity and
equipped is RFID readers thus enabling them to know the exact
content of the cart. This information is sent back to the store's
main system at the moment of checkout and thus avoiding the
need for scanning each item one by one as is currently being done.
There is a video clip that demonstrates how these technologies
work together [51].
3.9 The dinner
Scenario
On Friday nights, the Echelon family usually dines outside in
different the restaurants located in the city. Tonight it it is Flora's
turn to choose which restaurant they will go, so she grabs her SD
and start flipping through the digital business-cards of restaurants
that had been automatically sent to her while she was within 100
meter range of them previously. Her SD has automatically
classified them into categories and assigned ratings based on her
personal preference of food. These data were collected every time
she spent time in a restaurant and ordered specific dishes.
Having marked a few top desirable restaurants, she summons her
SD's AI-agent to help her come up with a final selection. The
latter connects to the restaurants websites and download their
latest menu updates including special offers.
Once Flora has decided on the restaurant, its GPS coordinates are
sent via Bluetooth to the in-built car navigation system while an
entry is made to the online family-blog about the restaurant-dinner
online to be edited and approved later on by a member of the
family. The latter which is WiFi enabled, downloads the latest
updates from the transport-department to know current traffic-
flow status, whether any particular road have been closed for
road-works between their current location (home) and the
restaurant. Finally it generates the optimal path to reach
destination.
Two minutes prior to reach destination, the car-navigation system
queries the transport-department for available parking spaces
closest to the destination and also queries the law-enforcement-
department for theft and other related crime in that area and
advise Daniel about these.
When they enter the restaurant, the menu is downloaded onto
their SDs . Other dinners' reviews are also made available to the
family. They make their choice which is then sent directly to the
restaurant management system. Their SDs also store the
information about the food ordered. After having completed
dinner, the family members are requested by their SDs to review
the food.
Related Research
Mobile-based advertising has for long been subject of research,
starting with the short message service (SMS) [57]. However the
advertising could not be targeted and required that users opt in
voluntarily. With Technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi being
embedded in mobile phones, location awareness was used to
target users [58] but still from a group of people passing at a
location it was difficult to know about them, their habits and
preferences. With the SD, users can choose to share some
information about them and thus enable advertisers to better
personalised advertising and do better targeting as mentioned in
[59]. Users will accept to share information to advertisers since
they can also benefit from advertising to some extent as pointed
out in [57].
As far as trusting reviews made by other dinners, trust and distrust
values among people [60], probably by grouping people with
similar food taste will give an indication about how much one can
rely on a review usually made on mobile devices as demonstrated
in [44].
3.10 Going to Cinema
Scenario
After a wonderful dinner, the family decides to go to watch a
movie. Since Sarah's birthday was a few day away, she gets to
choose the movie. She grabs her SD and request for a list of latest
movies. The SD is aware about Sarah's taste and which movies
she has already watched. She is then asked with whom will she be
going: Daniel only, complete family or friends. When she selects
'family', the other family members' SDs are contacted via
Bluetooth and their movie preferences queried. Finally Sarah's SD
provide a final list of suggestions that will please everybody and
also taking their current location into consideration, with Sarah's
taste having a higher priority. Sarah make the final decision, the
SD proceeds to purchase the tickets for the family members on the
Web and the location for the cinema building is uploaded to the
car's navigation system. Reaching the cinema, their seats locations
are transferred to their respective SD which is then able to guide
them inside the dimly-light building to their seats.
Related Research
The above scenario is made possible due to the semantic web
explained in [45] making data available for agents to reason upon.
And the remaining capabilities have already been described in the
Smart Device section earlier.
3.11 The family blog (Flog)
Scenario
The family blog has enabled an effortless way of keeping a 'family
diary'. One blog post is made daily by pulling together different
activities automatically from devices such as SDs and the car
navigation system.
For example today, a picture was snapped automatically when
Daniel was taking Ryan to the car and annotated accordingly.
While Sarah was preparing the quick lunch at home, the kitchen
cameras made a high-quality movie of her cooking, this was also
included in the blog post. Similarly, when the family went out for
dinner, the car-navigation system sent the destination and time
data to the blogging system which then downloaded the comments
and reviews each family member had made from there SDs.
While the final blog post is very interesting for the family
members to learn how the others spent their day, privacy can be
an issue. There are some information that they would not like to
share. Thus there exist some privacy features such as by default
everything about each family member is made private to himself
or herself. Then there is the allow-list and group-privacy levels for
example, a group of relatives are allowed to see the different
activities of the family when they were together, another one for
particular member of the family only and another without time
and precise details making it just some kind of summarised post.
Related Research
While automated-blogging as described in this scenario has not
been research much, some work in this direction has already been
done. Mobilog [52] is a framework that automates the creation of
blog posts by pulling together information from different websites
and weather services to incorporate contextual information in a
post and thus saving user's time. They just need to go through the
automatically-generated post, add some personal text if they want
and approve it for posting. Mobile blogging has also been
investigated in [53] while adding video in blog posts been
explored in [54]. While these automated and mobile blog posts
are very interesting, they are not of much use for machine, in our
case, agents to crawl and understand their contents. Since the
Semantic Web has been made for machines to understand,
similarly, Semantic blogs are now being designed to give meaning
to data [55, 56].
4. CONCLUSION
The extent to which ubiquitous computing will change the life of
individuals is difficult to imagine. But what has been presented in
this paper is not fiction, for most of the systems presented,
research works have been published and prototypes implemented.
One of the most common technologies that has been used in
pervasive computing is RFID mainly because of its low cost,
wireless capability and it does not require line-of sight to be
scanned.
We have demonstrated that pervasive computing will enable
greater cooperation among individuals however the biggest
challenge of such technologies remains their adoption by society
since it is them, that will be the users and their lifestyles will be
changed. Studying how users adopt and use innovative
technologies in itself is a science, as has been the case for the
Web, which has given birth to Web Science, perhaps we will
need a Ubiquitous Computing Science to better understand it.
[61].
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