Earticle

This paper presents a middleware platform, Prottoy for the development of smart object systems. A smart object has some specific characteristics e.g., augmentation variation, perceptual feedback provision, push-pull model, etc. In addition a smart object could be stand-alone, co-operative or associated with an external application. Generic pervasive middlewares have no clean support for accommodating all these characteristics of smart objects. Prottoy is designed by carefully observing the characteristics of smart objects and it has taken a core-cloud approach to represent them digitally. A smart object’s common functional features are combined together as a generic core and a collection of supplementary service profiles represents the cloud that can be plugged-in atop the core. Application developers are offered unified interfaces to interact bi-directionally (senseactuate) with the underlying smart objects isolating access issues completely regardless of the smart objects' types and properties. Prottoy's hybrid architecture allows a smart object to be stand-alone, co-operative or a part of an application. The benefit of our approach is twofold. Firstly, the core-cloud artefact framework provides a lucid representation of smart object that accommodates its specific features leading to a generic smart object model. Secondly, Prottoy allows rapid development of smart object systems by providing unified interfaces with high-level abstractions. In this paper, we discuss the background, technical details and the qualitative evaluation of Prottoy.

With the rapid progress on the Internet Technology, many projects have been proposed in terms of remote education system such as WBT (Web-Based Training) and E-learning. Such systems can help learners for studying by themselves based on their own learning history in a virtual world. However, learners usually spend time in the real world during studying, exercising, and the other activities. It seems the systems do not give enough support to learners in the real world. Ubiquitous technologies make it possible to provide services to learners anytime and anywhere in the real world. It means learners can receive more meticulous, individually-targeted support in ubiquitous environments. In this paper, we propose a ubiquitous environment to support college students, professors, and visitors in a laboratory to encourage positive research activities. Actions of people in the Ubiquitous Laboratory (U-Lab) are individually recorded by sensor networks and analyzed to provide suitable supports. Based on these collected information, U-Lab provides services such as to grasp a precise research progress and share research information among students and professors. We also propose a method to advise students to improve their research activities.

In modern days, we must use various high-tech machineries and equipments to get our jobs done and make the life easier. These machineries should be controlled by the homeowner from any location as the homeowner might be away from home at workplace or traveling in a different place in the weekend. Thus a system of remote monitoring and controlling are very much necessary. Smart home is one of these types of system equipped with home appliances which we wish to control smartly from anywhere. Some products are commercially available which allow remote home appliance controlling through internet which is undoubtedly emerging. But it lacks the true sense of real mobility and security, making the remote home appliance controlling a limited term than it is supposed to be. In search of a true remote and adequately secure solution to be really effective and practicable, mobile telephony is better than any other solutions. Mobile phones have become almost an inseparable part of civil lives today. In this paper we introduce a new mechanism so that the ordinary services of the mobile phones can be leveraged to communicate with and control the home appliances and make our homes a really smart one.

Wireless sensor networks receive much attention in these few years due to its wide spectrum of applications. Localization is one of the significant techniques in the ubiquitous sensor networks, and most localization techniques nowadays apply RSSI-based ranging techniques to compute the location of the object in wireless sensor network. However, a wireless sensor network is of a fading-signal environment that comprises noises, and the noises cause RSSI to become unstable and lead to abrupt distance estimates. In this paper, we propose Verification-Based Localization Method (VBLM) to alleviate the effect of the unstable signal and provide the high-accuracy location estimates in wireless sensor environments. The basic idea of VBLM is to prune noisy signals in the localization process. In our method, the sensor node would use another neighboring beacon to assist to verify the quality of received signal under acceptable communication cost, and thus, the noisy signals can be removed to avoid increasing the error in the localization. The experimental results show that VBLM indeed reduces the localization error in the unstable signal sensor networks than other localization methods.

The process of evaluating a built environment for accessibility is known as “accessibility assessment.” Determining accessibility is closely related to the problem of determining possible motions of a specific kinematic structure – given an environment and a mobile device, how much of the environment is accessible? Given these similarities, here the accessibility assessment process is reformulated as a motion planning problem. Rather than treating each of the degrees of freedom ‘equally’ while planning, we explore a hierarchical characteristic of all of the degrees of freedom when constructing the roadmap. The approach is demonstrated on simulated environments as well as on a student residence at York University.