SmartElevator: revitalizing a legacy device through inexpensive augmentation

Ubiquitous computing holds the promise of a more connected, more convenient, and more information rich world. However, the limited number of pervasive devices actually available greatly restricts the range of functionality currently available to ubiquitous computing applications. We present an approach whereby legacy devices are revitalized as new, pervasive artifacts through augmentation by inexpensive sensors and actuators. While such augmentation is commonplace in prototyping, we argue the technique has practical utility, especially with respect to larger, complex devices. For these devices, often a substantial investment has already been made and invasive retrofitting or replacement would be prohibitively expensive. To ground our approach, we have been investigating the use of this technique to modernize a legacy elevator system at our university. In this paper, we describe technical challenges we have encountered and report on our experience in addressing these challenges.

[1]  M. S. Blois,et al.  What is medical informatics? , 1986, The Western journal of medicine.

[2]  Andrew G. Barto,et al.  Improving Elevator Performance Using Reinforcement Learning , 1995, NIPS.

[3]  M. Resnick,et al.  Programmable Bricks: Toys to Think With , 1996, IBM Syst. J..

[4]  Andy Hopper,et al.  A new location technique for the active office , 1997, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[5]  Ira J. Kalet,et al.  Anatomical information in radiation treatment planning , 1999, AMIA.

[6]  H. Levesque,et al.  Legolog : Inexpensive Experiments in Cognitive Robotics , 2000 .

[7]  Robert Szewczyk,et al.  System architecture directions for networked sensors , 2000, ASPLOS IX.

[8]  D. Box,et al.  Simple object access protocol (SOAP) 1.1 , 2000 .

[9]  Kyo Chul Kang,et al.  Domain-oriented engineering of elevator control software , 2000, SPLC.

[10]  E. Wang,et al.  Teaching freshmen design, creativity and programming with LEGOs and Labview , 2001, 31st Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. Impact on Engineering and Science Education. Conference Proceedings (Cat. No.01CH37193).

[11]  Kristof Van Laerhoven,et al.  How to build smart appliances? , 2001, IEEE Personal Communications.

[12]  Robert S. Giansiracusa,et al.  Radiation Therapy Planning : an Uncommon Application of Lisp , 2001 .

[13]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  Phidgets: easy development of physical interfaces through physical widgets , 2001, UIST '01.

[14]  Jan Borchers,et al.  iStuff : a scalable architecture for lightweight, wireless devices for Ubicomp user interfaces , 2002 .

[15]  Matthew Lease,et al.  PlantCare: An Investigation in Practical Ubiquitous Systems , 2002, UbiComp.

[16]  Matthew Lease,et al.  Making Sensor Networks Practical with Robots , 2002, Pervasive.

[17]  Matthew Lease,et al.  An Improved Model for Recognizing Disfluencies in Conversational Speech , 2004 .

[18]  Frank Stajano,et al.  Security for Ubiquitous Computing , 2002, ICISC.

[19]  Matthew Lease,et al.  Effective Use of Prosody in Parsing Conversational Speech , 2005, HLT.