Mobile Device

This chapter discusses 3D virtual worlds as a fusion of technologies for serious applications. A variety of new trends in the area is considered along with original findings, exemplified with particular approaches and features designed. The goal of this chapter is to evaluate and envisage what benefits can be acquired if such trends and features are fused under a single platform. Specific trends considered in this chapter include increase of the sense of immersion with virtual reality devices, simplification of control with joysticks and mobile devices, working with large amounts of multimedia content, and capturing activities using virtual recording. The discussion is supported with the literature review and evaluation of the features developed for vAcademia virtual world. A particular focus of the chapter is on the discussion of how the new properties of 3D virtual worlds can increase their efficiency for serious applications, enable new scenarios of use, and improve user experience. . There has been extensive study of the impact of 3D immersive visualization on user behavior, lower-level task performance, and comprehension of data. A key characteristic, arguably the one that motivates the use of immersive VR in high-value training, is that participants tend to react as if the sce-ne they were seeing were real. That is they behave in a way that is similar to their behavior in a comparable real situation .

Abstract. Combining Mobile Internet and Grid technologies could mean the ability to command the power of supercomputers with a mobile device. The computing and data transfer capacities of mobile devices are expanding and Grid-related technologies are already being employed in them. In this paper, we survey the current technologies and standards, mainly concentrating on MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) devices and Java (J2ME) interfaces. The technology has a potential for many new interesting applications. This paper outlines a feasibility study, a technological review and examples of applications. 1

Pervasive games are an emerging new game genre, which includes context information as an integral part of the game. These games differ from traditional games in that they expand spatio-temporal and social aspects of gaming. Mobile devices support this by enabling players to choose when and where a game is played. Designing pervasive games can be a challenging task, since

This paper characterizes incidents that occur on large, public transit buses involving wheeled mobility devices. A retrospective study of wheelchair-related incident reports for the period 2002 - 2005 was conducted in collaboration with a metropolitan transit agency. Eighty-three incidents were examined. Results indicate that the majority of incidents occurred when transit buses were stopped (73.2%). Most incidents took place on the lift/ramp (59.3%) or outside the bus before or after ingress/egress (27.1%). Injury events revealed a similar pattern. More than fifty percent of all injuries occurred buses were stopped (55.2%) and the majority of these injuries occurred on the lift/ramp (75%). These findings have important implications for both equipment manufacturers and transportation providers.

With the rapid integration of mobile devices and localization tech- nologies like GPS in our every day life, the interest for using combined tech- nologies for entertainment is also growing. This is the idea of location-based games, which take use of localization technology and integrate the player's po- sition into their game concept to generate a pervasive game experience. For this class of games we provide a systemization method not solely based on the tech- nological dimension but also from the game conceptual and spatial-temporal dimension. The systematization is further used to derive a game design method which utilizes these three game design dimensions. By variation of the parame- ter values in these dimensions new location-based games can be designed. As an example our proposed method is illustrated with an existing location-based game, GeoTicTacToe.

Abstract—The current proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in a large diversity of hardware specifications, each designed for different services and applications (e.g. cell phones, smart phones, PDAs). At the same time, e-mail message delivery has become a vital part of everyday communications. This article provides a cost-aware study of an RSA-based e-mail protocol executed upon the widely used Apple iPhone1,2 with ARM1176JZF-S, operating in an High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) mobile environment. The proposed study employs formal analysis techniques, such as probabilistic model checking, and proceeds to a quantitative analysis of the e-mail protocol, taking into account computational parameters derived by the devices ’ specifications. The value of this study is to form a computer-aided framework which balances the tradeoff between gaining in security, using high-length RSA keys, and conserving CPU resources, due to hardware limitations of mobile devices. To the best...

Resource-constrained mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular within distributed networks, but introduce a weak point of security. Existing protocols for distributed mobile device networks, such as SPKI/SDSI, are emerging standards and lack built-in confidentiality, mutual authorisation and mutual authentication. Our research addresses the above-mentioned security limitations of an existing network security protocol for distributed mobile device networks. By securing the protocol and minimising exchanged messages, our work gives a result which is both faster than the current protocol and more secure. This will open up new application areas for SPKI/SDSI.

