Activity-based computing: support for mobility and collaboration in ubiquitous computing

Abstract

For unknown reasons, research into ubiquitous computing seems to pay no attention to collaboration among users in such an environment. This paper presents the design philosophy of activity-based computing (abc) and a technical implementation of it in a ubiquitous computing infrastructure, the ABC framework , which takes collaboration in ubiquitous environments as its starting point. The idea of activity-based computing and the aim of the framework is to: (i) support the human activity by managing its collection of work tasks on a computer , (ii) to support mobility by porting activities across heterogeneous computing environments, (iii) to support asynchronous collaboration by allowing several people to participate in an activity, and (iv) to support synchronous, real-time collaboration by enabling 'desktop conferring' by sharing the activity across several clients. During a period of two years, our framework have been co-designed and evaluated in cooperation with a range of clinicians in a hospital.

Support for activity-based computing in a personal computing operating system

“…In this measurement, high figures (5) indicate that the experimenter judged the participant to make extensive use of the features of ABC. Table 2 shows that on average participants had a high score in the use of ABC and its features.…”

“…Our approach to activity-based computing is rooted in a yearlong engagement in the study of, and design for, hospital work with focus on the challenges of handling parallel activities, interruptions, mobility, sharing, collaboration, coordination, and easy access to large amount of physical and digital information [10,5,6]. In the analysis of the use of contemporary computer technology in hospital work we have seen a range of critical short-comings which pose fundamental challenges to the design of future computer technology.…”

“…support for handling activities, activity suspend/resume, activity roaming, and activity adaptation. Collaborative activity sharing and context awareness has been discussed elsewhere [5,9].…”

“…We call such applications stateful [5]. In the present Windows XP implementation, we differentiate between three types of stateful applications: (i) legacy applications with no programming API, (ii) legacy application with an API, and (iii) applications with full access to the source code.…”

Micro-interactions with NFC-Enabled Mobile Phones

“…For example, platform composition allows devices to share resources at the platform level [14], activity-based computing revolves applications around high-level tasks [1,4], and devices can be organized around a single owner [15]. Our focus on micro-interactions creates ad-hoc compositions in an instant, with context inferred from the interactions themselves.…”