Context-based document management in smart living environments

Abstract

Nowadays an increasingly wide variety of multimedia devices can be networked together in ever-growing smart environments. Although these networks, thanks to mobile technology and Wi-Fi, are almost ubiquitous by now, the players therein are still working largely distinct from one another. To simply play a file on the playback device A, which is originally housed on device B, is therefore a complicated task, despite the theoretical possibility provided by existing networking. Especially playing and viewing files on multimedia devices under various circumstances and limited reproduction capabilities is a non-trivial problem. Current solutions from industry still put little interoperable approaches in proprietary systems. Individual multimedia devices of the same manufacturer can be combined intelligently, but with respect to the usability the system scales poorly, the (also physical) distribution increases the difficulty of access to the functions and control is largely independent of the user’s context. In this work, a solution is developed, which focuses in particular on the context-based playback of files: sending video, music, image and text files to output devices with different display options, as well as the distribution of these multimedia files between devices. Activities are centered on a mobile device for visualizing the spatial distribution of all devices, including the user’s position and the intuitive movement of files of various types between them.