Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSDescription:
Mobile services have increased both in number and complexity in the past few years. This means that in order to get the most out of these services, less experienced users will have a hard time configuring them by hand. To address this issue, we must find new and innovative solutions to assist the user in this process. Furthermore, we live in a society of the immediate: everyone wants access to resources to be fast, simple and secure. It is also known that most of the users are laymen when referring to advanced configuration of mobile phone, resulting in some inertia in the use of applications and functionalities.
The survey of the State-of-the-Art in this field shows that currently there is no complete solution to this problem. However, the related work shows that some of the problems are already being addressed and that with Near Field Communication it is possible to develop new solutions, successfully reducing user intervention.
Near Field Communication (NFC) provides a unique opportunity to introduce new business paradigms in terms of interaction and ease of use. This technology allows short-range communications between NFC-enabled devices by simply holding them near each other, typically with minimal user intervention.
What mechanisms can one use to minimize a user’s effort to configure his mobile device? What technologies are available that cope with this problem? How can one leverage them? What mechanisms can be used to ensure their security? How could service providers take advantage of such service? This dissertation provides an answer for these questions by proposing an architecture that defines a new logic layer that can be used by vendors and developers to configure applications and the mobile phone itself. It supports multiple location-based service configurations, with or without authentication, for different users. The proof-of-concept prototypes show promising results, allowing multiple services to be configured simultaneously and effortlessly.
Author: Tiago Babo
Type: MSc thesis
Partner: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Year: 2013