History of Ubiquitous & Wearable Computing Alexander Nelson January 19, 2018 University of Arkansas - Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering
Responses Goals for the course: How wearable devices connect & transfer data Sustainable and new technology Communication between software and mobile hardware Wearable healthcare Hardware aspects Working with & designing wearables Non-traditional programming skills Working with sensors Designing Products 1
History of Ubiquituous Computing
Three Eras of Modern Computing According to Roy Want, Modern computing can be characterized by three eras: 1. Mainframe Computer 2. Personal Computer (PC) 3. Small networked portable computer products These eras would be based on the dominant mode of computing in that era 2
Prevalence of Computing 3
Diffusion of Computing That characterization may be a little broad New modes are adopted, and old modes are adapted Ex: Mainframes? Cloud Computing PaaS/SaaS/IaaS offerings 4
Wireless Communications
Xerox PARC Embedded devices should be able to communicate with nearby devices & infrastructure Need to limit communication range Preserve bandwidth 5
Spatial Capacity Spatial Capacity: Weiser (1993) - Bits per second per cubic meter Intel (2008) produced the following 1 : IEEE 802.11b 1,000 (bit/s)/m 2 Bluetooth 30,000 (bit/s)/m 2 IEEE 802.11a 83,000 (bit/s)/m 2 Ultra-wideband 1,000,000 (bit/s)/m 2 1 Bluetooth & UWB are evolving standards, and these numbers will have changed 6
Spectral Efficiency Spectral Efficiency How efficiently a protocol uses the available physical communication channel Given in terms of (bit/s)/hz 7
Efficient Networking Need to maximize use of bandwidth led to development of new radio techniques e.g. Bluetooth Near Field Communications (NFC) Zigbee WiFi 8
Invisible/Calm Computing
Xerox PARC Tradtional computing paradigm mouse keyboard is attention consuming and solitary Weiser wanted to integrate computing into work practices instead of as a separate activity Ex. Reading printed pages does not require knowledge of the techniques to produce the page 9
Invisible Computing Computing that is invisible gets out of the way Enables computing practices that don t require specific knowledge of the computer 10
Calm Computing Traditional computing tries to virtualize the physical world Make digital versions of physical objects inside the computing environment Calm computing is computerized versions of physical objects e.g. E-book readers (Kindle, Nook, etc...) 11
Pads, Tabs, Boards
Pads, Tabs, Boards Top: Tab & IR basestation, Left: Liveboard, Right: Pads 12
Minimum set of usable devices PARC wanted to test Ubicomp ideas Come up with the minimum set of products to produce to test Imperial measurement analog: Tabs inch scale devices, specific Pads foot scale devices, more general Boards yard scale device, immovable, part of the built environment 13
Communication Ceiling-mounted basestations creating a defacto microcellular communication network Basestations communicated with tabs using infrared (for low power, would now use RF) Pads communicated with basestaions using a short-range near-field radio (3-4 meter range, 250kbps) Boards wired into traditional computing workstation 14
Location Tabs were easily carried, and could serve as location beacons Led to the concept of context-aware computing e.g. a Tab could be used to control the room temperature 15
Context-Aware Computing Context is difficult to model, has many dimensions e.g. location, user identity, other nearby devices, time, environment PARC Tabs enabled orientation sensors to change the display Also had an application called Proximity Browser to view files accessed at the current location at a previous time 16
IBM Research: Pervasive Computing
Pervasive Computing IBM Mobile & Pervasive Computing mid 1990s Business unit dedicated to commercializing pervasive systems In 1999, created a system for Swissair passengers to use web-enabled cell phones to check-in & board with just a phone 17
Influence of Mobile on Pervasive & Ubiquitous Wireless computing platforms running standard OSes became a major driver of pervasive technology Limiting platforms decreases development time 18
ITRON & Cooltown
ITRON Professor Ken Sakamura from Tokyo University developed T-Engines & the ITRON real-time operating system Krikke, J., IEEE Pervasive Computing 4(2), 2005. Open-source license, allow development, and improvement without pushing changes back to source tree 19
Arduino & Raspberry Pi Arduino Raspberry Pi Open source hardware & software Microcontroller kits for digital devices Large open-source community Small single-board computers Debian Linux based Large development community 20
Cooltown Hewlett Packard (HP) Tags implemented unique IDs or URLs so that all objects have a web presence Cooltown Distributed system to represent people, places, and things in the system 21
Other Ubiqiutous Computing Applications
InfoPad UC Berkeley (1998) Access real-time media in indoor environment Used a thin-client model with two wireless radios: High-rate downlink for display updates Low-rate uplink for keys, mouse, pen events 22
Wearable Computing Thorp & Shannon Roulette timer (44% edge in roulette) 23
Wearable Computing Glasses (2008) Twiddler 47 WPM typing 24
Smart Objects MediaCup (1997-2001) University of Karlsruhe Smart-Its Collaboration between Karlsruhe & other institutes 16 related projects 25
2007 Today iphone introduced in 2007 Smartphones sold by year 26
2007 Today Effect of IoT & Connected Its Does NOT include computers, mobiles, tablets Gartner (2017) reduces their numbers (8.4M 2017, 20.4M 2020) 27