Abstract This work introduces an Ambient Assisted Route Planner (A2RP) aimed for providing route planning in unknown indoor environments. System was first designed as an assistive mobility aid to be used by intelligent powered wheelchairs, although it can be suitable also for other autonomous mobile robotics systems, non-automated mobility device users or pedestrians. A2RP system is based on a set of XML description files that can be retrieved from the internet. These files contain all the information needed to access public or private buildings: floor maps, accessibility information, available routes and calibration landmarks. XML description files must be created, located and maintained in an internet server specially dedicated for this purpose. This paper presents description files structure and the associated software applications: a visual editor to build and maintain XML accessibility information files and a navigation setup program to be run on board of the intelligent wheelchair processor.

Mobile devices have become very popular nowadays, due to is portability and high performance, a mobile device became a must device for persons using information and communication technologies. In addition to hardware rapid evolution, mobile applications are also increasing in their complexity and performance to cover most the needs of their users. Both software and hardware design focused on increasing performance and the working hours of a mobile device. Different mobile operating systems are being used today with different platforms and different market shares. Like all information systems, mobile systems are prone to malware attacks. Due to the personality feature of mobile devices, malware detection is very important and is a must tool in each device to protect private data and mitigate attacks. In this paper, we will study and analyze different malware detection techniques used for mobile operating systems. We will focus on the to two competing mobile operating systems-Android and iOS. We will asset each technique summarizing its advantages and disadvantages. The aim of the work is to establish a basis for developing a mobile malware detection tool based on user profiling.

In recent years, intellectual property violation events have caused enterprise to respect digital content protection. Illegal copying digital content abuses become a serious problem. Because the mobile devices are more portable and individualized than personal computers, anyone can access the network resources at anytime from anywhere. However, valuable digital contents without proper protection make the content vulnerable to unauthorized copying, modification and redistribution , causing revenue losses to service providers. Thus, constructing an effective Digital Right Management (DRM) system has become an important issue. On the basis of the mobile device, we propose an efficient digital rights management protocol. We apply symmetrical cryptosystem, asymmetrical cryptosystem, digital signature and one-way hash function mechanisms in our scheme. To overcome * Corresponding author.

During recent years, many distance teaching as well as residential institutions have started to experiment with mobile learning through pilot projects as part of their e-learning and technology enhanced learning environments. Mobile learning should not be regarded as a medium for distance learning. However, because of the similar affordances of distance learning technologies and online and mobile learning, the established field of distance education can provide valuable insight into strategies, approaches and practical experiences with regard to the conception and organization of this new medium for learning. Distance teaching institutions have a long history and much experience with media-based instruction. This affords them an advantage in the development and application of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for teaching and learning. Student support systems have existed in traditional distance education for decades. ICTs – especially mobile devices – open up ne...

The RFID technology is becoming ever more popular in the development of ubiquitous computing applications. A full exploitation of the RFID potential requires the study and implementation of human–computer interaction (HCI) modalities to be able to support wide usability by the target audience. This implies the need for programming methodologies specifically dedicated to support the easy and efficient prototyping of applications to have feedback from early tests with users. On the basis of our field-working experience, we ...

This paper describes a location – aware enhancement of a learning environment supported by mobile devices. Such an extension is proposed in order to facilitate the learning process and to provide a solid framework for introducing a more situative approach to learning and teaching into an everyday classroom experience. Introducing location sensing into an existing system creates a framework not only to determine students' locations in a learning environment but to introduce context – awareness and location -awareness into the learning process as well. What is more, location – awareness is a solid base for numerous services in a modern – mobile device supported learning environment since looking into the summary data on students' locations gives a better insight into their habits and needs, both individual and within a group. It is our belief that location – awareness presents a significant step towards creating a learning environment even more oriented to students and their n...

