Context Awareness and Pervasive Computing
Abstract
This paper explains what pervasive computing is and how it interacts with context aware environments and end users. Computing is turning into a utility, and the effects of this transition will ultimately change society as completely as the advent of cheap electricity did (Carr, 2013). It is now realized that pervasive computing technology is taking a giant leap and we are moving from mainframes, one computer for many users, to pervasive computing, many computers many users. “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (Weiser, 1991). The struggle is real while ICT services are trying to integrate with users everyday lifes. We are going to discuss real life examples of pervasive computing, the context aware environment that enables this technology to happen and the challenges that arise from this emerging technology. Keywords: Pervasive Computing, Context Awareness
Introduction
Pervasive computing refers to the data interaction between different types of computers, in different forms, activated under a certain context providing useful information keeping the underlying interaction system process hidden to the end user (Weiser, 1991). Computers are still there but in a transparent invisible way, helping but not interfering. Additionally, pervasive computing systems have to deal with the contextual information (context) which characterizes the current situation of the involved entities (users, mobile devices, environment, etc.) Specifically the interaction between the user and such systems has to be less intruding as long as the latter recognizes the current user situation and adapts its functions accordingly.
Mark Weiser introduced the term “Calm Technology” as the “technology that inform as without requiring our full attention” which literally means that the user is consuming what he really needs without getting overwhelmed by the data (Weiser & Brown, 1996).
This is based in the hypotheses that people are able to receive information both through central and peripheral focus of attention with the technology offering easy transition between these two states resulting in less disruption to the user and better context awareness. In Pervasive Computing, computers needs to be decentralized, differentiated, dimple and easy to provide connectivity. As in pervasive computing each end device is part of a separate field the main challenge arises is the management of these devices as they are decentralized. In differentiation we have devices that serve the same purpose but in different user experience.
As connectivity is very important on these devices, new standards of connectivity needs to be invented so that we will have machine to machine (M2M) connectivity and interoperability. Such these standards already exist: UMTS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee. On top of the communication transport layer we will need agile technologies and protocol standards such as XML, JSON or APIS in order to exchange data information with security. Pervasive computing is all about simplicity. Diverse systems need to define their operations in a simple way providing an easy to use interfaces independently of the user educational level.
Examples of Pervasive Computing
Pervasive computing is considered an emerging technology which finally has started to be realized in to tangible real life examples. There are numerous uses and appliances. Some of them are the contactless EMV (EMVCo, n.d.) banking payments, i-beacons (Cavallini, 2013) integration with smartphones, voice recognition, face and gesture recognition.
Contactless Payments
The process of a contactless mobile payment transaction is described in high level (Figure 1). In the past the user should have to insert his smart-card in to the EFT-POS (Ingenico, 2015) device in order to make the transaction. Now with the advent of technology the EMV smart-cards are incorporated not only with a chip micro-controller that actually is a mini computer for instant cryptographic calculations, but with an embedded antenna for communication with the contactless reader, which in our case is the EFT-POS smart terminal. As soon as the smart-card or the NFC (NearFieldCommunication.org, 2015) enabled mobile device with a mobile payment enabled application gets into the electromagnetic field of the NFC reader, data are exchanged between the card (mobile or physical) and the reader (EFT-POS) and the data exchanged are send to payment schemes (EPC, 2015) for validation. This NFC communication establishes a secure channel and encrypts sensitive information that are send through the air. So the user experience in this example is very nice and the user pays for the goods he bought without noticing all the surrounding technology working for this result.
Bluetooth Beacons
Beacons are just another example of pervasive computing. Early 2013 Apple firstly introduced the term Beacons for small transmitters broadcasting a UUID (Rouse, 2006) to the surrounding area using Bluetooth low energy standard BLE (Bluetooth SIG, 2015). Smartphones that supported BLE are able to integrate with the Beacons and interact with the users. As shown in (figure 2) below an Beacon is located in the area interacting with the smartphone. The smartphone either communicates with the marketing managing console to get the logic of the interaction and the campaign data or contacting for example the cloud, which in our case could be the CRM (Burnham, 2013) to process and return valuable information to the end user.
Beacons are an excellent example of pervasive computing clearly explained below. A customer has downloaded and installed to his smartphone the “loyalty/coupon — advertising” application from a specific merchant. As soon as the application is installed on his smartphone the application is registered to run in the background and all necessary interaction data are being downloaded into the device, in some cases offline data are being downloaded to the smartphone. When the mobile enters the geo-fencing area (Cavallini, 2013) of the Beacon the smartphone application triggers automatically and the smartphone receives a signal of a UUID message from the Beacon. The smartphone then will look in its offline database for responding, or contact the internet on a cloud CRM to get the appropriate data to serve to the end user. As a result of all this “silent” interaction, the user experience is very smooth and discrete.
