ENABLED project will develop location detection algorithms that are based on Wireless LAN, Bluetooth and GPS.

The algorithms will be able to determine the location of the user whether they are in an indoor or outdoor environment. Information about the area as well as the navigation aids will be provided to the user through the multimodal interface.

Other applications such as a control panel for the household appliances will also be developed in this project.

The specific objectives in this area include:

• Implementing haptic interfaces for the portable devices.
  
  
• Developing location detection algorithms based on Bluetooth or other wireless technology (e.g. GPS).
  
  
• Developing applications on PDAs, tablet PCs and other portable computers.
  
  
• Developing middleware between fixed and wireless networks.
  
  

The enhancement of the state of the art in this project is the combination of different modalities integrated into one context-aware system that leads to innovative multimodal User Interfaces for visually impaired people to access information over the Internet.

Workpackage activities:

The primary objective of ENABLED is to realise a coherent interface between web content and any other relevant services that are resident in the fixed network, and the devices that are resident in an end user's Personal Area Network (PAN). The interface between the fixed network and the user's PAN will be wireless. Furthermore, as the services provided to the user's PAN will vary according to the assistive applications used, the interface will need to be configurable in order to provide the required quality of service (QoS) to each application.

Particular innovative aspects of this workpackage include:

• The use of layered multicasting techniques to simultaneously transmit web content, which is formatted differently according to the sensory capabilities and disabilities of the end users. While layered multicasting has conventionally been considered as a scalable approach to streaming video and audio services, we believe that this is the first time that it has been applied to this type of application.
  
  
• The use of policies to auto-configure the connections that have to support the services to the devices on a user's PAN. We believe that this is also the first time that policies have been used to interact with embedded and wearable devices. It is nevertheless a perquisite for the disabled, who will not be able to do this for themselves. This raises a number of interesting challenges including response time and stability/reliability of the configuration policy.
  
  
• While the interconnection of wearable devices to the Internet is not new, we believe that the approach of using a programmable middleware architecture to facilitate dynamic deployment of services to a WPAN is.
  
  

Current research into programmable architectures for Wireless networks (e.g. WINE, BRAIN, Mobilware) do not consider how to reprovision for changing QoS requirements of the different types of applications.