The generalisation of the Internet and the recent technological developments in embedded systems and wireless networks contribute to the realisation of a vision where access to information is possible at any moment and from anywhere. This is particularly attractive with information that is relevant to a specific geographic location. Applications that rely on locationbased services to provide information to mobile users, or that support interaction with real devices in the user neighbourhood, are called location-dependent applications and enhance the relationship between mobile users and a specific geographic location. However, the design of such applications breaks with the existing paradigms and methodologies as the mobile devices and the wireless communication infrastructures have characteristics that are very different from those of desktop computers and wired communication systems. The Around architecture is an open and extensible framework for location-based services that allows network services to be associated with specific geographic locations. By using this architecture applications can select services that are relevant for specific locations. Within the context of the Around project we have developed a prototype system with multiple locationbased services and an application that accesses these services to provide information related to a town transportation system. This paper reports on the design and development of this location-based application. Its design raised several new issues, going from the computational model to the interface paradigm, which are also discussed in this paper. The developed application is composed of several modules: a set of agents which are autonomous units with the knowledge necessary to select and use location-based services in a specific thematic area (e.g. transportation); an HTML output area based on a browser metaphor; and a location-context module responsible for determining the user context. The results show that an application architecture based on a modular approach turns to be very flexible as it becomes very easy to extend its functionality by simply adding or changing the agents that deal with each location-based service.

A variety of cutting edge applications for mobile phones exploit the availability of phone sensors to accurately infer the user activity and location to offer more effective services. To validate and evaluate these new applications, appropriate and extensive datasets are needed: in particular, large sets of traces of sensor data (accelerometer, GPS, micro-phone, etc.), labelled with corresponding user activities. So far, such traces have only been collected in short-lived, smallscale setups. The primary reason for this is the difficulty in establishing accurate ground truth information outside the laboratory. Here, we present our vision of a system for largescale sensor data capturing, leveraging all sensors of todays smart phones, with the aim of generating a large dataset that is augmented with appropriate ground-truth information. The primary challenges that we address consider the energy cost on the mobile device and the incentives for users to keep running the system on their device for longer. We argue for leveraging the concept of the checkin -as successfully introduced in online social networks (e.g. Foursquare) -for collecting activity and context related datasets. With a checkin, a user deliberately provides a small piece of data about their behaviour while enabling the system to adjust sensing and data collection around important activities.

This paper reports a user study on creating, consuming and managing digital music content. We consider people's personal relationship to the music entertainment technology and content, and the typical actions carried out in and outside of the home domain. The study was carried out in two cultural environments, New York City and Hong Kong.

Several methods for providing location based service (LBS) to mobile devices in indoor environment using wireless technologies like WLAN, RFID and Bluetooth have been proposed, implemented and evaluated. However, most of them do not focus on heterogeneity of mobile platforms, memory constraint of mobile devices, the adaptability of client device to the new services it discovers whenever it reaches a new location. In this paper, we have proposed a Middleware based approach of LBS provision in the indoor environment, where a Bluetooth enabled Base Station (BS) detects Bluetooth enabled mobile devices and pushes a proper client application only to those devices that belong to some registered subscriber of LBS. This dynamic deployment enables the mobile clients to access any new service without having preinstalled interface to that service beforehand and thus the client s memory consumption is reduced. Our proposed work also addresses the other issues like authenticating the clients before providing them LBSs and introducing paid services. We have evaluated its performance in term of file transfer time with respect to file size and throughput with respect to distance. Experimental results on service consumption time by the mobile client for different services are also presented.

Protection of data against long fading time is one of the greatest challenges posed by a satellite delivery system offering multimedia services to mobile devices like DVB-SH. To deal with this challenge several enhancements and modifications of the existing terrestrial mobile TV (DVB-H) physical and link layers are being considered. These solutions provide the required protection depth but they don't take into account the specificity of mobile handheld devices such as power consumption, memory constraints and chipsets implementation costs. In this report, we propose an innovative algorithm (called Multi Burst Sliding Encoding or MBSE) that extends the DVB-H intra-burst (MPE-FEC) protection to an inter-burst protection so that complete burst losses could be recovered while taking into account the specificity of mobile handheld devices. Based on a clever organisation of the data, our algorithm allows to provide protection against long term fading while still using RS code implemented in DVB-H chipsets. We evaluate the performance of MBSE by both theoretical analysis as well as intensive simulations and experiments. The results also show good performance in terms of protection, battery and memory saving. The MBSE is now under standardisation and it is considered by the DVB Forum as the main solution for the DVB-SH class terminals.

