3.1 Ubiquitous Computing
In his seminal work about the computer for the twenty-first century, Weiser stated
that “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves
into the fabric of everyday life until they’re indistinguishable from it” [12]. Weiser
coined the term Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) to describe a new era of computing
that he expected would be achievable within twenty years. Today, Weiser’s vision
appears almost as utopian as it did twenty years ago. Nevertheless, important progress
has been made and several enabling technologies have been developed during this
period. Davies and Gellerson suggested that software engineering issues lie at the
heart of the remaining challenges [13]. They point out that, while computer and networking
hardware have advanced as predicted, ubicomp lacks middleware to allow
“us [to] combine components to form applications unforeseen at the time of their
deployment”. Want and Pering point out that the limitations on ubicomp progress
have moved to the higher levels of abstraction, primarily into the software area [14].
They argue that software capabilities have not advanced at a pace that can take full
advantage of the hardware and networking infrastructure.
Significant advances have been made when it comes to incorporating spatial information
into user context models. User positioning services based on satellite data,
cell phone tower triangulation or wireless access point localization have become
broadly available in consumer devices, and are actively used in Internet services, e.g.,
Google Latitude, and location-ware advertising. Mobile software applications are
increasingly utlizing contextual information about their user’s location in order to
lighten cognitive burdens, e.g., the personal task manager OmniFocus associates tasks
with user locations (omnigroup.com).
Other types of contextual information have also found their way into current Internet
applications, including information about the device being used (e.g., smartphone
vs. laptop), the identity/role of the user, as well as temporal details. Contextual information
pertaining to processes or goal-directed sequences of actions performed by
users are less commonly used in current Internet applications, except for very specific
domains, such as navigation systems and e-learning applications.
Researchers have investigated general approaches to integrating context-awareness
into the Web Engineering process. Kaltz and Ziegler have proposed a context system
as pluggable module that can be added as a filter or lens to general Web software
[15], while Jahnke et al. have developed a context system as an extension to general
Web portal software [16].
Current research challenges in ubiquitous computing can be partitioned into two
categories: (1) challenges with perceiving implicit human input, and (2) challenges in
The Smart Internet as a Catalyst for Health Care Reform 31
actuating system behaviour. Schmidt defines implicit human computer interaction as
“an action performed by the user that is not primarily aimed to interact with a computerized
system but which such a system understands as input” [17]. Researchers
have warned that the dynamic and fluid nature of human context is extremely difficult
to model in computer based systems; they have advised that any context-aware system
using such information should be engineered under the assumption of a high
likelihood of “getting things wrong”. Consequently, these systems should act conservatively,
clearly indicate actions taken and leave risky actions up to the user [18].
These considerations indicate that an augmented ability to model and reason about
human context is a pivotal prerequisite for advancing the vision of ubicomp and the
Smart Internet.