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In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a location-aware mobile-based emergency service for Bangladesh, a developing country, which lacks any central 911-like emergency service. Our goal was to investigate the feasibility and acceptability of such services that do not require building any new infrastructure or changing the existing infrastructure available in Bangladesh. To achieve our goal, we iteratively designed and deployed two location-aware mobile-based emergency services in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. These deployments provided a deep insight about user experience, acceptance, and sustainability issues. We learned that users considered these services effective, felt comfortable using these during emergencies, and expressed a need for integration of additional services. Our findings indicate that it is feasible to design a location-aware mobile-based emergency service in Bangladesh. We believe that our proposed design will help to provide a low-cost alternative to the central 911-services, especially for the developing countries.

To cope with the challenges posed by device capacity and capability, and also the nature of ad hoc networks, a Service discovery model is needed that can resolve security and privacy issues with simple solutions. The use of complex algorithms and powerful fixed infrastructure is infeasible due to the volatile nature of pervasive environment and tiny pervasive devices. In this paper, we present a trust-based secure Service discovery model, TSSD (trust-based secure service discovery) for a truly pervasive environment. Our model is a hybrid one that allows both secure and non-secure discovery of services. This model allows Service discovery and sharing based on mutual trust. The security model handles the communication and service sharing security issues. TSSD also incorporates a trust mode for sharing Services with unknown devices.

Universal access from a handheld device (such as a PDA, cell phone) at any time or anywhere is now a reality. Ubicomp Assistant (UA) (Sharmin et al. in Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on applied computing (ACM SAC 2006), Dijon, France, pp 1013–1017, 2006) is an integral service of MARKS (Sharmin et al. in Proceedings of the third international conference on information technology: new generations (ITNG 2006), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp 306–313, 2006). It is a middleware developed for handheld devices, and has been designed to accommodate different types of users (e.g., education, healthcare, marketing, or business). This customizable service employs the ubiquitous nature of current short range, low-power wireless connectivity and readily available, low-cost lightweight mobile devices. These devices can reach other neighbouring devices using a free short-range ad hoc network. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the UA service is the only service designed for these devices. This paper presents the details of Ubi-App, a ubiquitous application for universal access from any handheld device, which uses UA as a service. The results of a usability test and performance evaluation of the prototype show that Ubi-App is useful, easy to use, easy to install, and does not degrade the performance of the device.

With the advancement of hand-held devices, wireless and sensor network pervasive computing has achieved a perfect momentum. Formerly, a requirement existed that was a serious impediment and threat to the mobility of users – the necessary presence of a fixed wired network. This has been resolved by the recent advances in wireless and mobile technologies, particularly Bluetooth and WiFi. The advancement of available, portable, low cost mobile devices (PDAs, cell phones, etc.) has resulted in the user's mobility at unprecedented levels. As these devices can communicate with one another, the combined capabilities can be leveraged to form a useful new set of tools. Presently, pervasive computing is being extended into the sophisticated healthcare sector with the promise of providing an easier and more efficient mode of communication between physicians and patients or between the physicians themselves. In this paper we provide the details of our application 'Healthcare Aide', which has been designed to provide not only more convenience for doctor – doctor, resident doctor – doctor, patient – doctor and nurse – doctor interaction but also a smooth pathway for real-time decision making. Our pervasive middleware MARKS (Middleware Adaptability for Resource Discovery, Knowledge Usability and Self-healing) provides the underlying support for this application in a completely transparent manner. In this paper, we have also presented our survey results from users' point of view along with performance analysis.

Stress can lead to headaches and fatigue, precipitate addictive behaviors (e.g., smoking, alcohol and drug use), and lead to cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Continuous assessment of stress from sensors can be used for timely delivery of a variety of interventions to reduce or avoid stress. We investigate the feasibility of continuous stress measurement via two field studies using wireless physiological sensors --- a four-week study with illicit drug users (n = 40), and a one-week study with daily smokers and social drinkers (n = 30). We find that 11+ hours/day of usable data can be obtained in a 4-week study. Significant learning effect is observed after the first week and data yield is seen to be increasing over time even in the fourth week. We propose a framework to analyze sensor data yield and find that losses in wireless channel is negligible; the main hurdle in further improving data yield is the attachment constraint. We show the feasibility of measuring stress minutes preceding events of interest and observe the sensor-derived stress to be rising prior to self-reported stress and smoking events.

