Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two.

Information is useless unless it is used whilst still applicable. Having a system that notifies the user of important messages using the most appropriate medium and device will benefit users that rely on time critical information. There are several existing systems and models for mobile notification as well as for adaptive mobile notification using context awareness. Current models and systems are typically designed for a specific set of mobile devices, modes and services. Communication however, can take place in many different modes, across many different devices and may originate from many different sources. The aim of this research was to develop a model for adaptive mobile notification using context awareness. An extensive literature study was performed into existing models for adaptive mobile notification systems using context awareness. The literature study identified several potential models but no way to evaluate and compare the models. A set of requirements to evaluate these models was developed and the models were evaluated against these criteria. The model satisfying the most requirements was adapted so as to satisfy the remaining criteria. The proposed model is extensible in terms of the modes, devices and notification sources supported. The proposed model determines the importance of a message, the appropriate device and mode (or modes) of communication based on the user‘s context, and alerts the user of the message using these modes. A prototype was developed as a proof-of-concept of the proposed model and evaluated by conducting an extensive field study. The field study highlighted the fact that most users did not choose the most suitable mode for the context during their initial subscription to the service. The field study also showed that more research needs to be done on an appropriate filtering mechanism for notifications. Users found that the notifications became intrusive and less useful the longer they used them.

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published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

M.Sc. (Computer Science) / In the rapidly evolving world that we live in, the methods by which items are purchased are starting to be revolutionized. In a developing country such as South Africa, financial institutions within the banking sector are starting to implement their own systems or processes to process bank transactions. These processes include the identification and authentication of bank transactions, as well as the validation of the integrity of bank transactions between buyer and merchant. The changing of these processes by the banking sector could be viewed as a result of the increase in mobile device users. The purpose of the research presented within this dissertation is to explore an alternative method for identifying and authenticating a user in order to authorize a purchase made from a mobile device. The research will include evidence for the necessity of an alternative process as well as investigate the current technology by examining a few mobile banking solutions provided by the banking sector. The alternative process will be based upon a prototype design, which will employ Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to forward the purchase information from a point-of-sale (POS) device to the client’s mobile device, as well as employ fingerprint recognition technology to improve the identification and authentication of a user in order to authorize the purchase. The prototype will be known as BankAuth. The researcher hopes that this dissertation encourages other academics to discover new approaches in further researching mobile banking solutions.

Cell phones are the most prevalent computing devices. They come pre-loaded with many different functions such as a digital camera, a mobile web browser, a streaming media player, games, GPS navigation, and more. However, if the banks have their way, the cell phone may become the preferred method of payment for everyday purchases. When that happens, there will be a need to securely send and store the receipt information so that they can be quickly analyzed. This thesis will demonstrate the use of a Digital Receipt system to manage transactions using Bluetooth technology to communicate between mobile devices. This expands on a previous thesis titled "Bi-Directional Information Exchange with Handheld Computing Devices." (Qaddoura, 2006) Cell phones have now been added into the setup. Thereby, expanding the Digital Receipt concept to include many more affordable computing devices, thus, increasing the likelihood that this application will be accepted by the general public.

[pt] As comunidades sociais online sao cada vez mais utilizadas como plataformas para diversas formas de interacao e compartilhamento de informacões, tanto em forma sincrona (em tempo real) quanto de forma assincrona. A perspectiva do acoplamento da computacao social com a capacidade atual de sensoriamento dos dispositivos moveis torna possível o desenvolvimento de aplicativos sociais com maior grau de sensibilidade ao contexto, de deteccao de atividades de individuos e grupos e também de uma interacao social implicita atraves do compartilhamento de informacoes de contexto. Alem do contexto pervasivo obtido a partir dos dispositivos moveis, os veinculos e interacoes do usuario nas redes sociais tambem podem ser considerados ricas fontes de informacao para aplicacoes pervasivas. O Mobile Social Gateway (MoSoGw) e um servico web que fornece uma interface generica para transferencia de informacao de uma forma otimizada entre os dispositivos moveis e diferentes redes sociais, bem como servicos de terceiros. Sua interface e generica na medida em que torna transparente para o aplicativo movel cliente a interacao com essas redes sociais e servicos de terceiros. O desempenho e a escalabilidade tambem foram levados em consideracao durante a concepcao e implementacao do MoSoGw. No contexto desta dissertacao, o termo escalabilidade deve ser entendido como a capacidade que a aplicacao tem de suportar um volume crescente de usuarios móveis ou estar preparada para esse crescimento. Assim, tanto a arquitetura quanto as tecnologias utilizadas em seu desenvolvimento foram cuidadosamente escolhidas de forma a escalar para milhares de clientes e suportar o alto volume de requisicoes simultaneas. / [en] Online social communities are increasingly used as platforms for manifold forms of interaction and information sharing, both in real-time and asynchronous. The prospect of coupling social computing with sensing capabilities of current mobile devices makes it possible to provide social applications with higher degrees of context-awareness, detection of activities of individuals and groups, as well as implicit social interaction through sharing of context-sensitive information. In addition to the pervasive context obtained from the mobile devices, the links and user interactions in social networks can be regarded as rich sources of information for pervasive applications. Mobile Social Gateway (MoSoGw) is a web service that provides a generic interface for optimized information transfer between mobile devices and different social networks, as well as third-party web services. Its interface is generic in that it makes transparent to the mobile client application the interaction with social networks and web services. Performance and scalability were major concerns when designing and implementing MoSoGw. Hence, its architecture and all technologies used in its development have been carefully chosen so as to scale to thousands of clients and support high volume of concurrent requests.

