Removing The Barriers to Ubiquitous Services: A User Perspective

An emerging challenge to the realization of ubiquitous, mobile telecommunications is not ostensibly based on any underlying transport or network protocol but on the sheer complexity of technology presented to the user. Common scenarios of future mobile telecommunications often involve multiple devices with varied characteristics and rich and diverse multimedia applications delivered over heterogeneous wireless environments. Most users, however, cannot be expected to appreciate these technologies or participate in its configuration. To address this issue, a user-centric system is proposed that aims to hide complexity from the user. Incorporating concepts of the personal distributed environment, the proposed system uses a personal assistant agent to interact with, and react to, the environment and a personal content manager to be aware of content types, device capabilities and manage a user's digital content on behalf of the user