When for example the user enters a room in a store that sells shoes and he is in front a specific shelf or in a specific spot of the room, he will receive a message to his phone, which could be a welcome message, a notification informing him that a specific product is on sale or he may receive a loyalty coupon for redemption on his buys. With this way user ignores the medium and enjoys the result that technology offers.
Bluetooth & Wi-Fi Proximity Marketing
Pervasive computing is everywhere and the best thing, it goes through unnoticed. Big shops or department stores can benefit from the technology and get more customers and increase their sales.
Figure 4 displays the interaction between customers and the merchants (shops, department stores) via wi-fi or Bluetooth. A merchant can offer free wi-fi to everyone that is near to his location, passing by or visiting customers. Once the customer-visitor enters the geolocation area that has been defined by the merchant he is able to decide how to interact with the existing infrastructure. This offers improved IT services to the merchant like centrallized administration, multiple SSID (Christensson, 2006) support, guest user accounts and the application of policies on the accesses content.
Merchant is able to expand his brand by using Facebook Check-in, pushing splash pages and giving the possibility to the user to log in through his Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Gmail+ account allowing him to collect demographic data or redirect the user to specific web pages with promotional material. Through these systems customer loyalty is increased, customer is receiving instant redemption coupons or instant sales on specific products and can even integrate with existing CRM systems for detailed analytics reporting. Merchants can get heatmap reports (Rouse, 2013), being able to see which areas customers mostly visited while in their store. The customer would enter the store or being in range of the wi-fi and instantly could get access to the internet, get coupons, valuable links and information guiding him through his buys, easy and stressless.
Smart Home
Even though the underlying technology remains the same. The appliances of such pervasive computing technologies are numerous. Smart home implementation is one of them.
In figure 5 we see how we can interconnect and automate several utilities on a smart house. Having Wi-Fi or BLE enabled devices installed on the house, a user can use his smartphone device to control these devices or make his presence known as soon as he approaches his estate or enters inside his home. While approaching his home he can program the lights to turn-on automatically, start the music, turn-on the air-condition system or even start up the coffee machine. Inside his house he may have access to other interconnected devices, like the central heating, enabling the home alarm or initiate a video call with friends or business partners. Having setup a smart home implementation offers to the end user energy efficiency, home automation, entertainment control and home security. All this can also be easily incorporated by just integrating user’s voice, commanding ultimately all smart enabled devices. User can easily reduce his utility bills and at the same time automate simple tasks making his everyday life easier. “It makes people perceives obtain all the information necessary whenever and wherever by various intelligent equipment. In accordance with the result of pervasive computing to show human requirement, it implements the computing result to all kinds of devices being controlled in Smart Home system through power line carrier communication.” (Dong, Zhang, & Dong, 2010).
Context Awareness
“In the work that first introduces the term ‘context-aware,’ refer to context as location, identities of nearby people and objects, and changes to those objects” (Schilit, 1994). Since then there have been numerous definitions on this term. We mainly have two main categories, the technologies that are using context and the technologies that adapt to context. As Hull firstly introduced context-awareness is the ability of a technology to sense, decode and use the computing environment (Hull & P., 1997). As adaptive context-aware application technologies Ryan defined these technologies that are constantly aware of the environment but are triggered only when a specific incident occurs (Ryan, 1997). A more modern definition of context-aware system would be “A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task” (Dey & Abowd, 1999). Such environments that offer context awareness are electromagnetic fields as we saw in contacless payments, Wi-Fi and BLE bands as we saw in smart home, iBeacons and proximity marketing. Generally in pervasive computing the user’s context is very dynamic, allowing applications to behave different according to current environment. For every pervasive computing usage the context is different but the purpose remains the same, for the application to be aware of it. Context is vital for providing information to the end user.
Summary
This paper described some examples of pervasive computing and what context-awareness means in pervasive computing trying to touch the future impacts and the strong linkage that exists between humans and ubiquitous computing. Even though pervasive computing is often presented as a step in the future, privacy and usage of sensitive data may hold it down (Hong, 2005). Pervasive computing in a labyrinthine connected world affecting more and more every day people’s lives. This technology even though the concept is not young, need a lot of work to gain trust from users and with the advent of internet technology, now is the time.
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(1) (PDF) PERVASIVE COMPUTING: Context Awareness and Pervasive Computing. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333869143_PERVASIVE_COMPUTING_Context_Awareness_and_Pervasive_Computing [accessed Jan 04 2021].
