Context awareness

About: Context awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5790 publications have been published within this topic receiving 119944 citations.

MoCA: A Middleware for Developing Collaborative Applications for Mobile Users

Abstract: The Mobile Collaboration Architecture is a middleware architecture for developing and deploying context-aware collaborative applications for mobile users. MoCA comprises client and server APIs, a set of core services for registering applications, the ability to monitor and infer the execution context of mobile devices, and an object-oriented framework for instantiating and customizing server proxies according to applications’ specific adaptation and context-processing requirements. MoCA facilitates the development of distributed programs that require access to individual and group context to define application-specific and dynamic adaptations. MoCA’s design focuses on simplicity, extensibility, scalability, protocol heterogeneity, and application customization.

An Architecture Based on Internet of Things to Support Mobility and Security in Medical Environments

Abstract: Recently the problem of providing effective and appropriate healthcare to elderly and disable people is an important field in relative to the aging of population problems. The objective of information and communication technologies (ICT) is to focus on the new technologies the medical environments, so that it can provide management to accelerate and improve the clinical process. Our contribution is to introduce an approach based on Internet of things (IoT) in medical environments to achieve a global connectivity with the patient, sensors and everything around it. The main goal of this globality feature is to provide a context awareness to make the patient's life easier and the clinical process more effective. To achieve this approach, firstly has been developed an architecture which has been designed to offer great potential and flexibility of communications, monitoring and control. This architecture includes several advanced communication technologies; among them are 6LoWPAN and RFID/NFC, which are the basis ofthe IoT. Moreover the research deal with the problems related to the mobility and security that happens when IoT is applied in medical environments. The mobility issue requires developing a protocol over 6LoWPAN network to be carried out in sensor networks with high specification related with low power consumption and capacity. While in the RFID/NFC technologies need to support secure communications, our proposal is to introduce a set of security techniques and cryptographic SIM card to authenticate, encrypt and sign the communications with medical devices. The preliminary results showed a reduction of time in the handover process with the protocol for mobility defined, by omitting the stages of addressing and simplifying the MIPv6 protocol. In addition to increase the security in the communications carried out by NFC devices enhanced with the inclusion of cryptographic SIM card.

Local Differential Perturbations: Location Privacy under Approximate Knowledge Attackers

Abstract: Location privacy research has received wide attention in the past few years owing to the growing popularity of location-based applications, and the skepticism thereof on the collection of location information. A large section of this research is directed toward mechanisms based on location obfuscation enforced using cloaking regions. The primary motivation for this engagement comes from the relatively well-researched area of database privacy. Researchers in this sibling domain have indicated multiple times that any notion of privacy is incomplete without explicit statements on the capabilities of an adversary. As a result, we have started to see some efforts to categorize the various forms of background knowledge that an adversary may possess in the context of location privacy. Along this line, we consider some preliminary forms of attacker knowledge, and explore what implication does a certain form of knowledge has on location privacy. Continuing on, we extend our insights to a form of adversarial knowledge related to the geographic uncertainty that the adversary has in correctly locating a user. We empirically demonstrate that the use of cloaking regions can adversely impact the preservation of privacy in the presence of such approximate location knowledge, and demonstrate how perturbation-based mechanisms can instead provide a well-balanced tradeoff between privacy and service accuracy.

Context Acquisition Based on Load Sensing

Abstract: Load sensing is a mature and robust technology widely applied in process control. In this paper we consider the use of load sensing in everyday environments as an approach to acquisition of contextual information in ubiquitous computing applications. Since weight is an intrinsic property of all physical objects, load sensing is an intriguing concept on the physical-virtual boundary, enabling the inclusive use of arbitrary objects in ubiquitous applications. In this paper we aim to demonstrate that load sensing is a versatile source of contextual information. Using a series of illustrative experiments we show that using load sensing techniques we can obtain not just weight information, but object position and interaction events on a given surface. We describe the incorporation of load-sensing in the furniture and the floor of a living laboratory environment, and report on a number of applications that use context information derived from load sensing.

A survey of software adaptation in mobile and ubiquitous computing

Abstract: Driven by the vast proliferation of mobile devices and ubiquitous computing, dynamic software adaptation is becoming one of the most common terms in Software Engineering and Computer Science in general. After the evolution in autonomic and ubiquitous computing, we will soon expect devices to understand our changing needs and react to them as transparently as possible. Software adaptation is not a new term though; it has been extensively researched in several domains and in numerous forms. This has resulted in several interpretations of adaptation. This survey aims to provide a disambiguation of the term, as it is understood in ubiquitous computing, and a critical evaluation of existing software adaptation approaches. In particular, we focus on existing solutions that enable dynamic software modifications that happen on resource constrained devices, deployed in mobile and ubiquitous computing environments.