Summary

This chapter has both investigated and demonstrated the feasibility of employing context-awareness in software and supporting its development through an underlying application framework. The framework is based on a Post-It metaphor whereby digital resources can be placed in context and triggered when the user enters or approaches that context. In the creation of the framework and a trial context-ware application, a number of issues have been explored. Strategies for obtaining context information from sensor devices were investigated in addition to methods of representing the resulting data collected (and the need to keep these two areas separate). We proposed different methods of improving the performance of trigger checking and examined the phenomenon of border-hovering and techniques to compensate for it. Finally, we explored the HCI issues that arise as a result of the unconventional types of environment, hardware, software, and data that both user and computer are exposed to. The work on context-aware tools for ecology fieldwork that is presented in the next chapter continues our exploration of context-aware applications where the electronic Post-It note left off. The fieldwork tools are more sophisticated and designed for ‘real world’ use in the field with a large user base that helped us to evaluate their usability. Although triggering was not to have such a prominent role in the work, the nature and use of context and HCI issues are very much at the forefront.

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Whereas the previous chapter described our context-aware work at the supporting framework level, this chapter describes our work on developing context-aware tools at the end-user application level. The aim of this work is to explore some novel applications of context-awareness and to ascertain how useful and feasible stick-e notes, and, more importantly, context-aware tools in general, would be in assisting in some real-world activities.

We chose ecology fieldwork as our application domain with the aim of providing ecologists with some form of context-aware computer that could support their various fieldwork activities. This domain seemed well suited to our research for two reasons in particular:

Mobility within their environment, and the observation of that environment, is inherent in the ecologist’s fieldwork activities, i.e. a changing context is central to their work and hence an ideal place in which to deploy context-aware tools.

Although GISs (Geographical Information Systems) and other supporting software packages abound in the desktop computing environment there is currently little practical computing support for ecologists whilst in the field.

The tools that we present in this chapter aim to rectify this situation by providing ecology fieldworkers, and also fieldworkers from other disciplines (e.g. geologists, maintenance workers, etc.), with context-aware computing support in the field. A large part of this work was carried out under the “Mobile Computing in a Fieldwork Environment” project [Pascoe and Ryan 2000 - #100], the aim of which has been to promote the use of existing mobile computing hardware in higher education fieldwork settings through the development of new software tools. The development of these fieldwork tools and our close collaboration with the ecologists has allowed us to

explore some interesting issues of context-aware applications and also to develop a computing solution that has enabled us to judge the usefulness and practicality of context-aware technology in a “real world” setting. This is especially valuable, as context-aware applications all too often are confined to the research laboratory rather than the real world.

In this chapter we first present our assessment of the general application needs of ecology fieldworkers, worked out in collaboration with some ecology researchers and students in the Isle of Mull, followed by a description of the tools that were developed. We describe the extensive use of these tools in a giraffe behavioural study in Kenya, and the issues provoked by this usage, before concluding with the exploration of a novel context-aware application for identifying individual rhinoceroses.

3.1 Investigating the Ecologist’s Needs

A group of ecologists from Manchester Metropolitan University agreed to collaborate with us in the development of the fieldwork tools and invited us to attend a number of fieldwork expeditions. These expeditions enabled us to gain a better understanding of their work, to ascertain their requirements, to test out early prototypes, and to gather feedback and suggestions. Before our first such venture into the field we developed an initial prototype of what we envisioned a fieldwork tool to be. This first prototype allowed us to demonstrate to the ecologists the possibilities of such tools, which in turn helped in gathering more concrete feedback and suggestions from them as to what functionality they would need and/or like to have.

Based on our previous experiences in developing the electronic Post-It note program we switched development platforms from the MS-DOS based HP-200LX to the U.S. Robotics Pilot handheld computer (in subsequent incarnations called PalmPilot and Palm). The platform change was made because, compared to the HP-200LX, all aspects of the Pilot’s ergonomics, operating system, and user interface seemed more suited to being used in the field (see Figure 8 for a photo of the physical device).

The only disadvantages of the platform were the strictly limited memory and processor resources. These disadvantages will probably always hold in the immediate future: it has been said that small portable devices will always have a tenth the power and memory of