Mobility Agents

At a talk given today at TECFA on Video Games meet Ubiquitous Computing: The Collective Simulation of a Human Being, Alexander Repenning shortly mentioned Mobility Agents. The Mobility Agents system provides multimodal prompts to a traveler on handheld devices helping with the recognition of the “right” bus, for instance. At the same time, it communicates to a caregiver the location of the traveler and trip status.

An article describes the findings at several levels. At a technical level, it outlines pragmatic issues including display issues, GPS reliability and networking latency arising from using handheld devices in the field. At a cognitive level, it describes the need to customize information to address different degrees and combinations of cognitive disabilities. At a user interface level, it describes the use of different mission status interface approaches ranging from 3D real-time visualizations to SMS and instant messaging-based text interfaces.

Repenning, A. and Ioannidou, A. 2006. Mobility agents: guiding and tracking public transportation users. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual interfaces (Venezia, Italy, May 23 – 26, 2006). AVI ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 127-134.

Relation to my thesis: Excellent reference on a urban-scale use of a location-aware system highlighting both the technical and user interface approaches and issues. In some aspects, this research project made me think of GPS System to Raise the Confidence in the Ability to Travel.