Reflection-in- and -on-action are key elements of creative design. While reflection-in-action has been often studied, reflection-on-action has received less attention. In this paper, we fill this gap by first reporting results from in-depth interviews (N=12) with practicing designers aimed at understanding activities related to reflection-on-action. We found that activities related to reflection-on-action are intentional, repetitive and frequent, design materials are the primary aids for reflective activities, and there is a strong need for better reflection support tools. To address this need, we designed, implemented and evaluated a novel interactive visualization tool -- ReflectionSpace. The tool uses file meta-data and naming conventions to map design materials to the appropriate design phase and context of use and places corresponding representations in a time- and activity-centric visualization that can be navigated at different levels of detail. User feedback from a comparative study reveals that such a representation of design process is more beneficial and preferred relative to the traditional file-centric approach for fostering reflection-on-action.

Reuse of existing presentation materials is prevalent among knowledge workers. However, finding the most appropriate material for reuse is challenging. Existing information management and search tools provide inadequate support for reuse due to their dependence on users' ability to effectively categorize, recall, and recognize existing materials. Based on our findings from an online survey and contextual interviews, we designed and implemented a slide-based contextual recommender, ConReP, for supporting reuse of presentation materials. ConReP utilizes a user-selected slide as a search-key, recommends materials based on similarity to the selected slide, and provides a local-context-based visual representation of the recommendations. Users input provides new insight into presentation reuse and reveals that slide-based search is more effective than keyword-based search, local-context-based visual representation helps in better recall and recognition, and shows the promise of this general approach of exploiting individual slides and local-context for better presentation reuse.

Self-healing is one of the main challenges to growing autonomic pervasive computing. Fault detection and recovery are the main steps of self-healing. Due to the characteristics of pervasive computing the self-healing becomes difficult. In this paper, the challenges of self-healing have been addressed and an approach to develop a self-healing service for autonomic pervasive computing is presented. The self-healing service has been developed and integrated into the middleware named MARKS+ (Middleware Adaptability for Resource discovery, Knowledge usability, and Self-healing). The self-healing approach is being evaluated on a test bed of PDAs. An application is being developed by using the proposed service.

To address the challenges posed by device capacity and capability, and also the nature of ad-hoc network of pervasive computing, a resource discovery model is needed that can resolve security and privacy issues with simple solutions. The use of complex algorithms and powerful fixed infrastructure is infeasible due to the volatile nature of pervasive environment and tiny pervasive devices. In this paper, we present a risk- aware trust based secure resource discovery model, RTSRD (risk-aware trust based secure resource discovery) for a truly pervasive environment. Our model is an adaptive hybrid one that allows both secure and non-secure discovery of services on adaptive trust. RTSRD also incorporates a risk model for sharing resources with unknown devices. Hence, the two contributions of this paper are: adaptive trust, and risk model for resource discovery in pervasive computing environments.

Requests for communication via mobile devices can be disruptive to the current task or social situation. To reduce the frequency of disruptive requests, one promising approach is to provide callers with cues of a receiver's context through an awareness display, allowing informed decisions of when to call. Existing displays typically provide cues based on what can be readily sensed, which may not match what is needed during the call decision process. In this paper, we report results of a four week diary study of mobile phone usage, where users recorded what context information they considered when making a call, and what information they wished others had considered when receiving a call. Our results were distilled into lessons that can be used to improve the design of awareness displays for mobile devices, e.g., show frequency of a receiver's recent communication and distance from a receiver to her phone. We discuss technologies that can enable cues indicated in these lessons to be realized within awareness displays, as well as discuss limitations of such displays and issues of privacy.

