Visions of future computing environments involve integrating tiny microelectronic processors and sensors into everyday objects in order to make them “smart.” Smart things can explore their environment, communicate with other smart things, and interact with humans, therefore helping users to cope with their tasks in new, intuitive ways. However, this digitization of our everyday lives will not o...

Wearable computing is a branch of embodied technology concerned with devices and gadgets that are worn in or on the human body. Wearable computing is a fast growing hot trend in the device industry today. This paper will look at wearable consumer devices that track and quantify personal activity with the goal of motivating consumers to exercise more, be more active and lead an overall healthier...

A key problem for pervasive computing is due to the challenges of limited interaction available in the broad range of places people need to access and work with digital information. When there is no keyboard or mouse available, we cannot rely on conventional hierarchical or search interfaces to our files. This thesis tackles the problem in the particular case of collaborative tabletop interacti...

Universal personal computing (UPC) supports nomadic computing at user mobility and at terminal mobility levels in a userfriendly way. That is, a user can access computing resources anywhere on the Internet, using any available mobile or stationary terminal attached to any subnet supporting UPC services. These services are provided via agents and enable a personalized computing environment that ...

Ubiquitous computing environment is defined by the shift of computing technology from the desktop to the background. One of its most notable attributes is its potential to extend the scope of service and personal mobility. This paper describes an agent-based architecture that brings personal and service mobility to the ubiquitous computing environment. A software agent, running on a portable de...

Effective ubiquitous computing applications need to integrate users’ personal devices and data with the devices and resources they encounter around them. Previous work addressed this problem by simply enabling the user to take all of their data with them wherever they go. In this paper, we present a more flexible approach: the “instant matchmaker”, a personal device that allows a user to seamle...

Based on experience in orchestrating co llaborative learning scenarios with ubiquitous computing technology, two strategies for extending a co -constructive modeling environment with PDAs connected through a wireless LAN are described. One application is an annotation tool, the other replicates the modeling system on the PDA, both provide full synchronization with the PC environment. General im...

Questionnaires are one of the foundations of psychometric measurement in clinical psychosomatics. We collected mobile computer-based assessments of psychometric data from more than 7000 patients between January 1995 and December 2002. Our experience has shown that this mobile approach enjoys a high acceptance among patients, is effective and two-thirds cheaper than conventional questionnaires u...

In this paper we suggest a different computing environment as a worthy new direction for computer architecture research: personal mobile computing, where portable devices are used for visual computing and personal communications tasks. Such a device supports in an integrated fashion all the functions provided today by a portable computer, a cellular phone, a digital camera and a video game. The...

The emerging discipline of algorithm engineering has primarily focused on transforming pencil-and-paper sequential algorithms into robust, efficient, well tested, and easily used implementations. As parallel computing becomes ubiquitous, we need to extend algorithm engineering techniques to parallel computation. Such an extension adds significant complications. After a short review of algorithm...