College campuses can be large, confusing, and intimidating for new students and visitors. Finding the campus may be easy using a GPS unit or Google Maps directions, but this is not the case when you are actually on the campus. There is no service that provides directional assistance for the campus itself. This thesis proposes a driver assistant application running on an Android platform that can direct drivers to different buildings and parking lots in the campus. The application's user interface lets the user select a user type, a campus, and a destination through use of drop down menus and buttons. Once the user submits the needed information, then the next portion of the application runs in the background. The app retrieves the Campus Map XML created by the mapping tool that was constructed for this project. The XML data containing all the map elements is then parsed and stored in a hierarchal data structure. The resulting objects are then used to construct a campus graph, on which an altered version of Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm is executed. When the path to the destination has been discovered, the campus map with the computed path overlaid is displayed on the user's device, showing the route to the desired destination. / by Iana Zankina. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

No sistema brasileiro de saúde, cabe aos Centros de Saúde o papel de órgão provedor de assistência médica primária. Para que esse papel seja cumprido com responsabilidade e eficácia, se mostrou fundamental a condução de programas públicos de atenção primária que envolvam visitas domiciliares aos pacientes. O objetivo desses programas, tais como o Estratégia de Saúde da Família (ESF), também conhecido como Programa de Saúde da Família (PSF), é o de melhorar a qualidade do serviço de saúde prestado à população por meio da aproximação entre equipes de saúde e a comunidade, permitindo, dessa forma, uma migração do paradigma de tratamento de doenças para o de promoção da saúde. No entanto, apesar da importância desses programas para a organização e articulação do sistema de atenção primária, as atividades de atenção domiciliar são normalmente conduzidas com pouco ou nenhum suporte de Tecnologia da Informação (TI). Esta pesquisa de mestrado tem por objetivo mostrar a definição e o desenvolvimento de um sistema móvel que auxilie os profissionais de saúde na coleta de informações dos pacientes que usufruem dos serviços de saúde citados acima. O projeto recebeu o nome de Projeto Borboleta e durante o tempo desta pesquisa várias versões do software foram desenvolvidas. Essas versões geraram protótipos do sistema que foram submetidos a testes em campo e, a partir da avaliação realizada pelos profissionais de saúde, surgiram alterações diversas. / In the Brazilian Health System, the healthcare centers have the role of primary health care providers. To successfully fulfill this responsibility with more dedication and effectiveness, the Brazil- ian government created public primary health programs of homecare where the health professionals visit the patient\'s homes. Those programs, as the Family Health Strategy (also known as Fam- ily Health Program), aim to raise the quality of health services provided by the centers to the neighboring community. This enables a new way of treatment of diseases and health care promo- tion. Nevertheless, those important programs have almost no Information Technology mechanisms helping them to manage the processes involved by the program. This master research objective is to present a definition and development of a mobile system that helps the healthcare providers to collect relevant data on the patient status on the site of the homecare treatment. The project was named as the Borboleta Project and during, the development of this research, several versions were released. Those versions were tested as prototypes on a real situation until a more stable version fitted the health professionals needs. Other objectives of this research were to analyze the solutions adopted by the development team, to describe the difficulties encountered by the team while working on this mobile system, and finally to show which were the feedbacks of the usage of the system on the field, during the test phase.