INVISIBLE COMPUTING

SPECs: Personal Pervasive Systems Mik Lamming, HP Labs Denis Bohm, Firefly Design

P

ervasive technology promises both exciting new services delivered to any point of need and dramatically streamlined interaction with machines that sense aspects of the user’s physical context. However, researchers who want to explore applications in a real-world setting face a formidable obstacle: It’s often too costly to deploy novel infrastructure widely enough to conduct meaningful trials. In the early 1990s, the Olivetti Research Laboratory (later acquired by AT&T) in Cambridge, England, developed the innovative Active Badge system, a network of room-based infrared sensors capable of detecting badge wearers and relaying this information to a central computer. Using this infrastructure, my colleagues and I built a variety of novel context-sensing applications including Pepys, an automatic biographer; Forget-me-not, a memory aid; a reminding system; and a document access system. We found that conducting trials of these systems beyond the confines of our research facilities was prohibitively expensive, and became quite frustrated that the features we could rely upon at work were not available in the other contexts of our life. A memory aid that only remembered work events was at best a challenge to evaluate. Today’s most successful pervasive applications, such as the cell phone, are woven into the fabric of daily activities and offer mostly invisible support to anyone, anytime, anywhere. However,

researchers and their families with the means to experience, explore, and ultimately expand how invisible computing could impact their day-to-day lives. We have devised a system of wireless SPECs—small personal everyday computers—that can be worn or attached to a place or thing and, unlike Active Badges, can be networked without a centralized computer. Our approach increases availability on a per-user basis, rather than for an entire community, to create a truly per-

Small personal everyday computers offer a practical way to explore contextsensing applications.

other types of pervasive applications— including those designed to monitor individual activities for record keeping, health maintenance, communication, or budgeting purposes—demand continuous intimate knowledge of the user’s context.

SPECS Toward this end, the Everyday Computing project at HP Labs provides

sonal pervasive system. Users themselves deploy and maintain these autonomous devices throughout their own normal living areas: at the office, in their car, at home, and even in public spaces. SPECs, illustrated in Figure 1, are similar to Motes, wireless sensors originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and now commercially available. Motes provide the

Figure 1. Small personal everyday computer. Off-the-shelf components maximize battery life and minimize SPEC size. June 2003

109

Invisible Computing

Figure 2. SPECs can be attached to people, places, and things.

functionality of a general-purpose computer in a small package. They are optimized for placement in buildings or environments such as a battlefield, and use radio frequencies with a range of hundreds of feet. In contrast, SPECs focus on implementing only those functions needed to explore simple context-sensing applications. They are designed to be worn, and use infrared frequencies—which do not penetrate walls—with a range of about 20 feet. Making SPECs small enough to wear all the time, but having a long battery life and the ability to

autonomously sense their physical environment, were the top design priorities. SPECs discover one another using a rudimentary peer-to-peer discovery protocol inspired by Compaq’s Factoid and Xerox’s Pollen. Each SPEC beacons a 32-bit identifier every two seconds and listens continuously for other nearby SPECs’ ID32 beacons. For our purposes, domestic infrared (non-IrDA) transceiver chips, commonly used for appliance remote control, currently offer the simplest and lowest-powered off-the-shelf solution. When one SPEC sights another’s beacon, it uses a microcontroller and realtime clock to create a time-stamped record of the event and stores this data in an onboard, 32-Kbyte memory. Each record is subsequently updated to reflect the total duration of a continuously sighted ID32 beacon until it is no longer observed. SPECs communicate with other SPECs at a data rate of 40 32-bit words per second and have a range of four to eight meters. The current interface uses a single green LED to attract the user’s attention and a single button for input. Each SPEC is powered by two 150-mAh batteries, which last about a month with normal use and somewhat longer if there are few sight-

ings to process. Including the batteries, the entire electronics package measures only 40 × 15 × 14 millimeters.

APPLICATIONS Recent user studies highlight a wide range of practical applications that SPEC technology can help support. For example, given the numerous encounters we have, places we visit, and data we have to process on a daily basis, it can be difficult remembering everything that we are supposed to do. Consider Kyle, a sixth-grade student who sometimes forgets to bring home his scooter from school. As Figure 2 shows, Kyle has one SPEC that he has made into a necklace. He also has taped a SPEC to his scooter, another on the wall above the scooter’s garage parking spot at home, and a third on his desk at school. He has wired others to articles such as his backpack that he often takes to school. Kyle’s wearable SPEC is loaded with an event pattern designed to recognize which items he takes to school and to remind him to bring home any tagged items he might have left behind. Table 1 shows a sample daily event record from the wearable SPEC. Figure 3 illustrates how Kyle’s wearable SPEC watches out for any other

Table 1. History from SPEC worn by Kyle, a forgetful student. ID32 beacon source

Period observed

Garage Backpack Scooter Backpack Scooter Desk Desk Desk Scooter Desk Backpack Backpack Garage Garage

08:08-08:10 08:11-08:15 08:12-08:16 08:20-08:23 08:20-08:23 08:28-08:34 08:41-08:44 14:32-14:37 14:36-14:37 14:43-14:46 14:57-15:00 15:02-15:07 15:02-15:04 15:14-15:24

Taken Forgotten Scooter

Returned

Remembered Backpack

Garage Backpack Scooter Desk 9:00

8:00 Morning

...

