Supporting Localized Activities in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

The design of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems must be centered on users’ activity in order to bring computing systems closer to people. Adopting an activity-centered approach to the design of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems leads us to seek to understand: a) how humans naturally accomplish an activity; and b) how computing artifacts from both the environmental and personal domains may contribute to the accomplishment of an activity. This work particularly focuses on localized activities, i.e., activities having a strong association with a specific physical environment. This work investigates how ubiquitous computing environments can publish and offer user-centered activity support to users with heterogeneous personal environments, by exploring mechanisms allowing for the integration between local and personal environments.