Supporting a mobile lost and found community

  • Authors:
  • Dominique Guinard;Oliver Baecker;Florian Michahelles

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In the era of ubiquitous devices and mobility, we increasingly carry objects of great value (in terms of data, money or emotions). Because of our increased mobility, we are also more inclined to lose these objects. When it comes to finding them again, current lost property offices seem rather inflexible and not fully adapted to our nomad lives. They lack dynamic information, introduce too many intermediates and induce high costs. We support the growth of a community of users able to solve the problem on their own using their mobile phones. We describe our concept and implementation of the idea based on prototypes of mobile phones enhanced with a novel type of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentifiaction) reader, the use of the EPC (Electronic Product Code) standards and the creation of both mobile and server-side software. We finally discuss how it can help making the current system more dynamic and efficient.