15:30

14:30 Afternoon

Figure 3. SPEC in action. Kyle’s SPEC spots the forgotten scooter.

110

Computer

SPECs—in this case, on his backpack and scooter—that accompany him from the time he leaves the garage until he arrives at his desk, and again from 14:50 (five minutes after school lets out) until he arrives back at the garage. After Kyle leaves his desk, his SPEC fails to locate the SPEC he attached to his scooter and starts flashing to remind Kyle that he has left a tagged item behind at school. Another challenge we all face is organizing the huge amount of information we accumulate over time— photographs, receipts, and so on. To extract meaningful use from the information with which we are bombarded every day, there must be a way to organize it automatically. SPECs can help with this task by creating a detailed account of daily life—beginning with places visited and things or people encountered. Though limited, this record would provide an intuitive tem-

plate into which users could add other types of data to create a kind of autobiographical scrapbook. We anticipate that these more advanced applications will need to access online services to archive sightings, process them into a more intelligible form, invoke other actions, or download new search tasks. SPEC portals located in high-traffic areas will provide mobile SPECs with the means to make brief, opportunistic connections to the Internet.

lthough it is too early to declare our peer-to-peer approach to gathering context data a success, early results are encouraging. Installing the infrastructure to sense more parts of our lives is simple enough, capturing field study data for future experiments or for more intelligent, context-sensitive power management regimes. We

A

also want to see what other concepts “always on” activity-sensing facilities might provoke. In the near future, we plan to add a couple more sensors to the SPECs to help recognize other important landmark activities, thereby pushing the boundaries of everyday computing a little further. ■ Mik Lamming is a principal scientist at HP Labs. Contact him at mik@hp. com. Denis Bohm is a software consultant with Firefly Design, based in Los Altos, Calif. Contact him at denis@ fireflydesign.com.

Editor: Bill N. Schilit, Intel Research Seattle, [email protected].

IEEE Computer Society magazines cover a wide variety of topics Computer Agile Software Development Nanotechnology Piracy & Privacy

IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications 3D Reconstruction & Visualization

Computing in Science & Engineering The End of Moore’s Law

IEEE Design & Test Clockless VLSI Design

IEEE Intelligent Systems

IEEE Micro Hot Chips 14

IEEE MultiMedia Computational Media Aesthetics

IEEE Software Software Geriatrics: Planning the Whole Life Cycle

IEEE Security & Privacy Digital Rights Management

IEEE Pervasive Computing Smart Spaces

AI & Elder Care

IEEE Internet Computing The Semantic Web

IT Professional Financial Market IT

June 2003

111

SPECs: Personal Pervasive Systems

by AT&T) in Cambridge, England, developed the innovative Active Badge system, a network of room-based infrared sensors capable of detecting badge wearers and .... Figure 3 illustrates how Kyle's wear- able SPEC watches out for any other. Table 1. History from SPEC worn by. Kyle, a forgetful student. ID32 beacon.

430KB Sizes 0 Downloads 199 Views

Recommend Documents

SPECs: Personal Pervasive Systems - Firefly Design
by AT&T) in Cambridge, England, developed the innovative .... Contact him at mik@hp. com. Denis Bohm is a ... IEEE Internet Computing. The Semantic Web.

SPECs: Personal Pervasive Systems - Firefly Design
by AT&T) in Cambridge, England, developed the ... and offer mostly invisible support to anyone .... Contact him at mik@hp. com. ... IEEE Internet Computing.

SPECs: Personal Pervasive Systems
Pervasive technology promises both exciting new services ... We have devised a system of wireless. SPECs—small ... similar to Motes, wireless sensors orig-.

An Overview of Pervasive Computing Systems
digital assistants (PDAs), “smart” mobile phones, ultra-mobile laptops and office. PCs, and even home .... for pervasive computing [17]. A similar evolution is ... could eventually support pervasive computing with inch-scale computing devices.

