Christof Roduner

RFID Application Development With the Accada Middleware Platform

The proliferation of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems in application domains such as supply chain management requires an IT infrastructure that provides RFID device and data management and supports application development. In this paper, we discuss these application requirements in detail. We also contend that the characteristics of passive RFID technology introduce constraints that are unique to the development of middleware for the RFID domain. These constraints include the occurrence of false negative reads, tag memory variations, the heterogeneous reader landscape, and the limited communication bandwidth available to RFID readers. To address these constraints and the application requirements for filtered and aggregated RFID data, we developed Accada, an open source RFID platform. This paper shows that the Accada implementation, which is based on a set of specifications developed by the EPCglobal community and a number of extensions, such as the surrogate concept and the virtual tag memory service, addresses the majority of the application requirements and limitations of passive RFID technology.

Technology, Standards, and Real-World Deployments of the EPC Network

The EPC Network is a global RFID data sharing infrastructure based on standards that are built around the Electronic Product Code (EPC), an unambiguous numbering scheme for the designation of physical goods. The authors present the fundamental concepts and applications of the EPC Network, its integration with enterprise systems, and its functionality for data exchange between organizations in the supply chain.

Encountering SenseCam: personal recording technologies in everyday life

In this paper, we present a study of responses to the idea of being recorded by a ubicomp recording technology called SenseCam. This study focused on real-life situations in two North American and two European locations. We present the findings of this study and their implications, specifically how those who might be recorded perceive and react to SenseCam. We describe what system parameters, social processes, and policies are required to meet the needs of both the primary users and these secondary stakeholders and how being situated within a particular locale can influence responses. Our results indicate that people would tolerate potential incursions from SenseCam for particular purposes. Furthermore, they would typically prefer to be informed about and to consent to recording as well as to grant permission before any data is shared. These preferences, however, are unlikely to instigate a request for deletion or other action on their part. These results inform future design of recording technologies like SenseCam and provide a broader understanding of how ubicomp technologies might be taken up across different cultural and political regions.

Operating appliances with mobile phones: strengths and limits of a universal interaction device

Mobile phones are increasingly becoming ubiquitous computational devices that are almost always available, individually adaptable, and nearly universally connectable (using both wide area and short range communication capabilities). Until Star Trek-like speech interfaces are fully developed, mobile phones seem thus poised to become our main devices for interacting with intelligent spaces and smart appliances, such as buying train passes, operating vending machines, or controlling smart homes (e.g., TVs, stereos, and dishwashers, as well as heating and light). But how much can a mobile phone simplify our everyday interactions, before it itself becomes a usability burden? What are the capabilities and limitations of using mobile phones to control smart appliances, i.e., operating things like ATMs or coffee makers that typically do not benefit from remote control? This paper presents a user study investigating the use of a prototypical, mobile phone based interaction system to operate a range of appliances in a number of different task settings. Our results show that mobile devices can greatly simplify appliance operation in exceptional situations, but that the idea of a universal interaction device is less suited for general, everyday appliance control.

Facilitating RFID Development with the Accada Prototyping Platform

The proliferation of radiofrequency identification systems in application domains such as supply chain management requires an IT infrastructure that provides RFID device and data management and supports application development. In this paper, we discuss the requirements towards such an infrastructure and present the freely available Accada RFID prototyping platform. The Accada platform manages readers, filters and aggregates RFID data, and helps to interpret the captured RFID data in an application context. Our RFID infrastructure implements the specifications defined by the EPCglobal RFID community, such as the reader protocol, the application-level-events specification and the EPCIS capture and query interfaces. We believe that this freely available RFID infrastructure will allow the research community to evaluate novel concepts and applications more quickly by significantly lowering the barrier for large-scale, real-world testing

Objects calling home: locating objects using mobile phones

Locating physical items is a highly relevant application addressed by numerous systems. Many of these systems share the drawback that costly infrastructure must be installed before a significant physical area can be covered, that is, before these systems may be used in practice. In this paper, we build on the ubiquitous infrastructure provided by the mobile phone network to design a wide-area system for locating objects. Sensor-equipped mobile phones, naturally omnipresent in populated environments, are the main elements of our system. They are used to distribute search queries and to report an objects location. We present the design of our object search system together with a set of simple heuristics which can be used for efficient object search. Moreover, such a system can only be successfully deployed if environment conditions (such as the participant density and their mobility) and system settings (such as number of queried sensors) allow to find an object quickly and efficiently. We therefore demonstrate the practicability of our system and obtain suitable system parameters for its execution in a series of simulations. Further, we use a real-world experiment to validate the obtained simulation results.

BIT — A framework and architecture for providing digital services for physical products

Mobile phones are increasingly able to read auto-id labels, such as barcodes or RFID tags. As virtually all consumer products sold today are equipped with such a label, this opens the possibility for a wide range of novel digital services building on physical products. In this paper, we discuss the problems that arise when such novel applications are deployed, and present a unified system architecture for providing mobile phone-based digital services in the Internet of Things, called BIT. BIT aims to be a “single point of interaction” for users when accessing the services of a variety of tagged objects. BIT also aids service developers and product manufacturers in deploying services linked to tagged products, by providing a cross-device development and deployment framework. We have used BIT to quickly implement nine diverse services in a prototypical fashion, and report on our inital experiences with the framework.

Publishing and discovering information and services for tagged products

Radio frequency identification (RFID), and more recently the development of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, have popularized the idea of linking real-world products with online information and services. Apart from early prototypes, however, the benefits of such automated identification technologies have so far been mostly available to industry, rather than consumers. With the next generation of mobile phones capable of reading both traditional bar codes through their integrated cameras, as well as RFID tags using the NFC standard, end-users themselves could take full advantage of such ubiquitous identification labels, given novel information architectures that go beyond simple web pages or industrial enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This paper presents an open lookup infrastructure that allows commercial, public, and private entities to easily provide information and services associated with tagged items, thus facilitating the rapid development and deployment of applications based on everyday products.

Towards an enterprise location service

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has a lot of potential to automate business processes and improve visibility across the supply chain. To realize the full potential of RFID, an IT infrastructure is required that manages readers, filters and aggregates raw RFID data, but also facilitates data exchange among the supply chain partners. In this paper we first provide an overview of the EPC network, an architecture developed by the Auto-ID center and its successor organisation EPCglobal, that addresses the above requirements. We then propose the concept of an enterprise location service that captures all location information about products and assets within the enterprise to enable what we call business process debugging.

Mobile Devices for Interacting with Tagged Objects: Development Support and Usability

Augmenting everyday physical objects with digital services is one of the main interests of research in ubiquitous computing. In the pursuit of this goal, personal mobile devices, and mobile phones in particular, play an important role. As a powerful, networked, and highly personal computing platform that is always carried along by most people, mobile phones represent an ideal tool to mediate the interaction between users and an environment that is enriched with ubiquitous computing technology. They have thus become the default physical user interface for many ubiquitous computing applications. More recently, mobile phones have been equipped with technologies that allow them to be used as reading devices for inexpensive passive identification tags. These technologies include Near Field Communication (NFC) for the detection of RFID labels as well as the simple mobile phone camera, which can be leveraged to recognize standard barcodes as can be found on the majority of consumer goods. As a result of this, it is now possible to augment virtually all physical products with digital services without the need to deploy additional hardware. This raises two important challenges. First, while a wide range of possible applications and benefits for users have been proposed by the research community, it remains unclear which of these can live up to the promise of making our daily lives simpler, safer, or more efficient. Second, the sheer number of everyday objects that can potentially be augmented with digital services calls for the ability to create such services in a fast and efficient way that goes beyond the ad-hoc manner in which such applications are typically developed today. This thesis addresses these challenges with three main contributions. First, it investigates the specific case of using mobile phones to interact with physical appliances. It provides a classification of interaction task types and demonstrates in a user study which types are suitable for phone-mediated interaction and which are not. Second, it proposes an architecture and implementation of an infrastructure to publish and discover services for tagged objects that frees service providers from