A Workflow-Based Mobile Guidance Framework for Managing Personal Activities

In daily life, people have to perform a large number of activities typically in a limited amount of time. Accordingly, they may benefit from help and guidance provided by support systems in order to accomplish these activities accurately and in the correct order. In order to satisfy such needs we develop a software framework which also incorporates a mobile application. Within the framework, workflows are used for modeling user activities due to their successful structuring and verification capabilities. However, stand-alone usage of workflows for personal activities is not enough without relating activities with the users' context. Thus, we augment user activities with environmental and web resources, sensors, mobile phone features, and provide advanced assistance compared to the general workflows. This augmentation also enables to enrich user activities by relating them with supplementary resources (text, image, audio, and video) provided by users or workflow designers. Furthermore, using the relationships between activities and context resources we automate the user's works by defining rules within the framework. Yet another important issue is to provide a constant communication that minimizes the network usage, since users are generally mobile. For this purpose, we set up a topic-based publish/subscribe messaging system infrastructure. Finally, in this paper we illustrate the execution of the smart environment scenario in order to demonstrate the applicability of the framework.