An Overview of Pervasive Computing Systems
range of telemetric data from instruments used in an operating room and ... device controllers. ... relate to those in distributed systems and mobile computing. .... University [24], Cooltown in Hewlett-Packard [25], and EasyLiving in Microsoft.

Bonanza Performance Specs - Groups
Beechcraft F33A ('80 & up fuel std 74 gal). Horsepower: 285. Gross Weight: 3400 lbs. Top Speed: 182 kts. Empty Weight: 2125 lbs. Cruise Speed: 172 kts.

Bonanza Performance Specs - Groups
Gross Weight: 3000 lbs. Top Speed: 170 kts. Empty Weight: 1745 lbs. Cruise Speed: 161 kts. Fuel Capacity: 50 gal. Stall Speed (dirty): 52 kts. Range: 568 .... Beechcraft A 36 Bonanza (300 hp). Performance Data. Horsepower: 300. Gross Weight: 3650 lbs

Specs-MD-Pygmy-Hog-SRL.pdf
Retrying... Download. Connect more apps... Try one of the apps below to open or edit this item. Specs-MD-Pygmy-Hog-SRL.pdf. Specs-MD-Pygmy-Hog-SRL.pdf.

Bonanza Performance Specs -
Beechcraft B 35 Bonanza. Horsepower: 196. Gross Weight: 2650 lbs. Top Speed: 160 kts. Empty Weight: 1575 lbs. Cruise Speed: 148 kts. Fuel Capacity: 39 gal.

Bluetooth Specs Report
created the notion of a personal area network, a kind of close range wireless ...... The trailer is appended to the sync word as soon as the packet header follows the .... As a result, the DH1 frame can carry up to 28 information bytes (including.

Specs: 321 & 347 -
Yield. Strength .2% Offset psi (MPa). Ultimate. Tensile. Strength psi. (MPa) .... For these reasons, the degree of stabilization and of resulting protection may be ...

Bluetooth Specs Report
created the notion of a personal area network, a kind of close range wireless network that looks set ... Radio isn't directional, and it doesn't need line of sight, so it has obvious advantage over infra-red links ..... wired network. Because it is m

Specs - Apps Gallery placement
Orkut new UI Ad Format: > Dimensions: 300x250 pixels (SWF e/ou GIF/JPG). > Size (SWF): 50 KB. > Size (JPG/GIF): 50 KB. > Flash version allowed: 7/8/9/10. > Max frames per second rate: 24 FPS. > Max animation time: 30 seconds (endless loop not accepte

technical specs catering.pdf
Aids Day Celebration- Dec.) 2 snacks and. lunch, 100 pax. 1 job 30,000.00 30,000.00. 21 Global Handwashing Day celebration,. snacks, 100 pax 1 job 5,000.00 ...

Pervasive Biosensor Networks
In this study we briefly describe a biosensor network and some of the existing ... body for continuous monitoring of signals such as ECG, blood pressure, ...

Gateway Specs 3.25.13 (1).pdf
... clients via DHCP on a separate subnet (e.g., 10.4.6.2) than the host network. ... connection to Netpulse Cloud Controller for service and remote monitoring.

Specs-MD-Harness-Maxx-Comfort.pdf
MaltaDynamics.com // (800) 494-1840. Page 2 of 2. Specs-MD-Harness-Maxx-Comfort.pdf. Specs-MD-Harness-Maxx-Comfort.pdf. Open. Extract. Open with.

Specs-MD-10K-Swivel-Anchor.pdf
There was a problem previewing this document. Retrying... Download. Connect more apps... Try one of the apps below to open or edit this item.

Specs - Display Ad - CPM 300x250 - MOBILPASAR.COM
Specs - Display Ad - CPM 300x250*. Orkut new UI Ad Format: > Dimensions: 300x250 pixels (SWF e/ou GIF/JPG). > Size (SWF): 50 KB. > Size (JPG/GIF): 50 KB.

blackberry playbook specs pdf
Sign in. Loading… Whoops! There was a problem loading more pages. Whoops! There was a problem previewing this document. Retrying... Download. Connect ...

STRUCTURAL SPECS & DRAWINGS - BCMS WALKWAY PROJECT ...
There was a problem previewing this document. Retrying... Download. Connect more apps... Try one of the apps below to open or edit this item. STRUCTURAL ...

Specs-MD-Razorback-SRLs.pdf
There was a problem previewing this document. Retrying... Download. Connect more apps... Try one of the apps below to open or edit this item. Specs-MD-Razorback-SRLs.pdf. Specs-MD-Razorback-SRLs.pdf. Open. Extract. Open with. Sign In. Main menu.

dell latitude d430 specs pdf
Sign in. Loading… Whoops! There was a problem loading more pages. Whoops! There was a problem previewing this document. Retrying... Download. Connect ...