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.