The number of students using the e-learning services provided by the central open education system at Anadolu University has been increasing day by day. More than 200 thousand students used the e-Book, e-Practice, e-Exam, e-Facilitator Service, e-Television, and e-Audio Book that are available in the Open Education e-Learning Portal in the 2004-2005 academic year. This study evaluates the opportunities own by the students who want to use the open education e-learning services via mobile devices. Seven groups of mobile devices i.e., laptops and tablet PCs, pocket computers with and without telephone, portable media players, mp3 players and smart telephones were analyzed in terms of online and offline use.

One of the most important issues of the fourth generation (4G) wireless networks is the capability of mobile devices of handing off running communication sessions to the appropriate interface. It is widely accepted that the handoff decision must consider users, terminal, and network criteria. In the last ten years, several multi-criteria decision mechanisms have been proposed to solve the handoff decision problem. However, it appears that the criteria's choice is somewhat arbitrary and some of the proposed mechanisms even give arguable results. In order to better understand their applicability, we compare extensively by numerical simulation the performance of multicriteria decision algorithms for vertical handoff. We evaluate each mechanism by considering specific requirements for different classes of service.

Mobile devices come embedded with various sensors of which camera is most widely used, however operated by the device owner for the individual needs. We feel that there is a potential for these camera sensors to be used in an on demand participatory fashion for a variety of community based sensing applications. In this paper, we propose forming local participatory camera networks for on-demand object tracking. We explain the various challenges such as mobile device discovery and configuration, willingness to participate, and direct communication cooperation between mobile devices. Finally, we define metrics for performance evaluation of these camera participatory networks for object tracking and discuss an application scenario for the same.

Mobile agents are a useful paradigm for the development of complex Internet applications. However, the effective development of mobile agent applications requires suitable models and infrastructures. This paper proposes an organizational approach to the design and development of mobile agent applications and describes an infrastructure designed to support such approach. The approach models the Internet as a multiplicity of local and active organizational contexts, intended as the places where coordination activities of application agents occur and are ruled. The MARS coordination infrastructure supports the development of mobile agent applications by implementing organizational contexts in terms of programmable tuple spaces. An application example related to the use of mobile agents to access and organize tourist information is introduced and discussed through the paper to clarify our approach and to show its effectiveness.

In this paper, we present a set of optimizations for a spoken language interface for mobile devices that can improve the recognition accuracy and user interaction experience. A comparison between a speech and a graphical interface, when used to accomplish the same task, is provided. The implications of developing a spoken language interface and integrating speech recognition and text-to-speech modules for European Portuguese in a mobile device, are also discussed. The paper focuses in the speech recognition module and in an algorithm for name matching optimization that provides the user with a more comfortable interaction with the device. Usability evaluation trials have shown that spoken language interfaces can provide an easier and more efficient use of the device, especially within a community of users less experienced in handling mobile devices.

This paper realizes the vision of Mobile Grid Computing by proposing a fair pricing strategy and an optimal, static job allocation scheme. Mobile devices has not yet been integrated into Grid computing platforms mainly due to their inherent limitations in processing and storage capacity, power and bandwidth shortages. However, millions of laptops, PDAs and other mobile devices remain unused most of the time and this huge resource repository can be potentially utilized in the Grid environment. Here, we propose a game theoretic pricing model, to address load balancing issues in mobile grids. In particular, by drawing upon the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), we show that we can obtain a unified framework for addressing such issues as network efficiency, fairness, utility maximization, and pricing. The advantage of this framework is that we have a precise mathematical characterization of the solutions and their properties. Our current endeavor characterizes a twoplayer alternating-offer bargaining game between the Wireless Access Point (WAP) Server and the mobile devices to determine the pricing strategy which is then used to effectively distribute jobs to the mobile devices. Our job allocation scheme maximizes the revenue of the grid user, and yet is comparable to other load balancing schemes in terms of the overall system response time.

