Using the Mobile Phone to Interact
with Objects in A Smart Environment.
MSc. Advanced Computing Science. Lancaster University, September 2007.
Serko Katsikian

Abstract

As mobile devices become more powerful, they affect our everyday lives in ways we don't even realize. Meanwhile, the need for available services in an ever changing, dynamic environment, has given rise to the concept of context-aware computing. Ubiquitous environments augmented with a variety of sensors can provide an adaptable infrastructure to provide services in a personalised context-based approach that has never been possible in the past. Research in the area of mobile computing has therefore focused in developing applications that can work in coordination with such context-aware environments to make our lives more comfortable and enrich our experiences in the digital world. This project tries to take a step towards that direction through the development of a mobile distributed application which in coordination with the user's environment can provide a variety of services to the user. Specifically the prototype developed can stream multimedia contents to devices such as TVs and audio systems while employing a localization mechanism that senses the user's location in the area and teleports the media to the device closest to him at any moment. The prototype also provides a remote controller module developed for this project to allow the user to have control of the streaming media. The project was broken down into two parts. A client application running on a Nokia N80 phone and a server application running on Linux PCs were developed. These work in coordination in order to support the necessary services. A user study which provided valuable feedback and insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the prototype was conducted after the development process. Furthermore a preliminary Bluetooth localization study was conducted to test the applicability of Bluetooth in location-aware services.

Copyright (c) Serko Katsikian, 2007