Software prototype for presence management of special groups

The emergence of special social groups that use networked media applications are largely based on knowledge of their status and presence information. This information can be retrieved by many different means and devices such as asking for user input, or using satellite or network positioning. The same methods can be used in the context of eldercare, helping disabled people, or monitoring other special groups. In this paper we introduce a new concept of presence management developed during an ongoing research project. The concept describes how location information can be used for automated presence status updates without user interaction. The aim of the study is to utilize new and advanced mobile technologies in the context of location-aware mobile applications which we believe is an emerging trend in mobile applications. As there are many ways to implement these applications we expect that the technologies studied in this paper are the most potential alternatives in the future. We also present the overall system architecture, provide an overview of the technologies used, and describe the features currently developed for the prototype system.