An activity-centered ubiquitous computing framework for public spaces

Abstract

This paper presents ActivitySpot, a ubiquitous computing framework for supporting localized activities, i.e., activities strongly associated to a specific physical environment, performed by occasional visitors. The ActivitySpot 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. ActivitySpot has been evaluated by user studies run at different public spaces and results demonstrate the framework's suitability to the targeted type of environment. Future work is going to deal with the evaluation from the designer/developer perspective.