Ubiquitous phone system

Abstract

Portable smart devices, such as Pocket PC Phones and Smartphones, have become common devices in our daily life. However, they still provide technology-oriented human interface. In future ubiquitous environment, context-awareness is the key to make the human interface of smart devices become human-centric. In this paper, we design and develop a ubiquitous phone system, referred to as UbiPhone, which provides context-aware, human-centric phone service based on rich context acquired from various sensing sources. The most unique feature of UbiPhone is that a user only needs one click, UbiPhone will automatically choose the right communication channel and device to connect to the callee. UbiPhone also provides intelligent feedback service when the callee is not available, such as when to call back according to callee's calendar, whether to automatically dial back when the callee becomes available, who to contact with if this is an emergency call and the callee is not reachable. In particular, social network is adopted to reason who would be the most appropriate person to help the caller find the callee immediately. Prototype of UbiPhone has been developed to show its feasibility. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.