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.

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.