In this paper, primarily, we delineate the numerous challenges that can arise in mobile-business (m-business) to provide the highest degree of proliferation of pervasive advertisement. Later, we demonstrate the feasibility of PerAd-Service, an integral part of, MARKS (middleware adaptability for knowledge usability, resource discovery, and self-healing) to address those challenges.

Due to the pervasive nature of current short range, low-power wireless connectivity and easy availability of low-cost light weight mobile devices, it is necessary to have an omnipresent customizable service. It can be used by different types of users different fields such as education, healthcare, marketing, or business, at any time, and at any place. These devices can reach ubiquitously to neighboring devices using a free short range ad hoc network. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no one has designed such a service. In this paper, we present the details of the Ubicomp Assistant (UA), which is designed to accomplish the above objectives. To evaluate the design, we have developed an application which uses UA as a service. It uses MARKS (Middleware Adaptability for Resource Discovery, Knowledge Usability and Self-healing) as an underlying core service provider.

The advancement of available, portable, low cost handheld devices (PDAs, cell phones, etc.), bluetooth, and WiFi has resulted in the users' mobility at unprecedented levels. As these devices can communicate with one another, the combined capabilities can be leveraged to form a useful new set of tools. Presently, pervasive computing is being extended into the sophisticated healthcare sector with the promise of providing an easier and more efficient mode of communication among healthcare professionals. In this paper, we present the details of our application 'Healthcare Aide', which has been designed to provide not only more convenience for doctor-doctor, resident doctor-doctor, patient-doctor and nurse-doctor interaction but also a smooth pathway for real-time decision making along with survey results from users' point view and performance analysis. Our pervasive middleware MARKS (middleware adaptability for resource discovery, knowledge usability and self-healing) provides the underlying support for 'Healthcare Aide' in a completely transparent manner.

A secure resource discovery model for devices running in pervasive computing environments has become significant. Due to the constrained nature of these devices, the need for a model that allows discovery and sharing of resources without putting much overhead on the operation of devices is needed. The dependency on fixed powerful machines for ensuring security is not desired and also not feasible. In this paper, we present a resource discovery model that provides security whenever needed without degrading the performance of the device. We also propose a trust based service-oriented adaptive security mechanism named SSRD (simple and secure resource discovery).

SSRD is a secure resource discovery model for devices running in a pervasive computing environment. SSRD is based on a lightweight trust model. SSRD+ is an extension of the existing SSRD model. In SSRD+, we enhance the trust model by adding dynamic trust relationship and also specifying behavioral characteristics that determine the level of trust among devices. We also add a risk model to address challenges posed by the pervasive and ad hoc nature of the network. These models work together to make the entire discovery process lightweight and secure. In this paper we present details of the trust and risk models. We illustrate the design and implementation of SSRD+ as a whole that optimally explores resources without degrading the performance of the devices while ensuring user security and privacy.

With the tremendous increase in the use of mobile handheld and wearable devices, the pervasive computing arena is becoming stronger and powerful day by day. Despite having various physical constraints, many of the resource-rich functionalities enjoyed by other devices have been incorporated in these tiny devices. This is why different fields of research have developed in this area. There are still some unexplored but crucial features like knowledge usability, resource discovery, and self-healing that deserve further attention. Besides exploration of these areas, implementation and evaluation of these features need to be considered from a security and privacy perspective. In this paper, we illustrate the design and implementation of a middleware MARKS, which incorporates these less-explored areas of pervasive computing, to guarantee optimum utilization of the physical capabilities and also to ensure security and privacy

To facilitate thousands of hand held device users' lookup for services anywhere anytime, the importance of a resource discovery scheme in pervasive computing environments cannot be overlooked. The incorporation of security, adaptability, fault tolerance, and efficiency features is the quest for long but there is no existing resource discovery scheme that can be claimed as "the solution". In this paper, we propose the design of such a discovery mechanism named SAFE-RD, which is an integral part of our on-going research project MARKS (Adaptive Middleware for Resource discovery, Knowledge usability and Self-healing) with illustrative examples.