Runtime middleware for the generation of adaptive user interfaces on resource-constrained devices

Mobile computing imposes a profound level of challenges on human-computer interaction because applications are used in the move and services are accessed in different situations. Current approaches favor the design of an interactive system that is suited for a predefined set of contexts. For this reason, an adaptive middleware is needed to generate the user interfaces and adjust their characteristics to the different usage scenarios. To achieve this goal, the middleware needs to enable the separation of the adaptation mechanisms from the core operations of the interaction. Furthermore, a more structured approach is needed to describe the different aspects of the human-computer interaction, which can then be used by the middleware to generate adaptive user interfaces. Specifically, this paper describes a run-time framework that enables the generation of user interfaces on portable devices by a process of mapping and transformation of a set of abstract models, and their adaptation to suit the current context-of-use. We also present a prototype mobile application to illustrate our approach.