Multimodal interaction is becoming common in many kinds of devices, particularly mobile phones. If care is not taken in design and implementation, there may be latencies in the timing of feedback in the different modalities may have unintended effects on users. This paper introduces an easy to implement multimodal latency measurement tool for touchscreen interaction. It uses off-the-shelf components and

To present three-dimensional data both in heavy and light-weight clients, an adaptation scheme is required. Current state-of-the art research shows promising results for specific purpose but still it is not well adoptable for the light-weight clients such as mobile devices. In this research, we present a method for transmitting adapted 3D contents to multiple target devices. To accomplish this goal, we devised a clustered representation of a multi-resolution model that is flexible, simple, efficient, and works with the MPEG-21 adaptation mechanism.

The tremendous advances in wireless networks, mobile computing, and sensor networks, along with the rapid growth of small, portable and powerful computing devices, offers more and more opportunities for pervasive computing and communications. This topic deals with cutting-edge research in various aspects related to the theory and practice of mobile computing or wireless and mobile networking. These aspects include architectures, algorithms, networks, protocols, modeling and performance issues, data management, ...

An attempt is made to characterize situations in which the use of mobile devices can be useful for the development of collaborative systems. Mobile devices have advantages, such as small size, low cost, portability. They also have disadvantages, such as small viewing screen, little storage capacity, slow processor, unreliable communication facilities. The idea is to use them when advantages are most relevant and disadvantages do not affect the system under development. A collaborative system for text co-authoring is presented as an example of design for the best conditions of mobile devices inclusion. This system uses the mobile devices for individual tasks performed while away from normal work site in uncomfortable or congested places.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Mobile Trusted Module (MTM) which should satisfy small area and low-power condition. Unlike the general Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for PCs, the MTM, that is to be employed in mobile devices, has very stringent limitations with respect to available power, circuit area and so on. Therefore, a MTM needs the spatially-optimized architecture and design method. We introduce the requirements for a MTM design and then implement a compact and power efficient MTM chip based-on the introduced requirements. The designed MTM can support all the necessary functions for trusted mobile platforms. The MTM chip covers 400K logic gates and consumes at most 10mA. 1

The current network architecture for mobile devices presents applications with a synchronous model and employs end-to-end connections. In reality, devices are often disconnected from the network and, while they are disconnected, they can connect to other devices in the neighborhood and exploit the connectivity to allow the user to continue to work. This is the key concept of the Haggle project [1], a groundup redesign of networking for mobile devices, to support the mobile user scenario. In order to benefit from users mobility, it is necessary to be able to opportunistically switch between (ad hoc) connections, whenever a new opportunity of connection arises. This imposes that connection set-up time must be minimal, considering that the nodes will probably stay in the range of each other for a short time frame. However, we saw that the 802.11 connectivity in Haggle carries significant overhead (especially when switching between Access Point (AP) mode and ad hoc mode, particularly wh...

This paper presents a DSP/FPGA hardware/software partitioning methodology for signal processing workloads. The example workload is the channel equalization and user-detection in HSDPA wireless standard for 3.5G mobile handsets. Channel equalization and user-detection is a major component of receiver baseband processing and requires strict adherence to real time deadlines. By intelligently exploring the embedded design space, this paper presents a hardware/software system-on-chip partitionings that utilizes both DSP and FPGA based coprocessors to meet and exceed the real time data rates determined by the HSDPA standard. Hardware and software partitioning strategies are discussed with respect to real time processing deadlines, while an SOC simulation toolset is presented as vehicle for prototyping embedded architectures.

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) can have adverse effects on commercial electronics. Current properties of high performance integrated circuits (IC's), such as very small feature sizes, high clock frequencies, and reduced voltage levels, increase the susceptibility of these circuits to RFI, causing them to be more prone to smaller RFI levels. Besides, recent developments of mobile devices and wireless networks create a hostile electromagnetic environment for IC's. Therefore, it is important to generalize the susceptibility of IC's to RFI. In this study, we investigate the susceptibility levels and frequency ranges of RFI to the clock network of a digital device, an 8-bit ripple counter, designed and fabricated using AMI 0.5 µ m process technology. Our experimental setup is designed to couple a pulse modulated RF signal using the direct pin injection method. Our experiments show that relatively low levels of RFI (e.g., 16.8 dBm delivered RF peak power with carrier frequency of 1 GHz) could adversely affect the normal functioning of the device under test. In the end, SPICE simulations show the sensitivity of a flip-flop, the basic building block of clock network, which further explains the experimental results.

