Flow-driven Interactions for Adaptive Pervasive Applications

The era of ubiquitous and pervasive computing technology opens the world for new pervasive applications and services within the physical surroundings. Often users find themselves dealing and interacting with multiple applications simultaneously to achieve certain goals to satisfy certain motive. Currently, pervasive computing applications are individually created and tailored with little or no consideration of the users’ overall goals and intentions. My research investigates the concept of flow-driven interactions as a prominent and innovative model for goal-driven activities carried out by users in the pervasive computing setup. Flow-driven interaction model is aimed at overcoming problems such as interaction consistency, losing orientation, context switching and interface adaptation, resulted from user interaction with multiple pervasive applications, devices and objects. 1 Problem Statement and Research Question My research is investigating the impact of the flow concept on human interactions in pervasive computing applications. A flow is a sequence of goal-driven activities carried out to achieve certain motives. Hypothesis: flow-driven interactions are naturally compatible with the adaptive and dynamic nature of pervasive computing applications; as such interactions adapt according to the environment and preserve the interaction consistency across multiple pervasive applications in the physical surroundings. Applying this concept engages many important questions, three of which will be investigated in this research: