As part of a project that I’m working on, a few months ago I did a report on context-awareness in smart homes, especially to support independent living (e.g. for the elderly). I’ve been meaning to post the paper here and just got around to doing it. So here it is in PDF format (about 360 KB) if you’re interested. Here’s the abstract:
The growth of new home technologies, its ubiquity, and the ageing
population of the world are some of the main factors that have generated
ideas and interests in combining them together to create a new breed
of applications that can be used to allow ageing in place, by supporting
elderly individuals to live independently at the comfort of their own
home while putting the minds of extended family members and care
givers at ease. This literature review report will discuss various research
and current issues in ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing,
smart homes, independent living, how they relate to each other, and
how context-awareness and smart homes can provide support for
independent living.
I’m working on a school project this semester. The first half of the project is mostly literature review to get some background about the project topic, identify any open issues and try to propose a solution or research to be implemented on the second half of the project. The project topic is, tentatively, Context-Aware Mobile Applications. I will have implemented a working prototype by the end of this semester (around end of November).
The subject coordinator (not my project supervisor) mentioned that one of her students uses blog as a research aid. The student posts his annotations for the literatures as he reviews them. Towards the end he will then use these annotations to summarize, analyze and write a nice report. This seems like an excellent idea. The notes become available from anywhere with internet access, and it is shared with people so they can give comments and/or have discussion about it. An example of such blog is iclouds (choose “Literatures Reviewed” category).
I will probably do the same for my project, for literature reviews as well as progress on the project itself. I’m hoping to post as much as I can about the project as soon as I have the permission from my supervisor. I can only say that I will most likely be developing a mobile application that runs on mobile devices like a PDA, it will most likely be using the .NET Compact Framework since most powerful PDAs or smart phones nowadays use Windows Mobile as the OS, and from what I heard .NET CF is actually not that bad even though it’s from Microsoft. So I’ll definitely be doing something different this time.
Update: Found another blog that is used to record progress for research, coincidentally the topic is very similar to what I’m interested in.
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