he continuing evolution of mobile communications has spawned several radio technologies (e.g., orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing [OFDM], code-division multiple access [CDMA]) and mobile network architectures (e.g., Third Generation Partnership Project [3GPP], 3GPP2) over the last few years. This technological proliferation has, in turn, brought on an unprecedented increase in the number of wireless access standards and their associated protocol stacks. The need for ever faster standardization cycles and the urgent demand to support access to the Internet by these mobile network architectures called for a "mix-and-match" approach to the definition of the associated protocol stacks. As individual protocols are typically specified with different assumptions in mind, the end-to-end performance of these protocol stacks in deployed mobile networks has not always been satisfactory.

Mobile visualisation of map-based information is a difficult task. Designers of such systems must contend with the limitations of mobile devices in terms of hardware, screen size and input mechanisms. These problems are exacerbated by the nature of spatial data, where a large information space needs to be presented and manipulated on a small screen. In this paper, a prototype adaptive mobile map-based visualisation system, called MediaMaps, is presented. MediaMaps allows users to capture, location-tag, sort and browse multimedia in a map-based view. MediaMaps was designed to adapt the information visualised, the map-based visualisations and the supporting user interface. The results of an international field study, in which participants used MediaMaps on their personal mobile phones for a three-week period, are also presented. These results show that the adaptations implemented achieved high levels of accuracy and user satisfaction and successfully addressed some of the limitations ...

We present Scratch Input, an acoustic-based input technique that relies on the unique sound produced when a fingernail is dragged over the surface of a textured material, such as wood, fabric, or wall paint. We employ a simple sensor that can be easily coupled with existing surfaces, such as walls and tables, turning them into large, unpowered and ad hoc finger input surfaces. Our sensor is sufficiently small that it could be incorporated into a mobile device, allowing any suitable surface on which it rests to be appropriated as a gestural input surface. Several example applications were developed to demonstrate possible interactions. We conclude with a study that shows users can perform six Scratch Input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than five minutes of training and on wide variety of surfaces.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks offer reliable and efficient services in different application scenarios. In particular, structured P2P protocols (like Chord [1]) have to handle changes in the overlay topology fast and with as little signaling overhead as possible. This paper analyzes the ability of the Chord protocol to keep the network structure up to date, even in environments with high churn rates, i.e. nodes joining and leaving the network frequently. High churn rates occur, e.g., in mobile environments, where participants have to deal with the limited resources of their mobile devices, such as short battery lifetimes or high comnmunication costs. In this paper, we analyze different design parameters and their influence on the stability of Chord-based network structures. We also present several modifications to the basic Chord stabilization scheme, resulting in a much more stable overlay topology.

Background Patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes often find it difficult to control their blood glucose level on a daily basis because of distance or physical incapacity. With the increase in Internet-enabled smartphone use, this problem can be resolved by adopting a mobile diabetes monitoring system. Most existing studies have focused on patients' usability perceptions, whereas little attention has been paid to physicians' intentions to adopt this technology. Objective The aim of the study was to evaluate the perceptions and user ...

This chapter examines the usability of topographic maps on mobile devices. To evaluate this usability, field tests in a national park were arranged with a group of test users as a part of the GiMoDig project 1. The purpose of the evaluation was to identify preliminary design principles for maps on small displays, as well as the main benefits and obstacles in using topographic maps on mobile devices. As a result of the user test, the mobile contexts relevant for topographic mobile maps were identified. Regarding mobile map services, the most important context of use is currently the location of a user. However, several other contexts worthy of attention were: system, purpose of use, time, physical surroundings, navigational history, orientation, user, and cultural and social contexts. How some of these contexts were considered for the implementation of adaptive maps, is also described. As is normally seen in the iterative process of user-centred design, the implementations presented here will also be evaluated, and the experiences gained will be used in the second round of user-centred design cycle.