By creating a handheld computer that succeeded where so many other palm computers had failed, Palm Computing quickly gained popularity in the personal organizer market in 1996 and 1997. Today the Palm OS accounts for over 80% of all operating systems installed on handheld computers. In the addition, over the past several years, new open documentation standards, freely available Software Develop...

Small humanoid robots available today often lack computing power and vision sensors. They frequently consist only of servos and microcontroller boards. We propose to use off-the-shelf handheld computers, Pocket PCs and ultra-portable PCs, to make them autonomous. These computers are lightweight, compact, robust, affordable, and have many interfaces. It is not hard to attach them to an existing ...

Penn State Abington has been exploring the application of handheld technology to the interface and control of autonomous mobile robots for educational purposes. The handheld or personal digital assistant (PDA) is an inexpensive computer that supports a wide range of mobile software applications, and features serial, infrared, and RF communication capabilities. In one application, undergraduate ...

Online access to biomedical information from handheld computers will be a valuable adjunct to other popular medical applications if information delivery systems are designed with handheld computers in mind. The goal of this project is to discover design principles to facilitate practitioners' access to online medical information at the point-of-care. A prototype system was developed to serve as...

Answers to clinical questions occurring during healthcare practitioner/patient interaction can be often found in National Library of Medicine's (NLM) databases. The recent advances in wireless handheld computers promise to make them a widely used tool to deliver needed information to the practitioner at the point of service. This paper addresses challenges in organizing and presenting informati...

Despite recent increases in the processing power of handheld computers, often called palmtops, the devices continue to function primarily as personal information organizers. We believe adding mass storage to handheld computers will expand the usefulness of the devices. We propose a storage hierarchy, involving a hard disk and large software controlled flash memory cache, that lowers the power c...

Educational use of handheld computers is becoming more common. It is therefore important to examine differences between standard educational interactions, and possibilities offered by handheld devices. Handheld computers allow the opportunity to study at times and locations where individualised interactions would not normally be possible or convenient. Conditions in such locations may different...

With today’s wireless technologies, such as BlueTooth and IEEE 802.11, connecting handheld devices and conventional computers together is no longer an occasional event for synchronization. Instead, devices can be frequently in close, interactive communication. Many environments, such as offices, meeting rooms, and classrooms already contain computers, and the smart homes of the future will have...

Personal Digital Assitants (PDAs) have become one of the important tools in our life. Their popularity are due to their small size and mobility which enable them to be carried anywhere. Along with their popularity, handheld devices are starting to become the target for the attackers, who are mainly interested in gaining the data stored in handheld devices. Therefore, security of handheld device...