Sumi Helal

The Gator Tech Smart House: a programmable pervasive space

Research groups in both academia and industry have developed prototype systems to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive computing in various application domains. Unfortunately, many first-generation pervasive computing systems lack the ability to evolve as new technologies emerge or as an application domain matures. To address this limitation, the University of Floridas Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory is developing programmable pervasive spaces in which a smart space exists as both a runtime environment and a software library. Service discovery and gateway protocols automatically integrate system components using generic middleware that maintains a service definition for each sensor and actuator in the space. The Gator Tech Smart House in Gainesville, Florida, is the culmination of more than five years of research in pervasive and mobile computing. The projects goal is to create assistive environments such as homes that can sense themselves and their residents and enact mappings between the physical world and remote monitoring and intervention services.

Konark - a service discovery and delivery protocol for ad-hoc networks

The proliferation of mobile devices and the pervasiveness of wireless technology have provided a major impetus to replicate the network-based service discovery technologies in wireless and mobile networks. However, existing service discovery protocols and delivery mechanisms fall short of accommodating the complexities of the ad-hoc environment. They also place emphasis on device capabilities as services rather than device independent software services, making them unsuitable for m-commerce oriented scenarios. Konark is a service discovery and delivery protocol designed specifically for ad-hoc, peer-to-peer networks, and targeted towards device independent services in particular. It has two major aspects - service discovery and service delivery. For discovery, Konark uses a completely distributed, peer-to-peer mechanism that provides each device the ability to advertise and discover services in the network. The approach towards service description is XML based. It includes a description template that allows services to be described in a human and software understandable forms. A micro-HTTP server present on each device handles service delivery, which is based on SOAP. Konark provides a framework for connecting isolated services offered by proximal pervasive devices over a wireless medium.

Human Activity Recognition and Pattern Discovery

In principle, activity recognition can be exploited to great societal benefits, especially in real-life, human centric applications such as elder care and healthcare. This article focused on recognizing simple human activities. Recognizing complex activities remains a challenging and active area of research and the nature of human activities poses different challenges. Human activity understanding encompasses activity recognition and activity pattern discovery. The first focuses on accurate detection of human activities based on a predefined activity model. An activity pattern discovery researcher builds a pervasive system first and then analyzes the sensor data to discover activity patterns.

Drishti: an integrated indoor/outdoor blind navigation system and service

There are many navigation systems for visually impaired people but few can provide dynamic interactions and adaptability to changes. None of these systems work seamlessly both indoors and outdoors. Drishti uses a precise position measurement system, a wireless connection, a wearable computer, and a vocal communication interface to guide blind users and help them travel in familiar and unfamiliar environments independently and safely. Outdoors, it uses DGPS as its location system to keep the user as close as possible to the central line of sidewalks of campus and downtown areas; it provides the user with an optimal route by means of its dynamic routing and rerouting ability. The user can switch the system from an outdoor to an indoor environment with a simple vocal command. An OEM ultrasound positioning system is used to provide precise indoor location measurements. Experiments show an in-door accuracy of 22 cm. The user can get vocal prompts to avoid possible obstacles and step-by-step walking guidance to move about in an indoor environment. This paper describes the Drishti system and focuses on the indoor navigation design and lessons learned in integrating the indoor with the outdoor system.

Enabling smart spaces with OSGi

Todays pervasive computing spaces are developed primarily with proprietary technology and seem to lack a long-term vision of evolution and interoperation. The future pervasive computing environment will comprise a wide variety of devices and services from different manufacturers and developers. We must therefore achieve platform and vendor independence as well as architecture openness before pervasive computing spaces become common places. The Open Services Gateway Initiative attempts to meet these requirements by providing a managed, extensible framework to connect various devices in a local network such as in a home, office, or automobile. By defining a standard execution environment and service interfaces, OSGi promotes the dynamic discovery and collaboration of devices and services from different sources. Moreover, the framework is designed to ensure smooth space evolution over time and to support connectivity to the outside world, allowing remote control, diagnosis, and management. We present the OSGi technology and examine several OSGi development toolkits and products. We also share our experience in using OSGi to build an open, assistive environment that supports independent living for elders.

Context attributes: an approach to enable context-awareness for service discovery

The service discovery problem has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and practitioners. Jini, SLP, and UPnP are among the few emerging service discovery protocols. Although they seem to provide a good solution to the problem, there is an unaddressed need of more sophisticated location and context-aware service selection support. In this paper, we introduce the concept of context attribute as an effective, flexible means to exploit relevant context information during the service discovery process. Context attributes can express context information including service-specific selection logic, client, and network condition. We describe our approach and implementation, and present experimental results of our context-aware service discovery implementation.

Enabling location-aware pervasive computing applications for the elderly

The Pervasive Computing Laboratory at the University of Florida is dedicated to creating smart environments and assistants to enable elderly persons to live a longer and a more independent life at home. By achieving this goal, technology will increase the chances of successful aging despite an ailing health care system (e.g. Medicaid). One of the essential services required to maximize the intelligence of a smart environment is an indoor precision tracking system. Such system allows the smart home to make proactive decisions to better serve its occupants by enabling context-awareness instead of being solely reactive to their commands. This paper presents our hands-on experience and lessons learnt from our first phase work to build up a smart home infrastructure for the elderly. We review location tracking technology and describe the rationale behind our choice of the emerging ultrasonic sensor technology. We give an overview of the House of Matilda (an in-laboratory mock up house) and describe our design of a precision in-door tracking system. We also describe an OSGi-based robust framework that abstracts the ultrasonic technology into a standard service to enable the creation of tracking based applications by third party, and to facilitate the collaboration among various devices and other OSGi services. Finally, we describe three pervasive computing applications that use the location-tracking system which we have implemented in Matildas house.

RFID information grid for blind navigation and wayfinding

We describe a navigation and location determination system for the blind using an RFID tag grid. Each RFID tag is programmed upon installation with spatial coordinates and information describing the surroundings. This allows for a self-describing, localized information system with no dependency on a centralized database or wireless infrastructure for communications. We describe the system and report on its characteristic performance, limitations, and lessons learned.

Standards for service discovery and delivery

For the past five years, competing industries and standards developers have been hotly pursuing automatic configuration, now coined the broader term service discovery. Jini, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), Salutation, and Service Location Protocol are among the front-runners in this new race. However, choosing service discovery as the topic of the hour goes beyond the need for plug-and-play solutions or support for the SOHO (small office/home office) user. Service discoverys potential in mobile and pervasive computing environments motivated my choice.

A three-tier architecture for ubiquitous data access

We present a three-tier architecture of middleware that addresses challenges facing accessibility, availability, and consistency of data in mobile environments. The architecture supports the automatic hoarding of data from multiple, heterogeneous sources into possibly a variety of different mobile devices. The middle tier enables the automation of synchronization tasks in both connected mode (following disconnection) and weakly connected mode, where only intelligent and effective synchronization can be used in the presence of a low-bandwidth network. We present the three-tier architecture based on the Coda file system.