Evaluating an Activity-centered Ubiquitous Computing Framework for User Assistance in Public Spaces

Abstract

This paper describes a ubiquitous computing framework for supporting activities that are strongly associated to a specific physical environment and that are performed by occasional visitors. Our framework implements an activity-centered approach to ubiquitous computing, by defining a conceptual model inspired by Activity Theory and implementing a software infrastructure derived from this conceptual model. The framework has been evaluated from the user view-point by experiments run at different public spaces. We are proposing to perform an additional experiment with the framework, providing user assistance to Interacção 2006 participants and organizers.