Towards dynamic and cooperative multi-device personal computing

Abstract

In the 2WEAR project we have explored the paradigm of cooperative multi-device personal computing, where different wearable, portable and infrastructure elements communicate with each other in an ad-hoc fashion. The physical decoupling of the elements that form the system results in great flexibility, making it possible for the user to change its configuration in a simple way and at any point in time. However, it is precisely due to this dynamic nature of the system that makes the exploitation of the distributed available resources difficult. An additional challenge is to achieve this without forcing the user to (continuously) provide input to the various devices of the system in an explicit manner. Towards this objective, advanced mechanisms were developed on top of an open communication and discovery framework, which address key issues of distributed user interface and storage management on behalf of the application programmer. For the interested reader, a more elaborate introduction of the syntax-based protocols is given in (Gutknecht 2003). The UI framework is described in detail in (Savidis and Stephanidis 2005a; Savidis and Stephanidis 2005b). Finally, work on different aspects of core runtime support for personal area network computing and a more updated version of the storage management facility is reported in (Karypidis and Lalis 2005) and (Karypidis and Lalis 2006), respectively. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.