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Addressing the needs of mobile users

Abstract

Mobile phones hold the promise of enabling the ubiquitous computing vision, bringing computing power into our daily lives. Using sensors and actuators built into the devices we carry, applications can provide us with context-aware information delivery. Ubiquitous computing systems can use sensing capabilities and information access to help people accomplish their tasks and take advantage of unseen opportunities. The high mobile phone penetration rate across the world makes this platform ideal for building many of these advanced applications. In order to enable more advanced mobile applications, we face several technological and human challenges. Although mobile phones today are similar to computers from a decade ago they are still limited in their computation, network, storage, and input capabilities. These areas are rapidly improving to enable further innovation in mobile computing. More important than the technical challenges are the human challenges. Unlike desktop or nomadic computing, being mobile means there is an fundamental problem of limited attention that must be dealt with. Mobile users are often engaged in several tasks at once; trying to stay active in their main task and interact with their mobile device at the same time. A lack of attentional resources naturally limits the amount of interaction one can have with his mobile device, hence the need for technology and applications that are designed with the users' attentional resources in mind. Addressing this fundamental human problem alongside the other technical challenges open the way for advancing the ubiquitous computing vision. This dissertation provides a structure to the rapidly expanding mobile space by contributing work that focuses on addressing the fundamental problem that mobile users face, limited attention span . The contributions of this dissertation are three-fold: 1) an understanding of the fundamental problem that mobile users face, which is often being engaged in another task while trying to gather information, 2) demonstration of using low-fidelity mobile phone sensors for context-awareness that can be used to alleviate the problems mobile users face, and 3) a description of the unique character of ubiquitous computing applications and the promise for changing the way we live in our mobile world. These core contributions demonstrate the problems that mobile users face, as well as several technological and design solutions to lessen the burden that they feel. Future mobile advancements will need to account for the lack of attentional resources in order to build systems that help improve people's lives by enhancing the ubiquitous computing vision

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