Inhabited Intelligent Environments
BT Technology Journal
A Testbed for Evaluating Human Interaction with Ubiquitous Computing Environments
TRIDENTCOM '05 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the DEvelopment of NeTworks and COMmunities
UbiComp'05 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing
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Despite the significant research over the last ten years, commercial ubiquitous computing environments and pervasive applications remain thin on the ground. This paper looks at the explosion in application creativity on the internet in recent years -- the so-called 'web 2.0' -- in order to identify the obstacles to application creativity in ubiquitous computing. Although technological and standardisation advances are progressively diminishing the scale of the technical problems in the domain, how to manage such applications in such a way so as to encourage user-acceptance remains an open question. It is a question that is particularly difficult due to the serious privacy concerns and the need for negotiated management of services between users due to physically embedded nature of sensor-driven applications. We describe a technical platform which is designed to allow users of ubiquitous computing environments to manage their own personal data and share it in a controlled way and describe an experimental programme to measure the relationship between users' perception of how much control they can exercise over their personal data and their acceptance of ubiquitous computing applications.